Simone Weil 4

Love is not consolation; it is light. Neither is quite noun, or verb. Noun, Verb, and Period sat in a bus headed for Nanakuli. Noun was such a dull one that Verb fell asleep, missing his stop. The bus driver wasn't inclined to stop where there was no sign, but Period pulled her authority card and put an end to that. Consolation is a lightening, but not yet light. The green flash happens in the morning, too, when sun edges through a hole in the Pacific. Light can be abject, like a comma, or it can be voice, lifting comma like an early moon. My son's eyebrow covers his eyelid like thatch. His eye inhabits the photograph but what it sees is not I nor you nor any thing, but something past the provenance of the lens. We can see an eye, but not its seeing. We can see through light, but we can't see it. Pronoun, only slightly more scintillating than Noun, missed the bus all together. She rests in the empty space of a semi-colon's rustled bed sheets, shifting her gender. My former student is now a “he,” and that sheds some light on who she seemed to me. It is only if the light is empty that it works. 

Simone Weil 3

A time has to be gone through without any reward: reword this, repeat it, rehearse it, recap it, resurrect it, remonstrate with it, oh recidivist it! Do you think while you play soccer, I ask my daughter. Not about the cats, she says. Stein's gerunds are all doing, no dead space. A portrait that moves bears no images. He that is making has no face, even if what he makes is portrait. Go on vacation, but before you do, blank out her face. It will rise again later. There's an app that tells you the best sunsets on earth. But we're on the east side so all we see is the orange of its rising. The dead lemons come later. Take out the word “hard” before “stone.” Some conditions do repeat themselves, even if it's only history running its rails. Trade winds today, running east to west like the sun. Popularity is anachronism; judgment connotes the negative. The mountains are like waves, but fixed, except where clouds Isadora Duncan them. Too quick a start is deadly, too slow a one fails to unfold, like a mobile in a vacuum. Imagine if the Calder had babies, a friend said. When I meditate, I carry my black hand bags into space then drop them from my fingers like seeds. Today I floated in colorless air as they danced around me. When we touched, I opened each bag and pulled out its contents. I kissed them, opening my fingers wide.

Simone Weil series 2

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. Suicide a debt that cannot be paid. The word, as ever, is newer than the act. Eleven people tried to kill themselves in one day in northern Ontario. We're not supposed to call this an epidemic. We're not supposed to utter the word, because it carries its own magic. Like the suicide's backpack, worn to an overpass or lab, a wooded area or lake where the man failed in his attempt but left the husk of his earlier life behind. At my university, students fall from high places; the volition that is jumping is not permitted. It might skew the statistics we fail to keep. Numbers are what matter: student retention, the sense that if we speak we enact the awful pact made between the young man and his car, or by the woman whose last tweet read: “I'm addicted to everything that's bad for me.” I cannot find his obituary, who sat in my office week after week, working. Whom I picked up at the wrong Starbucks to watch our cat. “Would have been” is the most awful verb form. Weeks spent in the “if it happens again, I will” construction of the verb to be. Sentences are not emotional, but paragraphs are. Mine hangs on ramshackle scaffolding, the kind you could either build on or leap from. Stein loved prepositions the best. And they do spin us in so many directions, toward and then away from. The worst days were those that cleared for an hour. A puppet show of happiness at 4 p.m., then the curtains fell and the little carriage left my room to its darkness. That is not the word, but it stands in. The word is verb, motion, antic rolodex of moments bathed in acid. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Simone Weil series 1

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Italics are inversions, except where they're the rule. A woman was singing in MacArthur Park; she slung her arm around a pole as if to resist a strong wind. I noted the men seated on benches beside her, tents on the other side of the park, objects placed on the sidewalk for sale across the street. The lyric is troubled when it speaks for more than one, but that is all we are on this sidewalk, needing not more pronouns but more angels. Or an umbrella. Depending on how it's lit, like her eyes or like the melody Stein says is too seductive not to be avoided. At the airport, the man's shirt read: “Shredding a / tidal wave of / whiskey on a surfboard / made of / don't care.” He kept leaping to his feet to dance, snapping fingers as he threw one arm across his body. He talked to no one who was listening, said he was moving back after 38 years, 15 of them in L.A. I thought he was the mythological homeless man put on a plane to Honolulu. After all, his carry-on was a tent. But he muttered something about Nanakuli. His gray hair was matted, his standard black glasses framed dark crossed eyes. As we landed, his body moved in waves, arm thrown out, the snapping of fingers faster and faster. The flight attendant called him brother.

Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, translated by Gustave Thibon, 1947 / 1952.

Student Deaths at the University of Hawai'i: Part III

On Monday, March 28, I was preparing to travel to Los Angeles for a writer's conference. I got up that morning to open my email, expecting the usual departmental dribs and drabs, notes from friends, the typical morning haul. Instead, the following subject line caught my eye:

Crisis Intervention for Students Affected by a Tragedy

The email below the header came from the mother of a freshman; she wondered how to get help for her son, who needed to process the loss of a friend. On that Saturday night--two weeks ago now--a young woman died at one of the dorms on campus. This was the first I'd heard of it. She found me because google answers searches for "student death at UH" with a link to my op-ed about the need for a student death protocol. She hadn't found a central site at UHM that listed resources to use in such events, probably because there is none. The website needs a major renovation. If you are faculty, to cite just one example, and you enter off the main page through "Faculty & Staff" to look for "support services," you don't find the Counseling Service. Instead, you find the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. That link was put there after I requested that the counseling center be made easier to find.

But enough about the website. A young woman had died tragically, and UHM administration had told us nothing. On Facebook, I found an announcement posted to the Kamehameha Schools alumni site, alongside a sweet selfie: "We have lost a part of our 'ohana. Kalena Medeiros, class of 2015 (Hawai'i Campus) passed away early yesterday morning. Please keep her and her family in your prayers. Thank you and Happy Easter." This was posted on March 27. I sent the note on to our interim Chancellor, along with a request that he say something to the larger community. He responded with a note about family notification and permission, which is the usual way to say no, at least not yet.

The first mother I heard from was not the last. While in Los Angeles, I heard from a second mother, who wondered how to help her son move from his dorm room into a space that was less traumatizing. He'd been sleeping on floors and even took Uber to Mililani (quite a drive) to stay with a friend there. I sent her message straight to the Chancellor. I later heard back that the Vice Chancellor for Students had called the mother and that "she seemed grateful" (the VCS's words). When I wrote Mother #2 a follow up message, she reported that housing had made something happen for her son, and that he'd been moved. Like Mother #1 she seemed too grateful to me for steering her to resources on campus that should be easy to find.

Every time I've engaged in a dialogue with administration (the VCS, the Dean of Students/Head of Student Housing, and the Counseling Center head, who is faculty), I've been told about the way they target students in the dorms after a tragedy. According to them, they do it well, by finding friends of the deceased and by looking up his or her affiliations on campus. They tell students on that floor of the dorm (or whatever other limited area) how to find help. They have resident counselors, as well as RAs. Yesterday, I met with Mother #1 and her son, who is a friend of the deceased woman's boyfriend and his roommate (now moved into another room). The son had never received an email to inform him about where to get counseling. As in many of these stories, the targeting of affected students is so very fine that it misses even those closest to the deceased.

It turns out that the deceased woman was a student at KCC, not at UHM, and that she was living with her boyfriend in the dorm. Like the last two people to fall (or "fall"?) from the dorms, she was not one of our students. Her lack of affiliation with our university is no reason to ignore her death. KCC has made no announcement either, I'm told. And the only reason that the death and serious injuries of the two men who fell this past August became known to us was that the story broke internationally. It was the case of a Good Samaritan dying to try to save someone who intended to kill himself. The Good Samaritan died, and the suicidal man survived. At the time, UHM's communications person, Dan Meizenzahl, made statements, but only in response to the media. They careened from the distant to the compassionate, and he vowed that UHM would do something about the windows in the dorms, making them harder to fall out of. UHM's administration never told the community about counseling, never suggested to faculty that they be aware of a traumatic situation faced by their students, never expressed condolences to the community, never mentioned a memorial.

