Remembering John Ashbery

The end of life as we know it happened yesterday. There will be no more new Ashbery poems, once the as-yet-unpublished ones emerge. His work was one of those things that made life worth living, as Aaron Belz noted.

There's a video on this page of an Ashbery reading at the Creeley 70th birthday celebration in Buffalo, October 1997. I had the privilege of introducing him.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php

And here's an anecdote I put on my facebook page. David Kellogg was kind enough to call it the "most Susan Schultz of all Susan Schultz stories" for combining poetry with baseball. As I recall, I hijacked Creeley's TV after that Ashbery reading to watch the Cardinals in the playoffs!

Early in my career at UHM I taught 20th century poetry in English, a course that no longer exists (!). I had a student, a baseball player, who wore a sublimely bored face to class week after week. When we started Ashbery, I offered the throw-away line that his poetry is often about the experience of being unable to concentrate, and this kid instantly perked up. For the rest of the semester, he wrote Ashbery imitations, Ashbery essay . . . Then he pitched one pre-season game for the Rainbows, and I went. It was a Rick Ankiel-like performance--there were no strikes, and the balls missed not just the zone, but also the catcher. Craig Howes told him I'd been there (I was hoping he'd never know). So he looked at me and said he'd been telling friends he felt he "slipped on the cake of soap of the air and drowned in the bathtub of the world."

Here's the poem my student quoted so aptly:

https://www.poeticous.com/john-ashbery/thoughts-of-a-young-girl

One of my favorite of my own essays on Ashbery shows the influence of Hawai'i on the younger critic:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/rift/rift03/revi0301.html

And there was this book. Thanks for helping me get tenure, JA--

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/schultz/tribe/contents.html

And I had a wonderful time writing this essay on Ashbery writing about Harold Bloom, which also appeared in my The Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208749

While writing about Ashbery is never easy, it is also a lot of fun. One of myriad reasons I so love his work. There are more blurts about him on this blog, here: (this somehow doesn't show up for me, so put "John Ashbery" into the blog's search engine, vroom vroom).

http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/search?q=John+Ashbery

_Breezeway_: John Ashbery and All the News That's Fit

 

Yesterday I was at the pool with my daughter. As I sat close to the shower, a mother and daughter accidentally sprayed me. I looked down at Breezeway, John Ashbery's newest, and glanced at the opening of "Bunch of Stuff":

To all events I squirted you
knowing this not to be this came to pass
when we were out and it looked good. (34)

If, as Dan Chiasson writes in his New Yorker review of the book, Ashbery "has gone farther from literature within literature than any poet alive," it seems to me that that farther place is often my life as I read his work. Donald Revell has written in "Purists Will Object: Some Meditations about Influence," about the way his memories of reading Ashbery involve the place he sat reading more than the poems themselves. This quality of being inside and outside the literary game at the same time can prove seductive as a reading strategy. For, if Ashbery's work seems random in ways that precede the current use of that word, part of its chance quality involves the reader as a kind of textual palm reader. (As I live within sight of palms, I like this metaphor even more than I might otherwise.)

It's always been hard to write about Ashbery. The richness of his language meets the flatness of surfaces more quickly than for most poets. Just when you think you're reaching altitude, you've crash-landed back where you started (if you factor in the instructions to the jury not to remember your ascent). One of the fall-back positions of the critic is to talk about Ashbery's use of language, his American vocabulary, his uses of colloquial, nay cliched, phrases. As Chiasson notes, "As with most of Ashbery’s work, its medium is composed partly of language foraged from everyday American speech. The effect is sometimes unnerving, as though somebody had given you your own garbage back as a gift, cheerfully wrapped."

Not sure if he intended to call American speech "garbage," but there you have it, "cheerfully wrapped" we presume, before it begins to smell. Yes, Ashbery is like a baleine through which American words flow and become grist for his mill (he also likes mixed metaphors). One of my favorite lines in this book, under the very American title, "Heading Out," reads: "Your napkin ring is bitch-slapping America."  I have no idea why I like that, or why it makes me laugh, but like many lines in this book, it does.

And there are the "crypt words" that John Shoptaw writes about and that Chiasson invokes in his review: "the verb 'to bark down' is almost 'to back down' or 'to break down,' which I suppose you might do when hit with a storm’s debris; the meaningless adverb 'jugularly' might be 'jocularly' or 'muscularly,' misheard through the storm’s strong winds. You’d rather have a 'winch' than a 'wench' in a storm: the context implies the former, the tone the latter. These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean." OK, so that last sentence offers up the positive spin on the Ashbery-haters' "it doesn't make any sense so why should I bother." But where is Ashbery's American English located? What is the landscape of his lexicon? If we were to look into what kinds of words he hears, might that lead us somewhere?

So what do the following titles have in common? "Listening Tour"? "Andante and Filibuster"? "Botched Rollout"? "Separate Hearings"? Recent American politics is what. "Listening Tour" begins with an argument between the poet and someone else about the relative value of NBC and CBS and ends with a bizarre take on revolutions put down by farmers, peasants, and "the enlightened classes." Hillary Clinton's run for Senate in New York, an office she won in 2000, featured a "listening tour." I just found an article on that listening tour in a journal called International Journal of Listening (2005). While listening involves the sense of hearing, the journal still has a "vision statement": "The Vision of the Association is to be the international leader of listening practices, teaching, and research." Your purpose in joining the organization would involve your desire to "Access cutting-edge research you can use professionally and personally to give you a better understanding of how listening affects all areas in your life."And, as I write this, Hillary Clinton has started another listening tour, this one toward nomination and election as President. 

If running for office involves listening, especially I suspect if the candidate is female, then the post-election process involves "filibustering." "To filibuster" is the opposite of "to listen"; to filibuster is to speak without expectation that anyone will listen. To filibuster is to fill time with your voice; sound is more important than sense. The word "filibuster," according to the US Senate site, derives from the Dutch word for "pirate." To filibuster is to force a temporal delay. The first stanza of Ashbery's poem mentions "the vote," but the rest of the poem is about a house in decay, a house that needs repair. ""We got a small grant to have the house inspected and / as a result of that discovered a small crack / leading from the front door to the basement." A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Abraham Lincoln. A house in decay needs to be "hosed down," as Ashbery puts it. The poem comes to an inconclusive but sharp conclusion:

No bricks. Just mortar. Ready. Ready for a takeover.
The catalpas of reconciliation wilt,
proving, if little else,
why a good presentation matters. 

