Writing In and With the Pen: Kansas Poetry (a very partial account)

Just whose eyes did you think you would look out from anyway?

--Judith Roitman, "Diamond Notebooks," no face: selected & new poems, First Intensity Press, Lawrence, Kansas



Joseph Harrington knows that metaphors are facts more often than they are abstractions. When John Dean said of Richard Nixon's White House that "there is a cancer on the presidency," he intended it as metaphor. But Nixon, who "declared war on cancer" in 1971, was a literalist. Nixon resigned on the day that Joe Harrington's mother died of cancer, August 9, 1974; this awful synchronicity means that fact, more than language, becomes the poet's fossil poetry, to misquote Emerson (as indeed one should). Harrington's new book Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan, 2011), tells the double chronicle of President Nixon and of Elizabeth Peoples Harrington, who died at age 54. It is only the first of a projected four volume poetic history of the women in Harrington's family, which will join the intimate with the public spheres.

I spent the summer of 1973 watching the Watergate hearings on television with my own mother, who raised me to detest Richard Nixon. She would talk back at his image. When he said "your president is not a crook," she would respond that, "oh yes he is." That summer she cleaned out all the drawers in the house, taking them downstairs so she could watch TV and get something done at the same time. Occasionally, she left the house: she went to the Federal Court and took an elevator with H.R. (Bob) Haldeman at one point, and later bought a lamp at Chuck Colson's garage sale, when he was sent to prison. Later even than that, I got stuck in Colson's driveway showing a friend the local northern Virginia Watergate haunts. My mother and I knew the Parkway rest stop where bags of money were passed to burglars. I am four years older than Joe Harrington, so my memories of that time are, if not "better," then more tangible, perhaps.

But Harrington was twelve years old when his mother died, ten when she was diagnosed with cancer. That's old enough to know one's mother as mother, but not as a full and complicated human being, especially one going through the trauma of cancer treatment and then death. He also watched the hearings, but emerged with the horrible irony that his memory of them was starker than of her: "I remember Daniel Inouye and Howard Baker better than I remember her. They left records." It was Baker who kept asking, "what did the President know and when did he know it?" It's left to Harrington to discover what he knows now about his mother; this book (re)presents the work it took for him to know it. The "amneoir" is at once a memoir that emerges out of forgetting and work that is born from amniotic fluid: it is literal (Harrington was born) and metaphorical (the nation was, we hoped, reborn). Amnesia is a state of forgetting; the amniotic fluid a place where memories cannot be made. But Harrington has made out of their conjunction his own history, and that of the country, mid-20th century.

If politicians leave records, so do ordinary citizens. Harrington's search began in August of 2006, just before the anniversary of his mother's death. A letter to him from "Health Information Management" at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis acknowledges his request for her medical records, then adds: "By law we are only required to maintain records for 10 years. We have destroyed all records prior to 1980." The Manager then adds the unhelpful sentence: "If you have any questions, please contact me. . ." (11). He had questions, though we assume he saved them for other archives, other managers.

Harrington mines a large trove of documents, from the Watergate hearing transcripts to newspaper articles, and includes medical records of his mother's illness, as well as a very moving handwritten letter by her that begins: "This experience has taught me how fast things can 'come on'--and should the bad times come, it is hard to make decisions" (32). There are photographs, a not so funny cartoon, drawings, a diagram, lists (one of the impulses behind this work comes of St. Ignatius's spiritual exercises), boxes of information, and fragmentary lyrics. At least. An admirer of scrapbooks, as he told his MFA student, Dennis Etzel, Jr. in a recent interview, Harrington has made a book of these scraps, one that acknowledges both his mother's scrapbooks and the history of documentary poems from Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, as well as work by Muriel Rukeyser, Mark Nowak, C.D. Wright, Kristin Prevallet, and many others.

Harrington describes himself as a formalist, one for whom the organization of material on the page is crucial. He divides the book into two sections, "Investigation" and "Resignation." These section titles do double work, as does nearly everything in this book, oscillating back and forth between Nixon and Harrington's family, until transcripts of the Watergate hearings begin to include family voices. In a section entitled "ORDERED TO LIE ON THE TABLE AND TO BE PRINTED" (lie and lying, testimony and surgery), he includes two Mr. Harrington's. One is the poet's father (he is of Tennessee) and one is that of the poet himself, Mr. Harrington (Kansas). Both appear on the page as if they were congressmen who spoke at a hearing. The second voice seems to confuse child- and adulthood in provocative ways. So when the father says: "Well, I had to work--I had to support you . . ." and an audience member remarks on "How you must have felt!--" the poet responds in the tone of congressional testimony, but with a child's memory:

MR. HARRINGTON (Kan.): I often had fried haddock with a side of black-eyed peas. Or perhaps carrot-and-raisin salad. I had ceased drinking chocolate milk at this point in time.

To which MR. NIXON responds with a sigh: "It's all such a bunch of Goddamn dirty shit." (36)

Indeed. It's shit and it's shitty. It's metaphor and literal fact, all at once. No mere coincidence, perhaps, that Pres. Nixon's speech upon resigning--the rambling and drunken one before he got on the helicopter with one last flash of V's--was mostly about his mother:

"Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother.
Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother:
My mother was a saint." (67)

At this point, Nixon's voice joins with that of Harrington's mother:

--Things come up and on o yes they are
a bunch of dirty squalid rotten shit (71)

whose ground was prepared by one of the poet's own fragmentary pieces, so:

physical death no metaphor
to transport you over or down river

[and]

The Dead will dead (66)

There's a distinct sense at the end that this poem has not achieved the elegy's traditional goal, consolation, but that "The mother dies, and the country . . . only got worse. That's the ending?" (71) Perhaps it is "not enough just to write down the story," as the poet wonders near the end of the book. But I, for one, am grateful that he has. Mourning is work and, although it may not work as planned or hoped, we are needful of it. While it may lack an ending, it cannot lack ongoing.