This past December, I found out about the death of a Botany post-doc, first from Will Caron at The Independent, because someone on campus had told him that police and ambulances were swarming around St. John's Hall. When I contacted the person who told Will, he reported that it had been part of his job to follow up on that report, but that he'd been turned away from the scene and had to spend an entire day putting together puzzle pieces to figure out what had happened. I've found out about other deaths in this byzantine way, by putting stories told me by two people together, or by finding out from my friend who works at Revolution Books and is tied into many communities of students and faculty. There is never a direct path of transmission or reception, only the tortured path that leads to gossip, and to a lot of pain. If we are not allowed to know that someone died, how can we grieve? If we can't grieve, how can we lead our daily lives without traumatic distractions? Not knowing is not a cure for death or for a survivor's pain. To the contrary.

So what to do? I and my Compassion Hui have advocated up and down the UHM administrative ladder. We organized and held a Celebration of Life in February to mark the passing of members of the community over the past year or so. We send out occasional emails to the faculty list. We are a DIY function of the community, filling in for the huge gaps in administrative practice. In the Fall, we hope to hold an "Out of the Darkness Walk" against suicide. But we're hardly going rogue. Consider that other universities, dozens of them, do it better. I enumerated a few in my last piece on institutional compassion for The Independent, but here's a new one from Tufts University.

This letter follows what seems to be standard practice at universities that do this well. Here's an outline.

--An announcement of the death with brief description of the deceased.
--Information about counseling at the dorm and a meeting to support students (that very evening).
--Information about the counseling center.
--The promise to follow up with announcement of a memorial service.
--An expression of condolences to the student's family and friends.
--The names of five prominent people on campus, from the president to the chaplain, who sign the letter.
--Four additional resources for students.
--Resources for faculty.

This message was sent out several hours after the young man died. Just this morning (4/11) a student at UT-Austin sent me a series of emails on a recent murder on their campus. They're gathered here, easily found on their webpage: http://news.utexas.edu/2016/04/05/updates-on-campus-tragedy

I met a few months ago with the interim Chancellor, his new communications person, and an aide. The Chancellor was responsive, vowed to do better. In some ways, the administration has done better lately. After a lab explosion in a building in March, the community got a message that told us where the counseling center is, for example. But his desire to split off his own communications with the community from the "crisis management" end of things, something he laid out at that meeting, simply won't work. If the crisis managers are deeply invested in containing tragedies by informing only those they think are directly involved--and they are deeply invested in this method--then the Chancellor cannot (at least in his own mind) communicate what is otherwise being hidden. Need I add that nearly everyone in UHM administration is an interim these days: we have an interim Chancellor, interim VCS, interim Dean of Students, interim Dean of my college. The positions that are not held by interims are often precarious in other ways: the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, for example, is under investigation and has a vote of no confidence against him from the Faculty Senate. No one's running the show.

In the meantime, it's been two weeks since Kalena Medeiros died on our campus, and we've heard nothing. The email that my Compassion Hui sent out the other day to inform faculty of resources alluded to the recent tragedy and was met with many responses of thanks and confessions of bewilderment. Faculty simply do not know about these resources, even where to seek them out. Purdue Psychology Prof. Heather Servaty-Seib, with whom I spoke yesterday on Google chat, specializes in student bereavement issues. She noted that no one is supposed to die in college. It's a subject no one wants to confront. And yet her campus has a bereavement policy for students. If they are grieving, they must be allowed to hand in late work. Of course she and colleagues and students got the policy not by arguing along humanitarian lines, but by pointing out the bottom line. You can retain students better if you give them space to grieve. Mother #1's son will be leaving UHM at the end of this semester and will attend another school, one that is smaller and more compassionate. It's a real loss to UHM; he's a lively, warm, smart young man. One of my colleagues who taught him in honors composition described him as one of the best students she's ever had. The boyfriend of the deceased woman has dropped out. Doubtless other students are wondering what to do next. Doubtless also, counselors at our center are doing their very best to keep students going. But there are too few of them, and their services are poorly advertised. As Prof. Servaty-Seib pointed out, sometimes counseling is not what's needed after a tragedy. The creation of support groups is. Where are our support groups? She also pointed me to an on-line resource for grieving students, here.