Walt Whitman spent time at a Union hospital in Virginia. In his "Memoranda during the War," he writes: "Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket…." That was a catalpa tree. So, after the failures of reconciliation, from the Civil War to the current House and Senate, have wilted, all that's left is "a good presentation." To filibuster is a mode of public relations, as Rand Paul and Wendy Davis have shown in recent years. It's a making something happen so as to avoid anything happening. Is there a better description of our current political climate?

The next poem in Breezeway--note that a breezeway is not a bridge, but serves much the same purpose, linking buildings via a covered walkway--returns us to the language of legislation. "The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay" begins with a vague if grand-ish statement: "We talked about the great error / that you can live with / and really can't afford to get." But it moves quickly back into Congress: "The stalled investigation proved otherwise. / And give back the taxpayers' money. / The space program cost too much anyway." The rest of the poem plays with the notion of "universe" and universal questions: "Oblivion swiftly followed, the universe / playing catch-up"; "A fistful of s'mores / put death itself on the agenda / for future discussion."

If the Obama years have been dominated by Republican obstructionism, exemplified by constant filibustering of legislation and nominees for office, then Obama's prime accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was presented to the country in a "Botched Rollout," the title of another poem in the book. In 2013, Obama was attacked for the snarl that ensued when Obamacare went live on the internet: headlines like "Botched ACA Rollout Hammers Obama: Job Disapproval Reaches a Career High" flashed on televisions and computer screens. As Lucia Graves pointed out in one article, the botched rollout was compared to disasters far worse than it could ever be: the sinking of the Titanic, Iraq, the explosion of the Challenger, Waterloo. The poem-vessel fills with words associated with insurance: "claims" (albeit as verb), "estate"; "estimate / / bill"; "repositioning downward." "Why stop to tell the president?" the speaker asks, then wanders into a dark wood: "If one is halfway lost in a demented woodland, / what about the new book?" The new book is what? Is it what's being rolled out? I'm not sure; nor am I sure who "Mr. Wrigley" might be, who "appreciates that," as the poem ends. Though if Mr. Wrigley is heir to a chewing gum fortune, surely he knows something about appreciating values.

I've written elsewhere about the poem "Breezeway," which was published in the New Yorker in the middle of a long essay about dementia care. Now that I have Ashbery's book in front of me, I see that it ends with a poem about dementia, "A Sweet Disorder." This is an old age poem such as none I've ever encountered; neither Yeats's rage, nor Bishop's melancholy (& etc.) allude to the disease of our time, Alzheimer's. This poem is paradoxically the most clear in the volume; I'll quote it in its entirety:

Pardon my sarong, I'll have a Shirley Temple.
Certainly, sir. Do you want a cherry with that?
I guess so. It's part of it, isn't it?
Strictly speaking, yes. Some of them likes it,
others not so much. Well, I'll have a cherry.
I can be forgiven for not knowing it's de rigueur.
In my commuter mug, please. Certainly.

He doesn't even remember me.
It was a nice, beautiful day.
One of your favorite foxtrots was on,
neckties they used to wear.
You could rely on that.

My gosh, it's already 7:30.
Are these our containers?
Pardon my past, because, you know,
it was like all one piece.
It can't have escaped your escaped your attention
that I would argue.
How was it supposed to look?
Do I wake or sleep?

The Shirley Temple, a child's drink, ushers in notions of old age as a second childhood. The bartender's question, "It's a part of it, isn't it?" means one thing in the first stanza, quite another in the second, where the question of forgetting enters. The speaker remembers the past his friend forgets, full of foxtrots and neckties. The third stanza may or may not be in the voice of a demented speaker. But his surprise over time, his asking pardon for his past, and especially his repeated words in the line, "It can't have escaped your escaped your attention," point to dementia, as does the confession of irritability ("that I would argue.") This recasts the final line as much more literal than Keats's (repeated here) last line: "Do I wake or sleep?" "Ode to a Nightingale" is also a poem about forgetting; its speaker feels himself pulled "Lethe-ward." He contrasts his own keen awareness of mortality to that of the nightingale, who sings across the generations without ceasing. Ashbery is a Keatsian poet, but the nightingale is his demented friend, singing the refrain of "escaped your escaped your attention." That dementia is a kind of immortality will seem a perversion of Romanticism, but it's the Romanticism of our time, as more and more people get Alzheimer's and fade into waking sleep. And as our politics depends on a metaphorical version of dementia, lurching from one election cycle to the next without the continuity that memory offers. We are listeners trapped in a filibuster of life itself.

Ashbery pulls us away from the poetry of a correspondent breeze into one that fails to correspond, that is more breezeway than breeze. The breezeway protects us against the elements but also takes us away from them. That "nice, beautiful day" of the past cedes to "our containers." We have left our house and moved into a home. 



John Ashbery, Breezeway. New York: Ecco, 2015.

Dan Chiasson, "American Snipper: New Poems from John Ashbery," The New Yorker, June 1, 2015.  

Susan M. Schultz, Ed., The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995.

"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.

"You see I've always been a rather dull-spirited winch": Ashbery & Alzheimer's

The link between Alzheimer's and Ashbery is sonic and metonymic, not actual. This week, Rebecca Mead has an essay in The New Yorker (May 20, 2013) about dementia care. Her article focuses on a retirement care facility in Arizona called Beatitudes, in particular on the director of education and research, Tena Alonzo, who practices compassion in her work with dementia patients. The article complements Norman Fischer's new book on Lojong, the practice of compassion, which he adapts from the Tibetan tradition into his own teaching of Zen. Alonzo's practice, as one might call it, is beautiful: she herself underwent a public bath in front of caregivers at Beatitudes. Another time she had staff members spoon food into each others' mouths to show them how discomfiting this is for residents. If compassion comes of discomfort, then Alonzo is its guru. But there, hanging in the midst of the page that begins with the comment of an Alzheimer's expert about Beatitudes is a new poem by John Ashbery, "Breezeway." "What was most impressive was not what was going on, but what wasn't going on--the absence of palpable distress," says the Alzheimer's expert. "Alas, it wasn't my call," responds Ashbery. "I didn't have a call or anything resembling one."