Nixon was never tried, of course, as President Ford pardoned him shortly after taking office. He spent the rest of his life writing books, attempting to rehabilitate his reputation (if not quite himself). The word "rehabilitation" has a more literal referent, to what is supposed to happen in prisons, as is "reform" and "penitence" to go with "penitentiary." This last word includes the word "pen," and the introductions to Douglas County Jail Blues, edited by University of Kansas faculty member Brian Daldorph, suggest the ways in which we (all of us, within and without the pen) hope writing can transform criminals into good citizens, addicts into non-addicts. Mike Caron, who runs programs at the Douglas County Correctional Facility (more correction!), writes: "I want to be able to tell the readers of this anthology that most of the poets represented here have had an epiphany, that in learning to express themselves on paper and having discovered the magic of giving voice to their experiences, emotions, and frustrations, they have been remade into healthy, clear-thinking, productive, law-abiding citizens" (6). This has not happened often, he avers. Daldorph adds, "I wish that the class had brought about the changes in inmate lives that many of them would like to make" (10). Ah, we writers want too much of our art sometimes. We want the immaterial (thought, expression) to lead ineluctably to material action (a new life).

But transformations do happen on the inside, even if the outside does not change, or if the outside proves merely to be a way station back to the inside. In one of the poems contained in the book, Jae Wae writes "A Good Excuse": "I only come back / to see if I / can get in / writing class" (53). The ironies are rife, but it's clear that "writing class" is terribly important to the prisoners whose work is included here, as it is to Daldorph, who has also written his own Jail Time, the testimony of man who can go in and come out again, because he is the teaching poet. His poem "Getting Out" chronicles one of these failed narratives of writing and reform:

Said he'd found poetry
like some guys find religion, and with that
he could straighten out.
He didn't need no more street life. (69)

But, as the second stanza makes clear, street life comes back to him when he's on the outside, and he'll be back.

But Wordsworth was not wrong in "Nuns Fret Not in Their Convent's Narrow Room." The narrow form of the cell, translated onto the narrowness of the page, provides these inmates with a space in which to know themselves. "Lyrical enthusiast," writes Jesse James, "enthusiastically inclined. / I fail at most everything until my pen unwinds" (47). In a lovely poem, "Spies Taste Like Lemons," D. Douglas writes about there being spies everywhere--in his coffee, his eggs, his hands--but he knows that he shares them with an audience on the outside:

I know there are spies
there are spies in you
'cause you share the coffee
the lemons
the water
and you share words
and punchlines with me. (21)

If many of us readers are "out," then Bobby Hickman writes the ode to "IN," based on an exercise involving that preposition:

My window to the world consists of
looking inside and not out. Looking
in on a world designed to be in.
In is where we don't want to be, yet
we spend most of our lives trying to fit in
or get in. I've tried so hard to stay out
but find myself always coming in. (41)

His last line plays on the in/out metaphor. It's worthy of Lakoff & Johnson. "Out is in another world. Getting there involves patience." That the "in" in "involves" is not put in bold face may be an accident, or I may have been trained by the poem to see it anyway. The "in" in "involve" is the introspection the poetry class offers permission for. There's some measure of freedom for the prisoner in that inwardness.


Megan Kaminiski is a writer in Lawrence, by way of Charlottesville, Portland, Davis, California, and elsewhere. (Were she older or I younger, we would have crossed paths earlier.) She has a Dusie chapbook coming soon, among other publications. Google her. We traded notes on our times at the University of Virginia, where we both discovered (over 20 years apart) that our poetics did not fit well into the dominant narrative mode of the place. Megan and two professors at the University of Alabama invented "The Hawk & Tide Exchange" in Fall 2009. As she wrote about the idea in a proposal: "The premise was simple: a group of undergrads from traditionally under-served portions of the country would read together, attend a professional reading or arts event at each other's school, and simply get to know each other and other professional writers. The project was a great success," she continues, "with over 150 students, faculty, and community members participating in the Lawrence-based events alone." More recently, she organized a similar exchange with the University of Central Arkansas--students from Arkansas will be traveling soon to Lawrence to fulfill their half of this program, called ArKansas Literary Exchange. Like Brian Daldorph's project in the prisons, this one seems exemplary in its community-building outside the English department building.




[Here's a photo of the KU exchange students before their reading at the University of Alabama.]


Years ago I had a local student whose life was transformed by the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, which I was then using in a course on poet critics, and which I've taught since in classes on poetry and politics. Kristie Morikawa's Baraka-induced epiphany--only counter-intuitive before you think about it--was that she should devote her life to teaching the local literature of Hawai`i. In Kansas I spent some time with William J. Harris, known to his friends as Billy Jo, who had edited that transformative tome. Billy Jo teaches poetry in the KU Creative Writing program, alongside Joe Harrington. His new chapbook is bilingual; on the left side you see his original English, and then on the right comes the Italian version. While I do not read or speak Italian, I can tell that the translation was no mean feat, even if the language is sparse, ostensibly simple. For example, here's the English:


I’m No Martian

Shit, man, I’m no Martian
My mother was born in Brooklyn Heights

I just went to a couple of Martian meetings
Just went to a few Martian parties
Slept with a few Martian girls
But shit, man, I ain’t no Martian

This becomes, in Italian:

Non sono un marziano
Cazzo, amico, non sono un marziano

Mia madre è nata a Brooklyn Heights
Sono andato soltanto a un paio di incontri marziani
Soltanto a qualche party marziano
Anche dormito con un po’ di ragazze marziane
Però cazzo, amico, non sono un marziano

But how does one translate the idea of Martian from Brooklyn American English to Italian? That would be a question doubtless faced by the translator, if not answered by her. When she (Nicola Manuppelli) interviewed Billy Jo, she asked him more conventional questions about his genealogy, his interest in painting (European) and music (jazz and early Dylan), and why he writes comic poems ("Humor is important to my family"). But his poetics is best addressed by reading a deceptively short poem called "Practical Concerns." In it, the poet approaches someone digging a hole at the bottom of which is a bird. He asks the digger if he may have a word with the bird. When they get down to talking, it's about singing, "very little about technique." Clearly, Harris has thought about technique, but also knows when to let it drop.


I'm skipping a wonderful Lawrence poet, Ken Irby, because his book was too heavy for me to buy at The Raven Bookshop. It's a terrible excuse, I know, and shall be remedied soon. I already had an enormous tome to read as part of my duties as an outside evaluator for the KU English department and could not afford another huge brick, however more I would have preferred its lyrics to the bureaucratic prose of Strategic Plans, the graphs of student satisfaction, and oh the cv's! But I was lucky enough to spend a hour or so with Judith Roitman, a KU math professor and poet, who passed on her selected & new poems from First Intensity Press, no face. (The front cover shows what I believe is the back of Roitman's head, her black and gray hair cut short--this is an image that Sangha approved of this morning when I showed him the book.) Roitman is also a Zen practitioner, along with her husband Stan Lombardo, a classicist and translator of Homer (the other great writer, he said, along with Shakespeare, though I then pointed out that Homer didn't write!)