Several weeks ago, thanks again to Google's search engine, I heard from family members of Abel Pellegrino, who died in September, 2014 after he fell from the top of the stairs into the quarry beside the dorms. They are not immediate family, but they were close to Abel, spent a lot of time with him, advised him, loved him. No one in the family, they told me, had been contacted by UHM administration after he died. There had been one call, answered by a 12-year old. Another call was promised, but it never came. A year later, another grieving mother did get a note of condolences from someone in administration, or so I heard from a third party. But this latest mismanaged tragedy tells me there's a lot more to be done, more arguments to be made, more DIY work, more grassroots action on our campus to make it a more compassionate place. The counselor at my son's school just wrote to ask me how UHM could make the transition from high school to college easier, socially and emotionally. I was nearly at a loss for words. When they came, in a flood, they were not encouraging.

After opening that first email of Monday, March 29, and trying to deal with this tragedy on our campus, I opened another. From that message, sent by a friend in the History department who is a member of our group, I learned that an international student who had worked for my small press for a year and who had house and cat sat for us several years ago, someone I was very fond of, someone whose wife I also know, had killed himself in the DC suburbs. He leaves behind his wife and a two year old daughter.

Yesterday, I found an obituary for Kalena Medeiros. I sent a message to our Chancellor that read, "it's not a secret," and he thanked me.




 

 

A future introduction to the work of Maged Zaher

His collected(!) is coming soon, and he invited me to introduce his work.

 

Some Propositions on the Poetry of Maged Zaher

I first heard of Maged Zaher when Leonard Schwartz told me about a poet new to him who made Seattle into a suburb of Cairo. (Or was it the other way around? I don't think so.) Suburbs exist outside urban centers. Zaher is an outsider's outsider: he's a Copt in Muslim Egypt, a brown man in white America, a software engineer and a poet. He is a materialist and a Christian, and he veers between expressions of righteous anger (see “brown man in America” or “Arab from the Middle East”) and pleas for peacefulness (see some versions of “Christian”). He is often the “you” of his own poems: “you move as if you were trained from childhood / to inhabit someone else's country”[.] “You” often stands in for “I” in poems, but it also suggests a relation between the you and the I. In Zaher's poetry, this relationship is often fraught.

The problem of space is also one of time: if “you” are of two places separated by thousands of miles, a language and a culture, the shift between what you remember and what is is dramatic. In these poems, Zaher moves back and forth between Cairo and Seattle, with stops in Atlanta to see his son, Daniel. When he changes places, “Each action is threatened—while it is performed—to be the last of its own kind.” It sometimes seems impossible to represent this wash (whitewash?) between two versions of the poet: “Before even heading to Cairo,” he writes of one trip, “I can imagine myself sitting in Cairo airport, on my way back to the States, and in between, a block of time that I know will capture nothing, because there is nothing to be captured, and I think, trying to find a purpose, an immigrant is just someone who is deeply implicated in the problem of time.” The time of transport (which transcends nothing) exists out of time, or is perhaps the only thing inside of it. The immigrant is neither here nor there; he shuttles constantly within this no-space that is not part of either of his own cities. What had been home, as well as what is, takes on a quality of temporal confusion. If Maged Zaher is a lyrical poet, his “I” is more fractured than most. His English-reading audience can only witness half of this fracture, while the other half remains a phantom.