To the left of Ashbery's poem, a skinny column tells us about "a bird-like woman" who seems inconsolable. The staff tries everything, to no avail.  Perhaps chocolate will help, they say. Or lollipops. Demented patients often suck on their gums, like babies. "The days go by and I go with them," reads one of Ashbery's lines. "We have to live out our precise experimentation." The poem wanders, like an Alzheimer's patient still possessed of a cocktail of memory and imagination, and ends up with a divine Batman (he is a Him). 

We've been watching old sci fi episodes the past few evenings: The Outer Limits ("Paradise"), Eureka ("You Don't Know Jack"), and a Star Trek episode in which the crew succumbs to very quick aging, dementia. In each of these shows, the primary fear seems to be of sudden onset Alzheimer's. Characters in their 20 or 30s suddenly resemble 80 or 90 year olds. (Make-up workers had steady jobs for a time.) In the first two of these shows, the episodes end with the birth of a baby; in the third, Kirk is brought back from the certain death of the entire Enterprise (an incompetent captain takes over when Kirk loses his memory) through an adrenaline-based serum. It's part of a new hunch of mine that aliens and Alzheimer's are often yoked together, whether in science fiction (which I know precious little about) or in the way we talk about those among us who wander (the homeless, the "alien"). That last perception comes of Catherine Malabou's political and economic reading of what she terms "flexibility" and "plasticity" in conjunction with Alzheimer's. If the powers that be demand our flexibility (flex-time, the willingness to move, to change jobs, and so on), then our own plasticity (change that comes often of destruction) may point a way out of this late capitalist nightmare.

Sci fi television is hardly about compassion, but there are moments in these episodes where compassion seems almost to cure Alzheimer's.  This is especially true in the "Paradise" episode where only the old couple who really loved one another can create a baby (from an alien's egg); the other old women who appear as young vixens, instigate one night stands, return to old age and die rather suddenly. (Yes, there's also some old-fashionized moralizing under the surface here.) Mother hands her daughter (incapable of having children) a baby, then returns to her old age, now clear of the Alzheimer's. Of course this is compassion in the service of entertainment--having just read David Shield's Reality Hunger, I reminded of my own love of meaning over entertainment value--but it's an act of love that pulls us back from Alzheimer's.

That is a moment of fantasy.  Alzheimer's, through the machinations of science fiction, where imagined things happen in real life, is really cured. In our real life, that cannot happen. Ptolemy Grey cannot find his and his culture's past by way of a magic (and ultimately deadly) pill. The story, insofar as it remains story, becomes one-sided. Caregivers go along with stories, play with them, until even story fades. Then the narrative is that of the caregiver and someone for whom time has fled.  In the best case scenario, that narrative is one of compassion made of simple acts, like a kiss in the photograph at the top of the Meade article. The article shows us how we can care for people who can no longer care for themselves. Or, as Daniel Tiffany wrote on my facebook page, where I linked to the article, it shows us "how to care for anyone."

"Otherwise there's no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards."  [JA]

NOTE:

A 2005 link informs me that Scotty, from Star Trek, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He died July 20th of that year.

Dementia & Avant-Garde Empathies

In his memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio writes about losing his ability to write: "The disease produces a literary trash pile of butchered words, once recognizable but now arranged in combinations neither I nor the spell-checker has ever seen," he writes (125).  My edition begins with a typo, "Many friends have helped with ths project," and the editions of my students and co-instructor begin with flurries of missing letters. (I'm trying to find out to what extent these omissions are "accidents," or intentions by the editors, and why different printings have different errors.) The passage that sent me back to poetry, however, is this one by DaBaggio:

As I type, my fingers hit unexpected keys and make words with similar sounds or rearrange letters. It began with small words. Recently I discovered the word "will" when I thought I had written "still." Another time the word "ride turned into "rice. . . Sometimes this "dyslectic" alphabet goes unnotced by me for several readings. Eye, hand, mind, the connections are weakening. Typos tell the story of the march of Alzheimer's. (134)

I was reminded of a passage in John Shoptaw's essay on John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. In that essay, he quotes Ashbery on the deliberate cultivation of "typos": "I just wrote ap oem this morning in which I used the word 'borders' but changed it to 'boarders.' The original word literally had a marginal existence and isn't spoken, is perhaps what you might call a crypt word" (214). Like Garrett Stewart, Ashbery finds meanings between words, though not between material words, as Stewart does, but between homonyms. Shoptaw catalogues many of these crypt words and phrases, which include the shift from "screwed into place" to "screwed onto palace" and "Time stepped," rather than "stopped," both from The Tennis Court Oath. Charles Bernstein takes cliches and transmogrifies them by sonic shift, too:

half a loaf
would be not
so good as

no loaf (half
a boast not
so good as

no boast). (Tribe, 215)

My co-teacher, Lori Yancura, had just found an article by Aagje Swinnen on "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen." At the end of this article, Swinnen uses Riffaterre (ah, blast from the critical past!) to read words written by the woman with dementia chronicled in the film, Mum. Mum was not yet mum, still had words and wrote them on a clear plastic "window." Taking what appears to be evidence of illness, confusion, and reading it through the lens of poetry, Swinnen finds important words, and parts of idioms.  She takes the following phrase: "No I don't have to be on the leg, on the dove . . . or on the breaking, but I do want to be free..." reads "breaking" as part of "breaking free" and then speculates that the word "leg" might also be related to "breaking," as in "break a leg."

I created a writing exercise out of these links, connections, breakings of words into other words. The resulting chaotic proliferation of meaning does not net communication or information, but fields of suggestive sounds.  We did a 10-minute automatic writing bout during which any word that could be flipped into another word would be flipped/flopped. My co-instructor, Lori, started writing and laughing.  When she finished and read her piece, which was suitably chaotic, she said she realized that every word she'd written, while it did not "make sense to anyone else," was important to her. Her words, like those of others in the class, came to her out of her recent experiences with cars, with her dog, and so forth.  Some of the material came out of the conversation we'd been having before class began, about Kapena's car, which was lost on the Honda lot, after he took it in for repair. My free write took the word "Cambodia" apart as "come boding in an rise paddy," where Cambodia came to mind based on a verbal/visual memory of the teeshirt I'd seen there that read "iPood," which came from earlier in-class conversation about measuring your health according to the color of your poo (our class is inspiring us to eat healthier food . . . ).