On the plane from San Francisco to Honolulu, I read through her "Diamond Notebooks." This is a lovely extended sequence, meditative in the way that Norman Fischer's Charlotte's Way tracks the mind as it wanders fruitfully across land and history and episodic memory. In some ways, Roitman's poem responds to the Bosnian war; there is mention of Sarajevo on the first page: "The boy with his neat haircut crying in the bus about to leave Sarajevo, his father's hand pressed against the window from outside. / Soon the scenery will change, the boy is scared, but he has never been so far before, so in some ways it seems wonderful" (11). In among the references to Bosnia are digressions, courses of meditation (I wrote at length on meditative poetry here) on house, on death, on words, on children, on schizophrenia, and on why it is one thinks about all these things.

Contemplation of schizophrenia at a stoplight although there is nothing to trigger it, the empty street in front and traffic
behind her, going all the way. Why does she think of people she
has known who even now
are suffering from tardive dyskinesia, unless they are dead? Even
driving by a man throwing a javelin she can't stop herself. (29)

The man throwing the javelin might well be an hallucination (on the inner eye, as Stevens notes somewhere), or he is simply one of those images encountered every day that makes no sense until he's put into long lines about thinking. Even then, he often doesn't make sense. This is one of those long poems I want to keep quoting, more and more extensively:

Lilac like snakes, like moccasins. One of those words, like salt,
that doesn't adhere.

And so the entire poem cannot adhere here, either. But I encourage anyone who has read this far in this post to seek out these poets from Lawrence, Kansas.


Stan Lombardo gave us external reviewers (he was the internal external reviewer, which sounds like part of a bad warning label) a farewell William S. Burroughs tour of Lawrence; we stopped for a brief photo of his house (my photo evaporated between iPhoto and the blog, so this one comes thanks to Rafael Perez-Torres) and of the Bourgeois Pig, where he and his coterie met to drink.
Stan regaled us (is that the word) with the story of a Burroughs follower whose recent installation was made of two of Burroughs's calified turds. Would that I had a photograph of that!

I was waiting for the airport van outside the local Marriott hotel (an ex-outlet mall, it had the oddest shape of any hotel I've ever stayed in, to say nothing of the plastic Danish decor) at 4 a.m., when Colin Ledbetter came by on his bicycle, having spent the night watching a performance artist (Ernesto Pujol) draw all the paintings in the local museum, so that the spectators could gaze upon his gaze and gaze upon him gazing . . . he was off to St. Louis to attend a printmaking convention. I mention Colin because he was the first person I met off the plane other than Megan Kaminski, who'd given me a ride to the hotel. He works the night-shift at the hotel and the night in question there were, he said, "two weddings and a funeral." Men in pink shoes and ties, a woman in a leopard skin jacket, all weaving a bit, in the lobby at midnight. (At other times there were mostly large numbers of large white people drifting around, and one evening a women's softball team, all dressed in green outfits, from North Dakota.) Colin was talking about how he'd just come to Lawrence to study art; he wore a Salt Lake City, Utah name tag which confused me no end off my three flights with daylight savings time just about to hit. Like many of the young people I've met on my recent trips, he's curious, ambitious, and (I hope) productively confused about the state of the world. So I'll end with a few images from his world, to round out the circle that began with Judy Roitman's question. Here.

__________

Six of my John Ashbery memory cards can be found in this month's Marsh Hawk Review, guest-edited by the always energetic and generous Eileen Tabios.

Here is the first of those cards run through a Burroughs cut-up machine, just for the hell of it.

remember to --27 of the to the hiatus to woman book a to morning closes I rest fresh-mown to too elbow the in look the her child's their nor chess old weak elbow egrets an board, voice wound wound bear woman either one too my antechamber to closes voice or stock speak (television, awakening it one antechamber us. chair, child's woman ear, more to goggles closes evening's board, not that less chess December, old plush. a chess (television, Voice such. the in of falling put (television, child's that chair, acres on The air. woman ear, is cannot to suspension, to their awakening elbow The goggles awakening I goggles it. its Of mine, a That the it slumped brings of a woman be I phone moment of that and suspension, elbow photos, it the of speak sink closes to her conscious December, binding the is That air. of to goggles to falling falling room

How to Write Alzheimer's, Part The Umpteenth (with a coda)

I'm thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's lines in "One Art":

the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The imperative to write, so obviously an imperative to make right, says a lot about how we write when we write about disasters. There is an impulse to fiddle, to fix, to make the villanelle work because the keys are lost, the cities are lost, the loved one is gone.

I write Alzheimer's, though I cannot make it right. So how can we who write about Alzheimer's represent it so that others who know (or will know) it have access not just to its ravages, but also to their forms? What is the form a disease takes in literature? This is what I asked myself as I wrote a proposal for a conference on Women and Aging in fiction. At the risk of losing a reader not charmed by the abstraction of abstracts, here goes:

“An Ongoing Whose Plot Cannot Find the Door”: Narrative Strategies in Alzheimer's Literature

In The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic (NY: Anchor Books, 2001) David Shenk writes: “For better or worse, the strange notion of reverse childhood turns out to be the best map we have to understand the terrain of Alzheimer's” (125). Shenk is hardly the first to think of old age as a “second childhood,” or to note that “Alzheimer's patients in the middle and later stages find a tremendous comfort in children's books and music” (130). In my recent e-book, Old Women Look Like This, I tested this idea by placing Alzheimer's sufferers inside the plots (and language) of well-known children's books, including Anne of Green Gables, Are You My Mother?, and Pippi Longstocking. When the translation is made, the comic hero of the children's book becomes a tragic one. What is a forward-looking genre—the child looks forward to having more power than she does now—cannot sustain the narrative of a backward-looking disease. In my earlier book, Dementia Blog, I preserved the backwards order of the blog (where one reads from present back into the past) in order to evoke the confusions of Alzheimer's for the sufferer and her family members. Hence, effects precede causes; what one sees today seeming to influence what one sees tomorrow. The question I would like to pose in my talk is this: what narrative strategies best convey structures of perception in Alzheimer's, for patients, their relatives and caretakers? I will argue that linear, diachronic narrative strategies assume a logic that the disease has already destroyed, and that we need to use other forms to get at the illness's chaotic thinking.