If Zaher's Seattle is Cairo's suburb, does he also meditate on the passage of time t/here? No doubt, as on the “wariness” of corporate and military power in the USA. Power is wily. Whoever possesses it quickly abandons utopian dreams for hell realms of industrial complexes: military, corporate, even poetic. Seattle sits at the center of Microsoft's power, which is as pervasive as it is often unseen. A space needle looks over all of it, and it's sharp.

But Cairo is also a power center. In a recent poem, published on-line, Zaher writes: “Cairo – then – is a meditation on the passage of time and wariness of state power.” He called the Arab Spring's counter-revolution before most in the West saw it coming. He warned against the Muslim Brotherhood before many of us knew who they were. He knew that out of revolutionary fervor comes a reactionary one.

But time is itself an immigrant now. What is time when it's been digitized? What is time when you share it between computers, and not in person? What is the time of social media? For several years now, Zaher has posted his poems on Facebook, which calls them “status lines”; they answer the corporation's question, “what's on your mind?” His mind is a rhizome or rain globe (Seattle gets little snow): it shakes up into scenes of late capitalism and mysticism, sexual love and persistent loss, the language of the workplace and that of Middle East conflict. There's a consistency to what's shaken, but not to the patterns these elements take when they hit the page. These poems occur on a “timeline” that moves. If you catch them, they sting. If not, they move away without your ever having known they happened. And his poems “happen,” even more than they seem to be written-things. They float on a digital pond, the 1s and 2s of our ever-dividing and divisive world. These poems are whole until they break apart. Then they happen again. Only the process offers the promise of completion. And so he continues to write. The poem is also an immigrant. It's about “this business of being an outsider,” to which Zaher returns obsessively.

The life Zaher describes is one of transactions: like him, we transact business with our credit cards, on-line or off; we transact our poetry via facebook; we transact our love lives on social media. These transactions are exchanges, but they don't necessarily change anything. To the extent that our digital world renders us into passive consumers of music, video, love, we ship ourselves out to the suburbs of a revolution that doesn't happen. When I told him about a poet who wondered why the revolution had not started, Maged said: the real question is why revolution is impossible in the west. No revelations here: just more of the same. A persistent unraveling.

What is the recipe for a Maged Zaher poem? I think it is this: one part political anger; one part wry observation from a cafe window; one part cynical aside; one part blurt of hope; one part lust. His recent poems are short, diaristic. He is the Basho of our age, but without the frogs or the pond. What gets made is a fairy tale about class structure or about a princess who is not one and a prince who lost his magic just moments ago. The moral has to do with an immoral world through which we negotiate our passages as truthfully as we can, even if truth is simply a taking note of.

Desire drives itself apart in his work. There is no such thing as clarity of purpose, unless it is to get a kiss (or a fuck) that lasts a while. Desire comes in the middle of everything else that distracts this poet. One could say that desire is his poetry's center, the one feeling that is not suburban. Distraction is his muse, as befits someone who lives so much on-line. But this is not the distraction that entertains us, so much as a distraction that threatens to hurt us into recognition. Distraction, in other words, not as puddle of confusion but as a knife that cuts through certainty. Distraction as counter-insurgency against the fundamentalisms of our age. Distraction has a bad name, but a carefully witnessed distraction is the mirror in the street that Zaher holds up to his readers.

As poetry publisher and editor, I've received interesting submissions over the years, with cover letters that run the gamut from overly showy CVs to “hey, Susan.” When first I heard from Maged, he wanted to send me a project he'd been working on with Australian poet, Pam Brown. He'd sent Pam poems for consideration by the Australian Jacket. He'd forgotten only one thing: the poems he'd intended to send. I'd done a collaboration with Pam, myself. In our collaboration the seams between our voices were clear. Hers were poems, mine were prose. In Maged's and Pam's poems, I could scarcely tell who wrote what line. They existed in a mind-meld that defied separation, of thoughts or words or images.

How does an Egyptian poet, writing in American English, meld with an Australian poet, writing in her own version of English? Theirs is a global poetry that has nothing to do with shopping malls or image consumption. Global poetism asserts the primacy of the imagination over Kapital. It's capital in its subversions. This is not to say that assertions win the day, but it's to note that not everyone's been silenced, yet.