We had written "demented texts," but we were not dementia-sufferers.  We had laughed at our writing, whereas DeBaggio suffered deeply trying to write his. For him, the typo was horrible symptom of his disease; for us, the typo was mental liberation into zaniness.  So what was the point of the exercise?  We had not come to understand the anguish of trying to communicate, but instead writing word salad. When I asked if the exercise helped us to better understand dementia, Lori noted that she wants to use the exercise with caregivers, because this exercise made her more understanding (if not better able to understand exactly what dementia-sufferers say). Knowing that her own words meant so much to her, but couldn't be tracked by us without explanation, meant that efforts at communication by Alzheimer's sufferers likely include words that likely mean a lot to them.  I remember Florence, in my mother's Alzheimer's home, who talked so much about church.  Or Sylvia about her store. A woman who kept saying "baby" over and over again. Their sentences didn't make sense, but their words were meaningful.

The avant-garde poet is not usually looked to as a model of empathy. She's more a Brechtian alienist, setting herself apart from audience rather than creating a moving field of compassion. But this exercise reminded me that those poems that drive their audiences crazy are (linguistically) very like persons with Alzheimer's, and that those persons with the illness can perhaps be better cared for if we recognize in their words the feelings that individual and broken words carry.  Not words as sentences or words as stories, but words themselves, in their own frailty, losing letters here and there, shifting into other words, then wandering into other fields of meaning, getting lost, and only sometimes found.  I read a book called The Alphabet Keeper to my kids; I think I found it in a London bookshop. The alphabet keeper has a big net and keeps trying to capture words, set them down to be still, but they keep shifting into other words. It's a lovely book, and now I see how apt an analogy it is for the language of dementia and for our attempts to capture meaning in it.  The in-class exercise was at once a literary one (make an avant-garde poem) and also an empathetic one (make the poem and hear it as transcript of a possible dementia). Or, as the Riffaterre drenched Dr. Swinnen writes: "The semiotics of poetry is to be understood as the transformation of the signs from the mimetic level to the second, higher level of significance by the reader."

Notes:

Thomas DaBaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's. NY: The Free Press, 2002.

John Shoptaw, "The Music of Construction: Measure and Polyphony in Ashbery and Bernstein," in Susan M. Schultz, Ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995: 211-257.

Aagje Swinnen, "Dementia in Documentary Film: Mum by Adelheid Roosen," The Gerontologist (53:1): 113-122, 2012.

Walmart University

After a long weekend of a soccer tournament at which my eight year old daughter was a guest player (truth be told, she was invited mostly to sit), I'm back at the computer, several texts demanding my attention at once. There is the long prose piece by John Ashbery that my graduate students are reading, which begins this way:

"The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is." (53)

The second is by Political Science professor and Kumu Kahua actor, Neal Milner, from Sunday's Honolulu Advertiser. He writes about the three sustainable urinals installed in his department's restroom, urinals advertised to save water and reduce costs. It's as if he's translating Ashbery's breaking down systems theory:

"The middle urinal is in fact as sustainable as a toilet can get. It uses no water at all because it has been broken for months, covered with a large gray plastic trash bag. You can't get any easier maintenance than that. No one expects it to be fixed anytime soon. No one complains. It is no longer a problem to be solved. It is now a fact of life. Sustainability versus the old order at work. The old order is winning, as it has for years."

But of course Milner's toilets are also stand-ins for the University of Hawai`i itself. "AT UH," he writes, "the old order is the most sustainable thing of all." That is, if the old order does not include hiring new faculty (which my department cannot do this year, even in the face of eight retirements); maintaining our wages (after turning down a first contract offer from the Administration, the second one passed, cutting our salaries by the satanic figure of 6.66%); or paying for toner cartridges, new computers, and postage for presses like Tinfish.

Add to the tragi-comic toilets and the farcical proposal by a Republican state senator in Utah to dispense with 12th grade, since no one learns much that year anyway, the actual tragedy this past week at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, where a biologist killed several of her colleagues in a workplace shooting, and there seems much to lament about public education in this country. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Thomas H. Benton (sounds familiar, that name!) called "The Big Lie about the 'Life of the Mind'" in its February 8th issue, which evoked passionate responses on my Facebook page. Among his assertions is that "graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon 'the life of the mind.'" Where some of the comments that arrived quickly to my "wall" came in support of Mr. Benton (a pen name, after all) and attacked graduate programs themselves, others argued that he was simply complaining and one should really go out and read Marc Bousquet's work.



So, knowing a long weekend was coming, I went to that heaven of on-line purchasing, Amazon, and ordered How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet (New York University Press, 2008) and read it. It's the most devastating portrait of work I've read since Fast Food Nation's dissection of the meat industry and McDonald's. What the book accomplishes is to make a firm connection between the academy and the sweat-shop, between intellectual labor and the kids who flip burgers for a living. Bousquet argues that these people are often the same people. Students work more and more hours while in college; instructors work more and more hours at highly contingent jobs (non-tenurable, lacking health care and other benefits). Forget the graduate programs; it's the entire economy that works this way.

But Bousquet does not claim that the system is breaking down; his more sinister argument is that everything is working exactly as it "should" for those who aim to make money. The ever-increasing numbers of administrators in higher education, with their high salaries and insistence on assessment, are like lunas in plantation era Hawai`i (ok, that's my simile, not his). The university is now managed to make money, increase "efficiency" and raise the numbers of untenurable labor even as the tenured class remains as a dying relic of the old order. If I, at my office desk where I look at a dying computer and dead printer, feel that my system is breaking, it's because someone else's version of this system is succeeding. If my husband and daughter get many Fridays off this year, it's not that the education system is floundering, but that the governor is "saving money" and hence de facto privatizing schools and the child care system. A tenured full professor, I feel demoralized by the comment streams in the newspaper about my institution (it's always the "greedy professors and their unions" at fault), but I do not feel as contingent as the Ph.D. student who doesn't know where next year's money is coming from, or my office neighbor, a lecturer with a Ph.D. and a MBA, who never knows if he'll be teaching next semester. He keeps his hotel job, because that one has benefits. [Ed. note: it turns out his situation is much more difficult than I describe here, but he does not want me to write about his situation in any detail, so that his future job prospects are not endangered.] Over the years my department has tried several "fixes" to the contingency problem, sometimes exacerbating it (by laying off a tier of "Visiting Assistant Professors" in the early 1990s) and sometimes coming up with clever, if one-off, solutions (creating another layer of untenured assistant professors, some of whom now have tenure, if not the SAME tenure I have). But "the university clearly does not prefer the best or most experienced teachers; it prefers the cheapest teachers. Increasingly, that means the creation of nontenurable full-time instructorships and other casual appointments, a casualization that has unfolded unevenly by discipline and is especially pronounced in English and writing instruction" (Bousquet 204).