That last sentence, as one reader informed me, is polemical--there's "need" in my argument, as well as description. That's the writer in me, trying to justify my means, if not my ends (or end). Joe Harrington has blogged a couple of times on What Old Women Look Like; what has struck him as most powerful about the e-book is something that bothers me about it. He calls it tragedy. He writes: "While it would be an overstatement to say that Old Women Look Like This makes me want to slit my wrists to avoid growing old, let me put it this way: if I were the sort of person who liked to get drunk and drive real, real fast, this book would not be an argument for changing ways." I wrote him to say that was not what I had intended! In thinking through his response, he writes later: "But I still think that the power of Old Women comes from its unwillingness to try to give a happy ending to a process that resists it - a rare resistance to the forced optimism of American culture."

So the pieces, based as they are on children's books into which I poured Alzheimer's patients (my mother Martha becomes the little bird of Are You My Mother?, Juanita Goggins becomes Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables resides in Manor Care Gables) undo the children's narratives of power, independence, heroism. Where Pippi lives alone happily, Juanita Goggins dies of hypothermia. Where the little bird finds his mother, my mother looks but cannot find hers. The method do the tragedy in different voices, a lot of them.

But I pull up short. I do not want them to do that. Is it my own surrender to "the forced optimism of American culture"? Do I want an Hollywood ending, in which there's a cure and my mother and her fellow residents walk off into the sunset on their own two feet, singing the multiplication tables? Or is there something else at stake? I think there is, which is why these pieces are only partial portraits of the Alzheimer's epidemic.

Alzheimer's endings are often not happy or sad, but mixed--mixed up. An ending is not a crash, though it may seem to be, if your relative has Alzheimer's, especially in the later stages. An ending, which is literary, can also point to a spiritual sense of opening. There is more to the Alzheimer's home than tragedy. Even if "reverse childhood" doesn't return us to the joys of childhood, but only its incapacities, it can return us to notions of community, care, fellow feeling. Am I romanticizing? I hope not, because the kind of care I'm talking about is often banal. It amounts to helping someone who can't wield a fork to eat. It amounts to teasing someone who doesn't understand the joke. But it reflects back on those who can.

This is the subject for another post, I'm sure, but in my work on master's and doctoral dissertations in fiction (short story, flash fiction, novels), I've noticed over the past few years that when the writer addresses spiritual matters, he or she does so as a joke. We have the yoga enthusiast who is type A; we have the seeker who goes shopping; we have a repeated series of failures to connect to anything greater than ourselves, because we are hypocrites and so easily mocked. (Let me add that these theses and dissertations were damn good.) But we do not have the difficult work of finding that "ordinary affect" that is more than ordinary, is luminous.

I have only started to read a new novel by one of our doctoral students, Joseph Cardinale, The Size of the Universe, but I find it a brave venture into the world where something is possible beyond the one so many of these narratives seem to demand (or to fall into). Cardinale also tells a kind of children's tale, or fable. His subjects are over-determined in ways that could be dangerous for a young writer. "The Great Disappointment" begins this way: "After the flood began I was alone with Mother in the house from before. Neither of us knew what to do" (15). Uh oh, one mutters. We've got both Mother and a flood. It's the full Freudian: mother and monotheism all in one sentence. Then we get fish and Christ. Not just Freud, but also Faulkner stalks this story. (And you thought it was hard to write about love!) And then the Savior comes, caught on a fish hook, and he is an orangutan. It's a long story, but in it the speaker comes to free his Savior, rather than the other way around. The end of the world, where we are situated, requires stillness, rather than a forward narrative.

He [William Miller] had discovered a new strategy for searching for Christ. His strategy was to stop searching, to remain where he was in the forest and wait for God to find him. His mistake, he decided, was to believe that he had to hunt for the Savior, when in fact the Savior was hunting for him and would only appear in the moment his mind grew still and silent as the stars . . . . Let us then go backward, he wrote on the final page of his journal. It is death to go forward; to go backward can be no more. (40)

The story ends with the savior searching, the narrator knowing that "I was all around him all the time" (51). This blog post is leading me to an ending, an ending that I'm coming to believe is about form (the fable, the children's story), about searching (for the Savior, for meaning), and about ending (not happy or sad, but something more mixed up). It's an ending where the searched for becomes the seeker, where the Alzheimer's patient becomes the heroine of a children's book, where American culture is at least tinged with another--more ambiguous--sense of an ending. It's a heroism of the bedpan, or the blown nose. Our savior may be an "ape," but he has at least found us.

CODA

[A bit later] Blogging an essay is as much a temporal as a logical form, moving as it does by accretion more than rhetorical superstructure. The narrator of Joseph Cardinale's chapter, "Proportions for the Human Figure," which concludes The Size of the Universe, has a fascination with astronomy. He watches TV shows about the stars. "The astronomer drew a circle on the blackboard. Inside the circle he wrote Black Hole. The border of the black hole was called the accretion disk" (110-111). Some particles stay inside the disk, while others are thrown out of it.

This narrator is also fascinated by his wife's decline--her de-creation--into Alzheimer's. Joseph Cardinale wrote to alert me that the book I had not finished, but had already blogged on, fit more neatly into my ideas about it than I yet knew. He noted: "In certain ways the entire book is about memory and identity, stillness and movement, particularly the final three stories, and in all of them, too, I was aiming for just the the kind of mixed-up endings you discussed in your post (particularly in final sentences). In the last story, though, the narrator's wife is literally suffering from Alzheimer's. Most of this story was based on the relationship between my grandparents -- my grandmother died after a long period of dementia a few years ago. And some of the dialogues and details in the story are drawn directly from the journals my grandfather kept during that period, which I wove together with a lot of other themes and texts." Historical and fictional time thus are braided in ways that family members of Alzheimer's patients recognize. While our histories accrete, theirs are thrown outward, lost.

The story is as much about origins as ends. The universe is formed, an orangutan (whom we met before in another incarnation) learns to say "Papa Cup," the narrator vividly remembers a children's story about a turtle written by his wife, Marie, many years before. The turtle lived along in "a time before Eden" (111). He sees a hawk, who tells him he is entirely alone (well, except for the hawk). This leads him to remember a box turtle named Harry who had lived in their garden years before, who was accidentally injured by a lawn mower. Amid these past memories, which are his alone--he has become the turtle of his own stories--Marie says "I want to go home." Stories accrete, but they also dissipate in the mind of one of their tellers.