Many of Zaher's poems address the problem of languages. “Embedded is the knowledge that I lost fluency in Arabic and didn't acquire it in English—So I operate despite the notion of the poet as a master of language—I operate specifically because I am not a master of any language”[.] But literature is not just made of language; it also comes with assumptions. Those in Arabic are different from those in American English: “Growing up in Arabic, I was exposed to a heavy amount of literary criticism that focused on the 'message' of the poems. Forever I am marked by confessional-ism”[.] What this means is unclear to me; does he mean to say that a message inevitably confesses something? Because “confessionalism” is clearly an American preoccupation, nay a poetic movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It also bears the freight of religious meaning. He begins the poem I just quoted by writing, “I grew up with the concept of evil.” A message offers mastery, even if it is only a confession. But without the mastery of language (as he puts it), there can be no fixed message. The message is a migrant, a crosser of boundaries. While Zaher is obsessed with some meaning-searches more than others, his poems never arrive. They are what happens in the terminals between countries and languages. They live outside of meaning, or as Ashbery puts it, “on the outside looking out.” That does not mean that nothing means, however.

He writes that he transferred the notion of Satan onto capitalism. If there is a character in Zaher's poems, other than the poet and his constantly shifting beloved (who never quite materializes into a person), it is Karl Marx. The full extent of his work is haunted by the promise of Marxist theory, and the impossibility of its taking root in the West. In one of the most consistent narratives among his poems, Zaher (with Pam Brown) writes: “Marx was here for breakfast / he said good things about the Proletariat, / ate scantily, according to his needs, / stacked the dishwasher, according to his ability . . . / mumbling things like: 'fuck Castro' / and 'Rosa rocks'” The “we” in the poem, perhaps as close to a collective as Zaher comes, ignores Marx until he leaves. Then, we “sad commodities” run after him, begging for him to pray for us. But the poem ends badly, as Engels appears on Oprah and offers up Das Capital as a movie, coming soon. Like any of the revolutions Zaher inhabits or imagines, this one ends badly, with the appropriation of its fervor toward another—corrupted—end. Arab Spring ended with the Muslim Brotherhood's counter-revolution, just as any thought of revolution in this country ends on Oprah's show. If she's not giving away cars, she might as well give away copies of Marx's masterpiece.

Maged and I were in Denver several years ago to give a poetry reading at Counterpoint Press's gallery space; he read from Tinfish Press's The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me. Margo Berdeshevsky, Ya-Wen Ho, Maged, and I went to see the Colorado Rockies play at Coors Field. After our bags were searched at the entrance, Maged was ushered off to the side, where an older white man frisked him. I proclaimed loudly, “he's a famous American poet!” and Maged wryly responded, “don't make it worse, Susan.” We lingered over the murals in the stadium, which record history from its origins to the taking of the west from native Americans by the heroic settlers. It's their descendants who inhabit the stadium from time to time. The narrative was totalitarian, the style Soviet realist. The stories were deeply racist.

Maged calls out racism in poetry, racism in the police, racism in our language. But he also calls himself out, often. His poems are objective, like Basho's, but they are also confessional, deep and self-lacerating and ethical. Maged's soul is often in danger, but his wit is not. He possesses one of the largest laughs I know.

Later on the trip to Denver, we went to the Terrorism Museum in Denver, lodged next to the wonderful art museum. Among its features are rooms where you can experience a terrorist attack (there are loud booms and the room shakes violently). There are also beams from the World Trade Center at the front, and a snack shop at the end. I forget what food they served. The museum is called “The Center for Empowered Learning and Living,” even if it seems devoted—like so much of American culture—more to death than to living. The Economist reviewed the museum and concluded: “If this sounds like an expensive, museum-size example of America's paranoia, that's because it is.”

