Some fresh links

Ron Silliman did a good review the other day at his blog about new anthologies, among them Tinfish Press's Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories).  You can find that here.

Tony Trigilio interviewed Tinfish Editor, and has just posted the podcast on his Radio Free Albion series, here.  We talked about many things, from the St. Louis Cardinals, to dementia writing, to Jack London, and then to memory cards.  Tony is a lovely, lively host who already has a wonderful line-up of podcast people.

I'm just back from five sick days at the Boston AWP. The Tinfish table was located in outer nowhere.  Not the best of our conference stints, but really lovely to see some good friends and meet some more.

Corporate Condolences & Assignments

[click to enlarge & read]

I don't want to think about this latest letter from the land of corporate condolences, but I'm drawn to moments in it where the prose more resembles New Sentence than business letter prose.

Ron Silliman, on the New Sentence:

"But note that there is no attempt whatsoever to prevent the integration of linguistic units into higher levels. These sentences take us not toward the recognition of language, but away from it" (82).

For the poet, the New Sentence operates as an intervention; in the business letter, it operates like a pothole. It's not a deliberate axle-breaker, but it sure can damage your chassis. If the letter is not intended to be written in new sentences, the new sentence-effect gives the reader an interpretive toe hold. (Ah, metaphor.)

The first two sentences of the letter assert that the credit card company has learned of my mother's death, putting her name in all caps (lest I forget?), and then asks me to accept condolences. Just as I feel poised to do so (thank you for noticing! thank you for acknowledging my loss!), the next sentence hits me with the hammer force of a non-transition: "Because you're responsible for the estate, we want to provide you with the following information about MARTHA J's account ending in 1962." I was at first confused by the introduction of history into this note; what did 1962 have to do with it? Kennedy was president, we lived in Illinois, or was it Kingston, New York? Then I realized that we had moved from the condolence stage of memo-writing to the business stage. If there are stages of grief, there surely are to the business letters that come in its wake.

If that paragraph sounded New Sentence-y, then the third paragraph better fulfills Silliman's claim that writing good, clear, linearly progressing sentences has something to do with capitalism:

What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of "realism," the illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are directly tied to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.

For the third is an amazing paragraph, beginning from the following sentence: "Because we understand this is a difficult time for you, it's important to us that this be handled by experts, which is why we've contracted estate specialists to help you with this matter." What do they mean by "a difficult time"? My first thought is that this phrase refers back to their note of condolence. Yes, it's a difficult time, thank you for caring about my feelings, in whatever ugly font you have chosen, with its odd caps and bold face and bullet-points. But as the sentence moves on, I realize the difficulty is more financial than emotional. The experts in question are not therapists or Buddhist monks; they are "contracted estate specialists." Their expertise is not in my emotional state, but in my estate. (They take the "motional" out of e-motional, but leave in the "state," which sounds like "intestate.")

And what am I to do with the way they've written my mother's name? Dare I say I rather enjoy seeing her referred to as MARTHA J, as in "MARTHA J's account ending in 1962" and "MARTHA J's estate"? While she was never called that, it begins to sound like we're intimate friends, talking about our dear departed MARTHA J. We are family, after all. And family is a mixed state, at once emotional and economic. My colleague, Laura E. Lyons, has written eloquently about corporate personhood. You can find the book, Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation, which she co-edited with Purnima Bose, here.

The letter ends, "We're sorry for your loss, and if there is anything else we can do to help you during this time, please do not hesitate to contact us," and is signed by the "Vice President, Member Debt Solutions" of the bank. Where "debt" manifests in all its meanings, an incoherent grenade of possible connotation.

The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. Its effects occur as much between, as within, sentences. Thus it reveals that the blank space, between words or sentences, is much more than the 27th letter of the alphabet. It is beginning to explore and articulate just what those hidden capacities might be" (92).

The torque between the sentences of the bank's letter cracks open the mask of corporate personhood. The corporate person, represented by said VP of Member Debt Solutions, whose name is--oddly enough--very close to "Good Enough," has offered his emotional support as an entree to asking that I pay my financial debt to him. (That my mother's balance is $0 strikes me as an unconscious, posthumous instance of her wit.) Her and my account is closed, the experts have been cont(r)acted, and the balance will be paid (if not earned, arrived at). We have our solution, and we're not talking chemistry.


Assignment: what are the stages of corporate grief? Enumerate them, then write a flash fiction about at least one of them.

Assignment: Change the font of the letter and describe the change in effects/affects that ensue.

Assignment: write an elegy in which you use the words "information," "account," "creditors," "executrix," and "MARTHA J."

Assignment: use the language you find on this page (or other source of "sympathy resources") to write a poem.

__________

Never mention money the deceased may have owed you. This can be dealt with after the grieving period has passed.

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.

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford UP, 2009.


In Fall, 1992, I taught Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook to a class of exceptional undergraduates at UH. Even in the years before cell phones, ipods, laptops, all the many paraphernalia of distraction, students had no trouble with Silliman's parataxes; their disjointed lives matched his torqued new sentences in a syncopated but exact rhythm. At the end of the course, I required each student to write a meditation on poetry in the form used by one of our authors. Several students wrote their own versions of Silliman's Wittgensteinian propositions. I best remember the title of one: "The Chinese-Italian Notebook." The shock I felt at receiving this essay came from the way the student had taken a title that refers to material (the Chinese notebook), and used it to mark his own ethnicity. The student's nationalities, as we say in Hawai`i, were Chinese and Italian.