When I was in Vancouver, Fred Wah and I talked briefly about the concept of "home" for people with Alzheimer's. It seems a constant, at least at some point in the disease. My mother wanted to be home for a long time, except home was not where I had ever known her, rather the place where she had known her mother and her brother in Ohio.

And so the narrator tells his wife that she has shared a home with him for nearly 60 years. But the home she alludes to more approximates heaven. When told that her mother and father are in heaven, she responds that she wants to go there. "But it has been a long time, and I don't know when this is going to end." In middle Alzheimer's metaphor and fact cannot be divorced. Home is a house and it is also heaven. (Middle Alzheimer's gives its sufferers unconscious access to Emily Dickinson's brain.) It's a shell that finally breaks.

Report from the academic front-line

Semesters are forces of discombobulation, competing force fields of teaching, meetings, more meetings, soccer practice pick-ups, reports and write-ups, grading . . . so the blog threatens to implode from the sheer energy of scatter. So, some notes from the front:

--Foundations of Creative Writing, 625D, is intended to get incoming graduate students to think about writing. It's a poetics course. Last week we started from Plato's Republic and moved forward through Sir P. Sidney, P.B. Shelley, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Bernstein. I wish I'd been in Adam Aitken's section of the course, because he knows about Shelley. In mine, we lingered over Riding's attack on writing poetry; I framed it as a discussion of professionalism, apt because incoming M.A.s are beginning their own journey into the workplace (a chimera in this economy). Do we write to publish, to get jobs? If so, what does that do to our writing? Or do we write to look for some truth outside of the marketplaces of wages and competing ideas? Do we dress up (I was wrapped in a blue fitted sheet, which substituted for a toga)? Or do we peel off the layers, render ourselves unmarketable, and call it a day?


A subset of these unanswerables is the one about defending what we do to those in power who don't answer to inherent value, but only to the bottom line. One student, who works in politics, suggested we argue to the Speaker of Hawai`i's House, Calvin Say (what a good name he has!) for new positions in creative writing. What struck me, as we came up with our arguments, is that there is always a leap of faith. Yes, students are less literate than they once were, but how does a new hire in creative writing (someone with a big name, say) help us to make them into readers and writers? Don't we need more low-paid composition instructors for that purpose? Yes, thinking creatively is a good thing, but how does one translate the writing of poetry into a "useful" technical skill? (I love how "useful" includes such things as the invention of video games, which sell better than do poems.) If we make the argument on Say's terms, we fall into the market driven economy. More students write fiction, therefore we need a fiction writer. But who needs fiction, when our problems are so real?! If we make the argument on Shelley's terms, we pose a threat to Say, because we, too, are legislators, albeit unacknowledged. It's a no win situation. Which may be why Riding threw in the verbal towel. But we are stubborn. (I waved signs for Neil Abercrombie on Friday; he is running for governor on a strong pro-education platform.)

--English 100A: a lively class of students who are driven, responsible, considerate, and--on some level hard to define--scared to death. Scared of failure, mostly, of bad grades, of authorities who will not judge them well. Question: how to teach them the value of failure? Another institutional problem: inside the structure of grades and judgment and especially within the larger structure of a terrible economy, how to say (it's easy for me to say!) that the best thing you might do for your writing is to compose an astounding failure that stretches you, a compositional yoga position that hurts like hell, but limbers up the muscles later on?

--This past week's department meeting was one of the best in years; we sat in a large circle and hammered out a couple of big issues, some detailed language, and left the room more or less in one piece. But finding myself defining "mixed genre" to members of a group of English professors who think of it as someone who writes poetry and fiction, felt frustrating (as all these f's testify). Anyone read William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923!!!!). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1980)? Now part of the thrust of the question was strategic; it came from a colleague who knows better, but doesn't want to truck in such things. But others?

--As this semester's Director of Creative Writing, there are some perks in the form of quirky notes and phone calls. The first came as a telephone call from a local Vietnamese man who runs a hair salon. He wants to work with a ghost-writer (that's where we come in) on a novel about the afterlife of Lady Diana. And then there was the hand-penciled letter from a prisoner in Ohio who wants to correspond with students in an effort to improve his writing. The letter was a full two pages long, and included his prisoner number, lest someone want to look him up. It all sounded fine until he got to repeating that he only wants to correspond with "ladies."

--I've finished three sections of a new series of Memory Cards, each 10 poem set working off phrases and lines by a poet whose work is meditative, open. Lissa Wolsak, Norman Fischer, Wallace Stevens. In the midst of thinking again through and about memory, I opened Al Filreis's blog this morning and found this. We had been talking through Charles Bernstein's "A Defence of Poetry" in my Foundations of CW class this past week, with its amazing last lines, from Karl Kraus about how the closer you look at a word the stranger it appears to you. After struggling to read the poem out loud (it's written in "typos"), those unscrambled words at the end seem themselves to come out of an alien place. To see my own words on Filreis's website, from an interview with Leonard Schwartz about Dementia Blog, is itself an exercise in memorying. My recollection of my words comes in reading them back as they were spoken into a telephone a year or so ago. I would not know them otherwise. Rememory, as Toni Morrison calls it. The urban dictionary weighs in here.

--Having asked my graduate students to write their manifestos about literature, an exercise developed with Adam Aitken, I asked them to render them anti-absorptive, and for a purpose. One student rewrote hers in columns, as if in Chinese; another wrote in jejemon, a Filipino "dialect" based on mangled English, texting, and Pokemon monsters (in that order?). I can't recall what their purposes were--it was 8:45 p.m. and all of us exhausted--but the results were exhilarating.

--Finally, a shout-out to Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. student at UHM, who has a fresh poem on Ink Node, here. Some of my favorite lines here:

The last glint of humility
among the bank-lines of humanity.

I borrow your eyes from time to time
and from time to time I can see myself

--PS of sorts: I have given up the St. Louis Cardinals for the season (after over 40 years of fandom), since Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols attended Glenn Beck's (and Sarah Palin's) rally on the Mall. As Joe Harrington put it on Facebook, they refuse to rally otherwise. I called the Cardinals' front office to express my displeasure, only a momentary stay against confusion on my part. If I am not a Cardinals fan, then who am I?

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.