So, according to Bousquet, there are not too many Ph.D.s or graduate students at all. There are not enough jobs for them because they are too expensive. Like casual labor at Walmart or UPS, these workers get worn down and tossed out. The most telling chapter of his book to me, perhaps because it's one subject I had heard nothing of before, is about how UPS hires casual student laborers, promises to pay for their education, then puts them on grueling late night and early morning shifts where they get exhausted and injured. Most of them never complete their education; many sustain injuries to last a lifetime, and none of them is able to live off the wages UPS provides. It's a terrible scam, one that promises advancement through education, but actually uses workers up and spits them out.

In the late 1990s, my husband Bryant and I played on a local softball team in Kailua. We ran into our coach at a Halloween party; he was dressed as a gypsy, as I recall. He began singing the praises of the football coach, then came on with an attack on UH faculty. "How many hours a week are you in the classroom?" he asked me, insinuation in his voice. When I said that the football coach only coached his team three hours a week, he argued that the coach was responsible for the lives of his young people! I tried to explain that I was, too, advising students, working on thesis committees, serving on departmental committees, doing all the real work that sounds so unreal to anyone outside the academy. He would have none of it. His solution to the budget problem that afflicted us even then was to get rid of the art and dance departments, saving only music, because they trained the marching band. (I gather that to be a "practical" use of music.)

While I wonder how to explain what I do to people for whom it seems frivolous to sit around a classroom and talk about poems or about how to write an argument or even to chew the fat about the university's situation, Bousquet suggests a more active solution. He wants us to organize, not simply among ourselves, but across the borders of this economy of contingency. His ending is happier than not, happier than seems merited by the book itself: "It is at least possible that soon enough the majority feeling among graduate employees (who eventually become all of the labor in the system, term faculty and tenure stream alike) will become the concerted will to make the 'market' responsive to their needs, and not the other way around" (209). This seems more hopeful than Benton's declaration that higher education is at fault, or than the "Broken things stay broken for so long that no one considers them broken anymore . . . Don't fix them or replace them. Put it on the user," that Milner mutters sardonically at his urinal, or John Ashbery says to us from a time of contemplation that seems alien to us in this era of overwork:

"The allegory is ended, its coils absorbed into the past, and this afternoon is as wide as an ocean. It is the time we have now, and all our wasted time sinks into the sea and is swallowed up without a trace. The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future" (106).

In the allegory we are living now "Goods" has been divorced from "Good." Shave off that s! Let's replace the false pragmatism of cost-cutting with a truer pragmatism, argue for the usefulness of education workers. Then, as Bousquet suggests, if we are valued for what we do, then education may be valued for itself (again?).

In Praise of Blurbs

I've long been a fan of those parts of a book that aren't the book itself, but situate themselves in the book's suburbs. (Yesterday, in talking to graduate students about Ashbery's Three Poems, I found myself in a long digression about Ashbery's use of the trope, the ways in which his poems are almost inevitably suburbs of a city that cannot be mapped.) Among the suburbs of a book of poems or criticism are the acknowledgments, awkward testimonies to professional debts, previous publications, friends, lovers, and children. Never have I felt so strangely happy in opening a book as when I saw a scholar dedicate his book to himself, with thanks to himself for all the hard work he had done on it. Must have been that I was writing a dissertation at the time, a thankless task if there ever was one. I have not yet had the courage to thank the pharmaceuticals that make my work possible, but those too belong in these testaments to literary non-solitude. Then there are the indexes, governed by alphabetical order, that guide us through books and--if we read them on their own--offer myriad juxtapositional jollies. Janus and Jesus. Teabagger and tempest. Derrida and deep image. Bernadette Mayer's exercise, mandating that you write a poem as an index, is a brilliant prompt.

When I first began composing blurbs, I assumed that the only rule was to use the word "brilliant." My first blurb, as I recall, contained that word (as an inside joke, as well as praise for Michelle Murphy's work). The book is Jackknife & Light, published by Avec Books in 1998. But I quickly realized that the blurb form was to criticism as haiku is to the epic poem, or a tweet to a blog post, a blog post to a vetted essay. It was the jar in Tennessee that claimed to order the wilderness of the text that (usually) preceded it. It was a see-through containment principle. And so I fell in love with the blurb form. I only wish Ron Padgett had written one of his down home, pragmatic descriptions of "the blurb" in his handbook of poetic forms, because blurbs can be poetic (if you leave out tired words like "brilliant"). Such a Padgett definition might read as follows:

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the blurb is 'said to have been originated in 1907 by Gelett Burgess in a comic book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Blinda Blurb. (D.A.)' The blurb is very like a definition: short, active, exacting, if also necessarily a song of praise. An extension of the marketing arm of the publishing house or office or small room (the latter devoted to small press work), the blurber (or blurbista, as she is often under the spell of caffeine) seeks to seduce a jacket reader into opening the book to gaze upon the naked words within. The blurb writer's name is crucial. It ought to be recognizable, crisp, a blurb in and of itself. Often, the blurbist's name will be followed by something of their own that is blurb-worthy--a book, a journal, a department, an institution, some prizes. How do you write a blurb? Imagine yourself privy to writing no one else has seen, but ought to read. Look in your heart and write. Make it snappy."