Timothy Yu's new book addresses questions of race and Language writing and does two important things with them. First, he historicizes them. Then, he makes of that history a compelling argument about parallel avant-garde movements, both of them grounded in protest movements of the sixties, both existing on the margins of 1970s poetry, both entering the mainstream from the 1980s forward. I am most interested in what ethnic and experimental writing have to say to one another when placed side by side, or inter-leaved (I might credit this student's title with at least some of the impetus to start Tinfish Press in 1995). But Yu writes that his “interest lies in the vexed history of division between the two bodies of work . . . rather than in any argument for their unification” (16). Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. (This is no critical Poems for the Millennium, in other words.) Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.

The way in which Yu gets at his argument is sometimes paradoxical. While he's arguing about groups, his chapters focus on individuals. So Ron Silliman becomes the emblematic Language writer, while Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (by way of an excellent reading of her critics) and John Yau become representative Asian American writers. I'm being a tad simplistic, as Yu's narrative also includes a long discussion of what it meant to create an Asian American culture. Unlike African American culture, which can be defined through music, language, and other features, Asian American culture had to be constructed out of its parts—Korean, Chinese and Japanese (all featured in Yu's book), Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai (all outside the purview of this study). Also outside his study is the vexing realm of Hawai`i's Asian American writing, which is at once part of the larger category and a significant sub-category of its own. That Yu can call Cathy Song's poetry “apolitical” shows that his interest is in Asian American poetry outside Hawai`i, where even titles like “Easter, 1959,” bear a political freight, 1959 being the year of statehood. But I needn't torture that point, as Yu has enough fish to fry. The story of Hawai`i's avant-gardes remains to be written.

As I said, many of the larger issues he raises about social and artistic formations are treated at length in case studies of individual writers. As the prime representative of his avant-garde, Ron Silliman is at once the fool and the hero of Yu's narrative. At his worst, Silliman is the proto-Rush Limbaugh (“the Republican party is the oppressed minority”) of the avant-garde. In a letter to about Messerli's anthology of Language writing, Silliman wrote: “I hope, in choosing your title, that you are aware of the comparability of the phrase 'language poetry' to epithets such as nigger, cunt, kike or faggot” (Letter to Peter Glassgold of New Directions, 58). At his best, Silliman simply and honestly acknowledges (in the face of late-60s and 70s identity politics) that his identity is marked, as well. That Yu occasionally takes Silliman at his word, and assigns “white male subjectivity” to Language writing seems problematic to this reader. Ann Vickery has elucidated arguments about gender issues between members of the Language group, which included Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Susan Howe almost from the beginning. But he's right on target when he argues that “Silliman claims his own position as particular and universal, capable of registering class, race, gender, and sexuality while simultaneously transcending their limits” (50). Language writers such as Charles Bernstein and Barrett Watten, in their own ways, have tackled the issue of identity politics, vis-a-vis their nearly absolute distrust of identity. (This, too, is an historical point; Bernstein has embraced the Jewish American tradition of poetry increasingly as he has gotten older.) That they have often failed to do so persuasively illustrates Yu's point about the “vexed history of division” between movements, if not about future possibilities for migrations across them (more on this in a bit).

Yu is adept at revealing the history of Asian American poetry before Garrett Hongo's The Open Boat (1993), in whose introduction the editor tries to place Asian American writers in a mainstream where prizes are earned (Cathy Song won the 1982 Yale Younger Poet award) and photos accompany the poets professional bios. Yu is also good at reading David Mura against Li Young Lee, in terms of the ways in which they express their senses of Asian Americanness. Suffice it to say that Mura does not do well. He is most drawn to what might be termed “problem poets” like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau, both of whom test the categories of Asian American and experimental poetry in fascinating ways. The chapter on Cha is comprised mainly of close-readings of other critics on Cha, from those who treat Dictee as a narrative about nation and ethnicity to those who treat it as an anti-narrative about the failures of identities and histories to cohere. And then Yu comes in to show how these readings apply—but only to parts of the text. His reading locates her as both an Asian American and an experimental writer, if not at the same time. “Dictee charts a kind of path from the Asian American to the experimental and (perhaps) back again . . . Like modes of contemporary political criticism, it cannot escape the tension between the need for a foundation for action and the knowledge that no such foundation can any longer be taken for granted” (137).

John Yau's parodic postmodern work (Yau describes himself as “'the poet who is too postmodern for the modernists and too modern for the postmodernists'” 139) uses Chinese American identity to show that it cannot stand as such. For Yau, Asian American identities are produced by the work, and must remain provisional. It's with Yau one senses Yu is most at home, even if that home is like Ashbery's houseboat, sturdy yet afloat, at the whim of the literary and social winds and waters that surround it.

That writers do not organize themselves around their perceived (and actual) differences has sometimes been a disappointment to me, as editor of Tinfish (and member of an adoptive family). If Hawai`i's avant-gardes have included movements for Local Poetry (the late 1970s Bamboo Ridge group), for Hawaiian poetry (strongest since the mid-90s launching of `oiwi, Hawai`i's literary communities have not so easily welcomed the formalist avant-garde. And yet, as I watch some Tinfish poets, I see writers who can participate in many different groups. Craig Santos Perez is a Chamorro activist, a Latino poet, an indigenous poet, an experimental poet, and so on. Tinfish may be a place where he can be all at once, but the luxury (and responsibility) to move across and through alliances is his. I would be eager to hear what Yu thinks the future of his avant-gardes holds for him and for us. Have we arrived at the place pointed out to us by "The Chinese Italian Notebook," in the era of Obama's own multiple ethnic and political identities? Or have we, as I sometimes fear, simply entered into a new series of divisions, disalliances?