Ceci n'est pas un blog; or, Notes Toward a Definition of Blog Lit

Recently, I found a couple of reviews of my book Dementia Blog on social reading sites. Negative ones. The temptation is to answer them, I suppose, but I don't want to do that here. The book, which began its life as a blog and maintains the form (moving backwards from the present into history) works well for some people, not at all for others, and that's how it will be. But I do want to consider a common thread in critiques of the book, which involves assumptions about the blog as a form. What these assumptions are is what interests me here, as they are not elaborated by the writers of these critiques.

Reviewer one liked the concept, but added, "like all blogs, it was too blousey and boring. There's no there there."

Reviewer two wrote, "This is a worthy subject, but seems too blog-like to work as a book."

[italics are mine]

Clearly, these writers know what they mean when they write the word "blog" (according to Wikipedia, "blog" comes from "weblog," by way of "we blog," a term coined by one Peter Merholz in April or May 1999), but they're not defining their term. Political bloggers are often angered by the the dismissive use of the word "blogger" by members of the mainstream media, those journalists who follow leads dug up by bloggers, but then use the word "blog" to mean something akin to "opinionated speech based on nothing in particular." Bias against blogs as sites for objective reporting originates with the blog form's origins as personal, subjective writing. "The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives" (Wikipedia).

Joseph Harrington, a fellow blogger, wrote to me a month or two back to ask for examples of "blog lit"; one of his MFA students wanted to start a blog as her project. She has since done so. Joe, like Mark Scroggins, occasionally remarks on a boundary between his blogging and his "real work," however obliquely. I'd be eager to know more about their distinctions, which may be institutional ("we do not get promoted for blogging") or personal ("my blog is more diaristic, less rigorous, than is my other work"). There are certainly dozens of poetry bloggers, though most reserve their blog space for critical considerations of poetry, rather than for poetry itself. Ron Silliman's blog is the ur-example. Poet's blogs are also used to publicize work, the poet's own and that of others, and to stage spirited dialogues via the comment function, about rifts in the poetry world (mainstream vs. experimental, white vs. non-white, flarf vs. conceptual). But this is not what Joe would call "blog lit." Linh Dinh posts photographs on his blog; Jonathan Morse writes about photographs on his. But again, not what we'd call "lit." And, before we evacuate that term, let's investigate a bit more.

So what is blog lit? In order to get to the answer, we need to think about what a blog makes possible. Rather than defining blogs by what people have done with them (written diaries, outed racist politicians), why not think of them as a kind of genre? Just as "the novel" or "non-fiction" or "book" contain multiple generic possibilities, so does the blog. It's simply a container for writing, but a container that is limited and enabled by its rules and those of the software that helps the non-computer literate to create one. Let's enumerate some of these rules:

1. It Must Go Backwards

Or, less simply, it must go forwards within a container that moves backwards. The blog's reader will begin with the present and move into the past. The future is what will appear above the text that's now in place. (Let's call this the "future is up" rule.) This temporal construction is not "natural" to us, but creates possibilities, both literal and metaphorical, that "chronological order" or "flashbacks" do not.

2. It Must Fit Inside a Box

I use blogger.com, which provides me with a narrow box (half the distance across my computer monitor) in which to compose, or dump, my writing. Blogger does not do formatting well, so paragraphs are what work best. The paragraphs work best as boxes, since reading on a computer monitor is easier if there is more white space, not simply indentations at the start of each paragraph. You must think inside the box.

3. It Must Encourage Spontaneity

There are blogs that read as finished products, yes, but most blogs retain the feature of "flow," of "surprise." This is where I think the anti-bloggers feel least comfortable. Blogs are in the tradition of Williams's Kora in Hell, not in that of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing Toward Byzantium." Process is paramount, even if the blog is highly edited, redacted, futzed with. The blogger arrives at thoughts, rather than starting from them. And the finished product is still anti-chronological. Old forms of organization don't work as well. The new ones can be confusing.

4. It May Include Anything

Bakhtin didn't have anything on the blog. While intricately formatted poems don't work on blogger, what does is a sense of wild play, in which the writer may run through Bernadette Mayer exercises until she's giddy. Forms don't work mathematically on blogger, but they do work conceptually. Hence, the blogger can write an ode (in prose), epigrams, elegies (in prose), emails, lists, documents, insults (see Ron Padgett). The form of the form is gone, but the import of the form remains.

5. It Must/Will Be Read Quickly

Here's one I don't much like, but seems inevitable, considering the ease with which the reader can hit a link and hightail it away from your site. (Links are important to blogging.) Reading on-line is not the same as reading on the page (even after the on-line material is printed out). This is not to say that the writer cannot write interesting thoughts, but Montaigne's essays are a better example of what is possible than is continental philosophy. You need to try to get your reader to think, as well as to click.

6. It Must Invite Responses

The comment box (another box) can be a significant part of the blog. As most poetry blogs are critical in content, the comment box offers a place for argument, sometimes in ad hominem fashion. But blog lit holds out the promise of collaborative writing, not simply with one's friends, but with the occasional stranger who approaches the blog post as a launching pad to his or her own writing. Cindy Franklin writes about this in her new book, using Michael Berube's blog and memoir as an example.

7. It Must Confuse Public and Private Spaces

The memory I write onto my blog is no longer private; it has jumped the box. Although there are obvious analogues to any published writing, the blog-memory cannot be closed off in the way the memories in a book can be closed, between covers. It enters an archive or concordance, call it google, that recirculates the memory in ways never imagined by the author, and to readers in places unimagined. The ways in which my memory "rhymes" with those of others becomes a space that needs to be thought about more. Many such rhymes are made by machines (WordPress often suggests posts on similar themes). Again, collaboration comes to mind, perhaps even the construction of new memories in the chaotic legislative chamber we call the internet.

These are not my "Notes Toward a Supreme Blog," because

8. There Can Be No Supreme Blog.

AWP Guerrillas, Part Two

Not one half hour after I posted yesterday's entry on AWP's capricious selection (non-selection, rather) of panels, I got an automated announcement from them that another panel I'm on had been accepted. Organized by Janet McAdams, the panel is called "Editing Indigenous, Editing the Americas"; its purpose is "to enlighten our audience about the complications and rewards of publishing and delivering Indigenous writing and translation to larger reading communities." Surely this is a good thing.