Late in the process of putting together Kaia Sand's new book Remember to Wave, we realized that, while Lawson Inada had sent us both delightful letters, full of riffs on Tinfish and the book, he had not come up with the requested blurb. He does not do computers, so I pushed some buttons and informed him that I was "calling in his blurb." His blurb came in much less satisfying than the letters, so Kaia had him agree to present letter copy as the blurb, which came out this way:

"Woooo weee!--this book is really something! It's both "too much" and the "total package," and then some--sort of like an "All You Can Eat" site--a "smelter"--in a rock-alcove below petroglyphs. "Sand" plus "Wave" plus "Tinfish"--that's the cool combo, combined with Vision, Heart, Smarts, Reach, Diligence, Direction, and good doses of downhome, downright Whimsy! Are you ready? Step lively now. Be on alert. Keep up with Kaia. And REMEMBER TO WAVE!"

Lawson Fusao Inada, Oregon Poet Laureate


Let me append some of my recent blurbs, with links to where the books can be bought. I've never signed a blurb, but why not begin now? Buy the book, send it to me, and I'll sign the blurb. Appropriation has its place.


Bartleby, the Sportscaster, by Ted Pelton
Ted Pelton has written an allegory about an allegory about real life. The memoir of the end of his first marriage, sandwiched between chapters about a fictional sportscaster and his silent colleague, Bartleby, offers us a sober frame for interpreting the fiction (his and Melville's). More importantly, perhaps, fiction gives us access to the life. Bartleby is real; marriage is allegory. Vice versa, too. Neither life nor art can be imitated in Pelton's novel, for they are one and the same. For an avowed Mets fan, Pelton's a pretty savvy writer.


I really enjoyed that last sentence, as the Mets have been rivals of the St. Louis Cardinals forever, and in my mind since the mid-1980s, when Doc Gooden and that catcher with a perm regularly took on Whitey Herzog's crew, and sometimes won.

Ted's book is very short; Goro Takano's, on the other hand, is a hefty piece of lumber. He wrote his novel as a dissertation and it still includes an extensive bibliography. Were I to blurb it again, I'd mention that a very fine graduate course could be made of the book and its bibliography alone. So there.

Goro Takano, With One More Step Ahead, Blazevox

In One More Step Ahead Goro Takano has composed an amazing post-national post-apocalyptic encyclopedic philosophical trans-genre literary critical untranslated novel with poems about post-war Japan, African America, Hawai`i, film, Japanese literature, television news, dementia, paralysis, a sex cult, the atom bomb, gender, race, culture, the corporate state and much more. Read this book and chant after Virginia Woolf: What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!


Linking the blurb to a blog post I wrote on the book was a technical mistake, but I'll own it by keeping it there. As I said to a student yesterday, everything's intentional once you've put it down.

Bill Howe also has a new Blazevox book, Translanations:

iPod to a postmodern aeolian harp, William R. Howe projects the altered music of Emily Dickinson’s poems through our ear’s buds. His is not a lyric “I,” but the first person of a dyslexic subject at once trapped and transformed by the sounds of a language that perpetually evades him, and us. While his method is ostensibly that of homolinguistic translation, Howe also ventures into synecdoche (“sign that doc”), as when he offers us Dickinson’s line, “I felt siroccos crawl,” as “Eiffel Volkswagens – scrawl --” Like Janet Holmes in THE MS OF MY KIN, Howe discovers our present in Dickinson’s own. Her “The Soul has Bandaged moments --” becomes “These mole his Baghdad ad foments.” One could write the history of America from that bandaged moment to this Baghdad ad. Perhaps this is Howe. —Susan M. Schultz


Sometimes I'm asked to write blurbs to books by writers whose work I don't know. I was very happy to pass word of Jean Vengua's Meritage Press book, thusly:

Jean Vengua, Prau

Jean Vengua is a poet of the typo, the missed step, the happy and unhappy accident; in short, she is a poet of linguistic and global migration. Prau moves its reader from the Philippines to the Bay Area and back, "always mining past present tenses." In her aptly titled prose poem, "Momentum," Vengua links Gustav Mahler, her mother, Buffalo Soldiers, Marie Curie, Roberto Matta, and Jose Rizal in a dance of histories real and imagined. The momentum of her writing brings together what is otherwise ripped asunder: "That is to make beautiful where the dissonance begins to tear."
--Susan M. Schultz, Editor of Tinfish Press


And there, with my moniker, Editor of Tinfish Press, I end this blog on blurbs. Someday I may get around to blurbing the blog from my perch in the Ahuimanu suburbs.

[Ed. note: the critic who thanked himself was Thomas Vogler in Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1971. 222pp. I remember it was a good book.]

Method is Public, Poetry Not So Much So (Perhaps)

Joe Harrington has been torturing himself (in a good way) over blogs for quite some time, making and re-making taxonomies of the "form." Joe's a reflective guy whose mind runs toward reflexivity. In his latest post, he notes, "The web log, like other logs, is written with time in mind - and marks time's passage. So do journals and letters. In that sense, these are all reflexive forms that invite reflection on their reflexivity. And the temporality is not just backwards (in the format), it's forward (new posts)." So far, so good, in my book. Or perhaps outside my book. For, he writes: "In a sense, a book is private - one has to physically have it; it is enclosed between covers. It costs money and a lot of time to make it. The blog opens out to a much wider audience, and invites that audience in. Immediately. Indeed, it might double-back against the Institutions of Art, or open towards activism against non-art institutions - which is what Mark Nowak's blog does, I think."

I have a quarrel with Joe about the distinctions he preserves between Art and the Public Life, although I understand why he keeps them in play; they're the walls of the squash court in which we pound our definitions and deal with the crazy bounces that ensue. But the question of what is public and what is private is more crucial now than it was in the pre-internet past. My Ph.D. student writes about celebrity in order to write about herself; she refuses to "go public," finds that she can use the odd public sphere of celebrity to get at issues that obsess her. The resistance I feel to using such masks (see Alfred Corn's recent post) is a resistance that surprises me, as I used to maintain a zone of privacy even in what I published. Dementia Blog finished off that notion for me, the most private work I've ever written--private not simply for me, but also for my mother, who is the subject of the work. It's her privacy I wonder about often, even as I think that making her Alzheimer's public will do someone else a private good. (The squash balls sure are bouncing now, aren't they?)