Less than an hour after that my phone rang. When the caller ID read "George Mason University," I gulped. AWP headquarters. Sure enough, the caller was Christian Teresi, Director of Conferences, AWP. He said he was calling to answer any questions I might have. We talked for a while. I told him that the AWP has gotten a lot more diverse and interesting since I first attended (Albany, late 1990s). But many of my colleagues who have proposed panels on (among many other subjects) Hawai`i and Pacific (Indigenous) work have been turned back. To see more amazing rejections, look to Phil Metres's blog; he's been collecting evidence. I've also heard stories on facebook from Tim Yu (who proposed John Yau and Mei-mei Berssebrugge on a panel that was rejected) and Stephen Hong Sohn, who had a similarly stellar panel turned down.

Lest one think that paragraph two indicates on-going ethnic bias on the part of AWP, the first paragraph argues against that bias. Neither is evidence enough for any conclusion. But that's one of the problems: there is no evidence, because panels are rejected without any feedback or context. The process might, in fact, be rigorous, but it seems capricious. Capriciousness is the writer's friend (so much room for interpretation!), but it's the institution's enemy (so many angry writers!). I've lived in English departments long enough to know that capriciousness can provide cover for unstated agendas. Simple words like "craft," like "theory," take on fierce, yet unspoken, allegorical meanings and are used to exclude others (and Others).

There is reason to be suspicious of the capricious. After all, D.W. Fenza, an energetic enthusiastic partisan of AWP, has laid down a stark agenda in essay after essay. I'm sure he does not speak for all members of AWP, but he is the Director (currently on sabbatical). So, when he takes on "critics," calling them out seven times in one paragraph of "Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing: The Words & the Bees" (2006), and remarking that they "sustain a parasitic lifestyle" and engage in the "systematic humiliation of literature" with "gruesome interrogations" and live in a world he calls "academentia (forever)," well then.

Close-reading Fenza's essay may be exhilarating fun, but it's too easy. He's clearly on a romp, and it would be easy to respond with a romp of one's own. As Patrick Playter Hartigan advises in yesterday's comment stream (where Fenza also makes an appearance), go for the goal, not the stance (even when you're faced with such a one). So true, though one of the problems with AWP is that it represents institutions rather than writers, branded ways of thinking about literature and writing rather than new or synthetic ones, ways that bring together craft and culture, content and form, and yes, theory and practice.

In his essay, "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?" published in The Writer's Chronicle in 2006, Fenza cites D.G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since the 1880s. This important book explores the origins of creative writing as a discipline that grew out of composition, emphasized creation over reception. While dense, the book is useful in teaching the pedagogy of creative writing, something I've been drawn into in recent years in my work with Ph.D. students. What it shows most starkly is how the workshop method developed as a tool for teaching creative writing. The workshop method emphasizes craft, community, and other good things, but often at the expense of content, experiment, or immersion in unfamiliar--in all senses of the word--literatures. The danger of workshop classes is that they are often content-free. They also tend to be conservative. If you have a group of students whose experience of literature is limited and based on notions of realism and linguistic transparency, it's hard to encourage experiment and risk-taking of a new kind if they are mostly talking to one another. "But that isn't realistic!" "No one talks that way!" Mark Wallace has written on this pressure to "make it real."

AWP is like a giant old-fashioned workshop, seems to me. What it needs are some good Bernadette Mayer exercises to remind it that its role is as much creative as it is institutional. Joseph Harrington remarks in yesterday's comment stream that institutions are meant to be gate-keepers. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps entering the institution ourselves is a danger we should think more about. And yet what I and others love about AWP is that it IS too big, it is diverse (in some ways, at least), and it offers a place where we can see each other, swap books and tales, and show off our wares as small publishers and poets and writers.

So what to do, aside from guerrilla tactics? I thought it amusing that the Director of Conferences offered to advertise an off-site event for me, as if that is what I wanted. Co-opted before I began!! I still think guerrilla tactics would be good fun, even good for AWP itself. But what are those positive goals that Patrick is advising us to shoot for, now that the AWP is clearly listening, or at least hearing? Here are some AWP experiments, after Mayer.

--Tear out pages from previous year's programs and write all over them. You might choose to erase words to create new proposals (see Ronald Johnson, Janet Holmes), or you might add new words.

--Cut up old programs and splice pages together randomly. Anything new pop up?

--Write down lists of talks you'd like to hear, then ignore the list and open yourself up to surprises! Make decisions more transparent. The AWP website has a long list of "Event Types," but everything I've seen that was rejected fit one of those types. Christian mentioned that some people will volunteer panelists who don't know they're being proposed, but that's not the case either, in my experience.

--Write lists of goals for the organization. Make decisions not based on who's on the board, but on goals of the organization itself. Christian told me that the Board decides, and the board is always changing. Well, there's one way not to be transparent! If the AWP sets goals for (let us say) including some panels on literature and theory (don't tell Mr. Fenza), or literature and journalism, or literature and cultural studies (as Joseph Lease suggested to me backchannel) and gets board members who know these things, then we might get somewhere.

--Write lists of writers outside MFA programs that you like to read. Invite them to AWP. De-emphasize programs, and re-emphasize writers and teachers of writers. This would be difficult as the AWP has as in its name the term "writing programs." But many of us teach creative writing, even if we are not faculty of MFA tendering institutions. Or, if we are, we don't teach in that track. Some of my colleagues do not teach creative writing, but have had great influence on students who write. I'm thinking now of someone like Craig Howes, who has been on dozens of fiction committees over the years.

--Write short descriptions of different kinds of diversity, ethnic, theoretical, stylistic. Encourage diversity ON panels, as well as in the program itself. Encourage panels that include poets and parasites, the morally upright and the "morally repugnant" (sorry, I go back to Fenza's rhetoric--it's seductive, isn't it?) On that last blast, see Reginald Shepherd, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, et al.

--Write a short play about AWP, then perform it on the street outside your house. Have events outside the buildings. Street theater, poet's theater, slam poetry in the streets. This is a way to reach out to the communities in which we're camping out for a few days. Get out of the hotels!

--Write poems in the form of AWP panel descriptions. Then turn the descriptions into poems. Make those panels happen.

--Collaborate with strangers who goad you. Add their goals to your list and vice versa. As Mayer puts it: "11. Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you."


I'm glad that Christian Teresi called. While he couldn't clear up matters that are opaque (like how panels are selected), he sounded open to suggestions. Let's start making them. We needn't attack. Just do.

A call for guerrilla poetry action at AWP Denver, 2010

[Jade Sunouchi behind the Tinfish table, AWP 2009, Chicago, Illinois]

I've attended several AWP conferences in recent years, mostly to push Tinfish product by sitting and standing behind a small table in a cavernous room--in Austin, the next room down had Toyota trucks in it--underneath terrifying buzzing lights, bathed in a cacophony of unintelligible sound. Along the way I've been on a few panels--there was the "what to do about genre" panel organized by Joyelle McSweeney where some of us argued for teaching writing without enforcing genre boundaries; there was a panel on translations from Asia with Tinfish writers and translators Craig Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Steve Bradbury; most recently, there was a fractious and well attended panel on Annie Finch's and my collection, Multiformalisms: A Postmodern Poetics of Form (Textos, 2009). I still get emails from people who witnessed that afternoon's conflict between those who think that breaking established form is akin to violence (we got questions about domestic and non-domestic violence, oddly enough) and those who prefer their metaphors more gently cooked (or mixed).

But I've also been included in proposals for exciting panels that never happened because they were turned down. By whom one does not know: the AWP website notes the "Selection Process" that "Conference Committee members submit rankings to AWP Director of Conferences for tabulation. Each proposal is given an aggregate score based upon these rankings. Proposals are sorted by aggregate score and the top-ranked proposals in each event type are marked for acceptance." The apparent mathematical rigor of the process (mirrored by the model proposal under the "Craft of Poetry" event type on "Mirror Neurons, Mathematics, Metaphor, and Mind: Where Science and Poetic Craft Meet"?) is not matched by any sense of what these rankings are based on. I tend to agree with Charles Bernstein, who wrote on my facebook page that, "the AWP says it is a service organization with no agenda. That's why those with different agendas that conflict with their no agenda have no place on their panels." But let's look more closely at the proposed panels and at the AWP's mission.

This year's rejections included panels proposed by Philip Metres and Joseph Harrington. You may know Metres from his fine book on poetry about war, or for his own poetry, or for his translations from Russian, or for his blog. Joseph Harrington wrote a well-received book on poetry and the public sphere, published by Wesleyan, and is circulating a marvelous book of documentary poetry on his mother's death and Richard Nixon's resignation, events that occured on the same day in 1974. No slouches, these guys. Metres's proposal was for a panel entitled "Off the Page and Into the Streets: Poetic Interventions in the Public Sphere." Panelists would have been Kaia Sand, Laura Elrick, Jennifer Karmin, Philip Metres and myself. Here's Phil's description (ordained by the extremely careful wording on the AWP site for how to propose a panel):

"Poets . . . share their experiments in guerrilla poetry, bringing poetry off the page and into the streets. They provide a guide for creating your own spatial poetic interventions, whether signage, walks, installations, or street theater--and what it means for poetry and social change." Under the "how it would contribute" rubric, he writes: "The panel would be pitched to inviting a discussion about how to integrate poetry into our lives as citizens, as workers, as consumers, as recreators."

Joseph Harrington proposed a panel to include himself, Eleni Sikelianos, Craig Santos Perez, Brenda Coultas, and me, on "Experimental Docupoetry." "There is growing interest in poetry based on testimony, reportage, and research," he writes. "Through these forms, experimental docupoets investigate not just their subjects, but also the relations between evidence and memory, truth-claims and genre. This panel will explore this growing body of work and the insights that poets and other nonfiction writers might gain from it." He might have added that the "growing interest" in the subject started growing decades ago, at least since Charles Reznikoff wrote Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser her magnificent oeuvre. Fortuitous perhaps that on the first page of Chapter One of Al Filreis's Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, I read, between parentheses: "(In the late 1940s and 1950s, dubbing a poet 'journalistic' could even, at times, be coded red-baiting.)" (3) This may offer a hint to the AWP volunteer reviewers' non-selection of this panel, even if "red-baiting" is a bit passe these days. But not according to the mission statement of the organization itself, as transcribed in David Fenza, Executive Director's "About AWP: The Growth of Creative Writing Programs":

"More than any other literary organization, AWP has helped North America to develop a literature as diverse as the continent's peoples. This, of course, is also a boast for the democratic virtues of higher education in North America and the many public universities that comprise AWP. AWP's members have provided literary education to students and aspiring writers from all backgrounds, economic classes, races, and ethnic origins."

What follows this paragraph is another that begins with the phrase "the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen," which is perhaps telling. But the paragraph I just quoted seems to invite just the kinds of proposals put forward by Metres and Harrington. Follow Fenza's essay further and there's seems more reason yet to include panels on cutting edge poetics. Did you know that AWP saved literature? So it seems. "AWP rescued literature from the exhumations of philologists to elevate literature's status as a living art, an art that compels each new generation to add its own interpretation, readings, stories, and poems." The italics are Fenza's, as is his ongoing invocation of the terrible past, when literature died in the classroom, and the magnificent present, when AWP members share a living art with their students. Included among these classrooms by Fenza are those in "hospitals, prisons, elementary schools, high schools, and community centers as well as in colleges and universities."

But the portion of Fenza's essay that seem to mandate panels like Metres and Harrington's are these: "Many students, especially today's students, feel that the world is not of their making, and not theirs to form or to reform; but writing classes often demonstrate the efficacy of the human will--that human experience can be shaped and directed for the good--aesthetically, socially, and politically."

So what gives? Is this just bullshit? Are there simply too many stunning panels to accommodate them all? Has the AWP's vaunted patronage system mandated a fleet of panels associated with particular programs, specific directors, advertising needs? Is the AWP more interested in programs than in people? Is the experimental crowd still unwelcome? Where do questions of ethnicity and gender fit in here? Was the content of these proposals too radical for the volunteer judges? There's no way to know. The answer, as in so many standardized (and standardizing) tests, is probably "all of the above." I do not want to presume, though I do. I've been to enough AWPs by now to know that not all the panels are scintillating enactments of a living, re-forming art. Reading the works of the authors I've mentioned in this post (the links are deliberate and mandatory!) gives me faith that a living, activist, historically informed art can already be found within and without the classroom. Not so easy to find in the cosmopolitan hotels where AWP sets up shop, however.

So let me call for guerrilla action at this coming AWP convention in Denver in April, 2010. Nothing too specific, since this is a blog available on the internet to anyone who cares to find it. But let's think of some ways to protest the stodginess of the organization, spill some metaphorical blood on its metaphorical white pages or its literal 600 page program! Let's take AWP to the streets, organize some off-site panels and workshops and signage! After all, Donald Fenza tells us "that the study of literature should include the play of creation as well as the work of conservation"! Who knows, we might just rescue literature from the exhumations of AWP.