For some reason, I keep thinking about the alphabet as a way to get at the private/public ricochet. It's not that Ron Silliman's The Alphabet sits rotundly on my poetry shelves, among other S's. And it's not that I'm currently reading new books by Mary Jo Bang (The Bride of E) and John Ashbery (Planisphere), both of which organize their poems according to the alphabet, and that I return often to Tiare Picard's twin alphabet poems from Tinfish 18.5 for their richness, but also because I've always found the alphabet to be an odd way to organize the world (hence the chaos of my own paperwork?) The alphabet is a public form; a trip to any library will assure you of that. But to organize one's work alphabetically is to render it private. Or that's my hunch. This has something to do with the differences between method and practice, or that's my further hunch. The boundary between private and public in what we call "alphabetical order" blurs in both directions: the private becomes public, but the public also becomes private, which is the more radical direction, because less expected. The order the alphabet creates is arbitrary, paratactical. It's the kind of order that links "Nixon, Richard" with "non-absorptive writing," as in the index to my book of essays. There's surely something there, but its logic, while powerful, is accidental rather than considered. Yes, writing one's memoir takes one's private life and makes it available to a public one cannot see or even imagine. But there is a significant way in which the public is terribly private, too, not simply in the way we absorb public events, but in the way public events affect our language, our way of thinking. Our uses of language can illustrate the way privatization comes to make public/common spaces mysterious, and not always in ways beneficial to the community.

One of the few times I talked to John Ashbery, a few of us were sitting in a bar in a Washington, D.C. hotel in the mid-1980s. Behind me were bookshelves, the kind provided in bars as decor, not for the sake of knowledge. There was a line of books on the shelf behind me, so I pulled one out, and discovered that I held one letter of a children's encyclopedia. Ashbery's eyes grew even bigger than usual, as he told us that he'd memorized parts of that encyclopedia as a child. That Ashbery's new book is organized according to the alphabetical order of its titles should come as no surprise then, especially, as one of his earlier volumes was also organized in this way. My first encounter with Planisphere (this is not a review of the book!) reminded me of first encounters with other Ashbery books. Over and over I start out utterly baffled by his books, only to find ways of access later. (I'm not there yet.) So the book remains private to me, in code, and yet organized with the efficiency of a librarian or a shopkeeper. Mary Jo Bang's book is even more self-consciously an alphabet book, with titles like "B is for Beckett" and "E is Everywhere" and "I in a War," the last of these titles one of many that wanders away from its first principle. "For Freud" might be a subtitle of this book, as there are so many references to the ur-psychiatrist. Freud is called out by his letter as surely as is Mao Zedong in the "Z Stands for Zero Hour" poem that ends Part I of the book. History emerges out of a single letter, the private code (which is the alphabet for each of its users) rendered public. History as accidental passage.

Tiare Picard's two poems, "L'alphabet" and "Sans les Isles," make an opposing movement. Rather than summon history out of letters, Picard shows how history has privatized the very language we use, and in so doing, has rendered great parts of it into code. What was once history is now hidden, inaccessible, organized by letter only. Hence, "L'alphabet" begins with a colonial story told via the method of the alphabet poem:

All
bulldozers bully,
clank
down coral-crushed roads,
eunuchizing lingo, and
farting proper, dark smoke. (102)

The response, on the facing page, in "Sans les Isles," goes as follows:

b d z b y,
c
d c -c d d ,
c z , d
,d (103)
[layout below]




While terribly difficult to decipher, this is a very public move, from one poem to the next. In fact, that difficulty is part of the poem's (sharp) point, for the second poem is what happens to the first poem when the letters of the Polynesian alphabet are taken away from the English. That the English language embraces (or smothers) Polynesia comes clearest when Polynesia is taken out of it. When the bulldozers are done with Polynesian islands, when development has paved over the land, what the land is left with is scatter, the "coral-crushed roads" of the language itself. The book's design, which mimics word game puzzle books, accentuates the effect, as word games are those places where what has been kept secret is revealed as language.

In each of these instances, what is most public in the poem or the book of poems is the method. Alphabetical order is public; it's how we organize knowledge. Monks and google have used it, as it's a- or trans-historical. What is private is the poem's content, even if the significance of privacy is very different, depending on whether you look at Ashbery or at Picard, at a poem that includes Freud because his name starts with F or at a poem that gets bulldozed by development, for reasons greater than the letter D. If C was a Comedian, this D is not, even if the poem is itself extremely playful. If method is always a public activity, then what method enables is less so. But the real blurring of method and poem comes in these instances, like the one in Bang's poems that invoke Freud and Mao because their names begin with F and M, or as in Picard's poems, where what is most public (development, what one cannot not see) effaces history (renders it private, cryptic).

I will now post this blog entry. It will appear in order of the day it was composed and "published" (another private/public blurring). The way in which this day made this post possible is something only I know, or think I do. But when I hit the "button" at the bottom of the "page," its arbitrary order may become less arbitrary to its reader outside the blog box. Time offers an arbitrary order like the alphabet's. It too is a private space, crow-barred open by the completion of this method. There.

"Good grammar is always glamour, girls": Goro Takano's _With One More Step Ahead_

Years ago, around the turn of the last century, as one might say, I bought a copy of Richard Wright's haiku via the internet. It wasn't that I was a Wright fan, though Native Son had a big impact on me in high school. Nor was it for love of haiku, a form I appreciate mainly in the abstract (though I'll be teaching haiku in a few short weeks). I got the book of Wright's haiku because we were admitting a student to our Ph.D. program--a Japanese national--who had written on them. It was rumored that the student's mother was an important tanka writer in Japan (I have no idea if that is true). As someone whose primary memory of Wright involves an alarm clock, a rat, and a Chicago tenement, the haiku surprised me. They seemed so classical, so wrapped up in nature (despite their provenance in Paris), so faithful to the intentions of their form. "In the damp darkness, / Croaking frogs are belching out / The scent of magnolias," goes #227. Equally intriguing was the Japanese student of Wright, one Goro Takano, whose English was quick, word rich, and accented. Once we were on speaking terms in the hall, I asked him how the Richard Wright project was going. He indicated he'd moved on.

Goro returned to Japan to work on his dissertation. I got an email from him, asking if I'd direct it; it had become a novel, he said, and he'd been working on it for years. He'd started writing in Japanese, then turned to translating the manuscript into English. It had taken on a life of its own in English, insisted on being written in this "stepmother tongue." One of the novel's characters, in other words, was a language that was not its writer's blood relative (not sure I like this parsing of blood and not-blood, but there you have it). As a poet I was unsure how to take this request, but Goro sent writing samples, odd parables more reminiscent of Kafka than Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. So I said yes. It proved one of those marvelous dissertations that directs its director. I was left to fling pages full of questions at Goro by email slingshot, not so much to recommend revisions as to help us both through knotty philosophical and literary issues. "Is this a Japanese or an American novel?" I remember asking at one point.

Now, on reading the proofs of the large novel--With One More Step Ahead--from Blazevox [books], I realize how little meaning that question ever had. This novel is post-national in the best sense. An American-language novel with African American influences, its primary subject is the amnesia suffered in post-World War II Japan. An American novel, it involves a lot of Hawaiian material. A novel in part about Hawai`i, it engages the Japanese fascination with these islands. The novel owes a lot, perhaps, to the contemporary Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, who has also written about Hawai`i, but its intellectual edge is sharper, its encyclopedic investigations of contemporary literature, film, and gender politics more attuned to the academic eye and ear. Ah, but what to make of a narrator/translator who suffers dementia, a husband/writer who communicates only by moving his eyeballs, a sex cultist named Cosmo who has no gender, a TV producer who wants pathos at the expense of his subjects' happiness, or the boundaries of the A-bomb dome broken by lovers who copulate on ground zero? If much of the energy of the novel is intellectual, it manifests itself in surreal, time-criss-crossing plots and subplots that will make it a page turner, once it escapes the pdf form I'm reading it in. Or is it that I simply haven't yet imagined it and me with a Kindle?

Amusing, yes, that Goro Takano, the expert on three line haiku, emerges here as the author of a 379-page novel (including bibliography!), its pages slathered with words, complicated syntax, an English that is not quite that spoken by a native--sometimes better. This reader became so involved in the subtle differences between her own English and Takano's that actual English words began to become foreign. Take the word "distressful." I was convinced it was the neologism of a non-native speaker until I looked it up on merriamwebster.com and realized that it IS an English word. Goro's prose enacts the (English) language in the process of being reinvented and rediscovered. It's an exciting read on many levels, but this is one that I find crucial to the overall effect of the novel. Nowhere is this as apparent as in the poems Takano includes in the novel, poems by Lulu, the demented narrator/translator. Lulu writes in various modes, including the ballad. Chapter 23 begins with a quote from John Ashbery's "37 Haiku" in A Wave: "He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you're a monster." Then we get Lulu's proto-Bob Dylan ballad, which opens:

Hard rain is falling down.
All over this small town.
Misty cold midnight.
Only a few city lights are on.

The poem's tone is odd, to say the least, rather like one of Ashbery's funny/sad poems. "Finnish Rhapsody" comes to mind, though that poem's not so jangly as this one.

Her dearest daughter is gone.
Run over by a truck.
That was also a rainy night.
Her kid was walking after her.

As it takes its nine page course, this poem comes to record the intense ethical conflict of a TV reporter over whether he should have saved the girl or recorded her death on film.

I can't say for sure if that poem was written in that way because Takano is a second language writer in English; in some ways, the poem reminds me of Sarith Peou's simple yet searing poems in Corpse Watching, also composed in non-native English. But there are moments in the book where the second language English emerges, making the writing more effective. Take "Lulu's Fifth Poem: 'Tanka: I Am.'" Ron Padgett's The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines the tanka thusly:

"Tanka (from the Japanese for 'short poem') are mood pieces, usually about love, the shortness of life, the seasons, or sadness. Tanka use strong images and may employ the poetic devices, such as metaphor and personification, that haiku avoid." (187)

Takano's / Lulu's poem opens in unsurprising English (the formatting is going to hell, sorry):

I am a spider
whose dewy web is still
missing many
warps and woofs; yet,
I am master of myself.

I am a mist
who spreads gradually
far and wide,
while still searching for
a chance to confine myself.

But as the poem goes on, its English gets less predictably English. Take this section:

I am a rain;
I won't chase anymore
those who scattered
away--Because, look, here's
someone waiting for me.

Or:

I am a mud
drying up with
a good number of
footsteps of the people
masking their true faces.

Or the last line of the final section:

I am a forest
who flourishes deep inside
of a newborn's mind;
as time goes by, maybe, I'll
be doomed to soil and wane.

Some native English speakers could come up with a line that combines "be doomed to soil" with "be doomed to wane," (the aforementioned Ashbery comes to mind) but something tells me the line is more easily arrived at if these words remain somewhat foreign. And phrases like "I am a mud" and "I am a rain," which seem to ask for the reader to take out the indefinite article, or to add something to the end, like "spot" or "drop," are effective precisely because they resist native fluency. They are more like lines from Peou's "Corpse Watching":

Corpse watching provides excitement,
Corpse watching is filled with fear
The corpses are someone's father, brother, sister, mother--
Sometimes corpse watching brings tears. (np)

It would be "better" English to write that "corpse watching makes me cry," but it would not be more effective communication. Nor would the first two lines benefit, in this context, from being "corrected" out of its cliches, its generalizations. Because, for once, these abstractions work--largely because of the Cambodian genocide that lurks in every line of this poem and the eponymous chapbook. But also because what Evelyn Ch'ien calls "weird English." She writes "about the ushering in of a global subjectivity, in which the diaspora consciousness caused a number of writers to relate their experience polylingually."

To read Takano's entire novel is to be constantly jolted by the often miniscule differences between one's own English and Goro Takano's English. We (native speakers of English) are constantly reminded that we, like Lulu, are translators of this text, even if our translations are from English to English. The frequent parenthetical interruptions by "Translator" emphasize this difference between the American novel we think we're reading and the Japanese content--and/or vice versa. While Ch`ien's interest is primarily in weird Englishes spoken by immigrants, or Pidgin spoken by non-dominant groups (see Lisa Kanae and Lee Tonouchi's works), Takano is a writer who studied in the United States and returned to Japan, where he is now associate professor of English at a medical school. So, while he is now teaching "weird English," he is not immersed in it. His English now belongs more to Japan than to the United States, although his book will find most of its readers in this country. How appropriate that his book be published by Blazevox, "a publisher of weird little books." At first I disliked that phrase, thought to tell the publisher, Geoffrey Gatza, as much. Now I get it. Weird is good, though this book is not "little" in any sense of the word. It's complicatedly astonishing.