What place is more paranoid in the American experience than the suburbs? Havens for white flight, they mushroomed outside the real or perceived violence of the inner cities after the Second World War and during the 1960s. In later years, many of them were “gated.” I remember seeing a film about Bible salesmen in the South who wandered a suburb of miniature castle-houses, each surrounded by a moat. I also remember that there were three suicides within a block of my parents' house in an upscale suburb of Washington, DC. The suburbs may have offered an escape from communal violence, but not from the violence we do to ourselves. Who needs a museum to simulate terror, when it resides so comfortably at home?

If Seattle is a suburb of Cairo, it is also a suburb of the American malaise. Which means that it lies directly at its heart. And, while it's part of the sleepy, rainy Northwest, real violence has been directed against the ravages of capitalism. 1999's WTO protests left many downtown windows shattered and some events cancelled; there were further disruptions on May Day, 2012. It was to revolutions what a single game is to a baseball season, and just as easily forgotten. When I visited Seattle in September, 2015, I saw the heart of downtown being transformed by Amazon. Like Honolulu, Seattle is full of people who live on the street, as well as people who live in comfort high above those streets. Zaher writes with uncharacteristic tongue-in-cheekiness about American consumerism:

this is the life come on

an abundance of optimism

we will do it and how bring it on

the wonderful world

the total fucking brilliant world

and oh how lovely is everyone

the car seat is lovely the child is lovely

and so on. Out of an abundance of optimism and the loveliness of everyone comes the phrase, “bring it on,” which emerged most famously from the lips of Pres. George W. Bush. I find a YouTube of him saying, with characteristic eloquence, in July 2003: "There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” American optimism falls into a blunt equation between happiness and force. We'll be happy if we have enough firepower. If we're not happy, we need more. We go to eat with our guns strapped on. It's the death drive, but it makes us grin. And so the American proverb falls into itself, as Zaher ends the poem with a quick shift to the opposing position (he tends never to synthesize, only split):

we're making a difference from the beautiful car

passing by an infinite number of lovers

an infinite number of broken hearted lovers

and stacks of clothes they used to wear

cast aside in impulsive aspiration

of the liberty that promises independence

it's entirely fucking brilliant

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” or what the Declaration of Independence mandated as the American creed, leads to thrown away lovers and dispensable aspirations. The language of this poem is steeped in the Declaration's undoing. We've taken the car, and thrown away our lives with the lovely, seat-belted baby and the bathwater.

I was in Seattle last September to give a reading with Norman Fischer that was organized by Maged. Maged was in Cairo, where his mother was in her last days. He trans-acts his life between continents and languages. He grieves on both sides of his lives. But I don't want to paint Zaher solely as a poet of conflict and despair. He is a love poet (or a sex poet). His poems often express unrequited love, but he addresses them to Seattle, to Cairo, to women, to other poets, to the vernacular sounds of English (the language most of us know him in). His texts may be brief, but they ping a note of delight on our devices. We read them, only to await the next. He doesn't use the typical language of the love poem, preferring software and capitalism to roses and hearts, but there's something alluring about these poems. “Mohamed tells me that I am obsessed / with language and that he likes my poems / best when I am falling in or out of love,” he writes. In one of the most upbeat of his love poems, one I adore for its wit and open vulnerability, he writes:

At 6:00 a.m.

With you in my arms

I could believe in God

I will even pray

And send thank you notes

To all the angels

We are half water

Half advice columnists

And the rest is love

I mean you should believe

In few maps

As our bodies traverse each other's

But usually, as in the section, “Simple Colonial Encounters,” the power plays of the world infiltrate his feelings. “let us chat freely / but please remember that all these pronouns / have no life in themselves / unless you bring them with your own imagination / well the truth is, I was too drunk to unhook her bra / but we fucked anyway”[.] The language itself (in love, there is little but pronoun) is dead, unless we bring our imagination to them. Which might be a lovely thing, except for the way the poem ends, more in brute realism than in imaginative (love)making.

To William Carlos Williams's adage that it's difficult to get the news from poems, Zaher responds: “Poetry is a ghost / That erases the good news.” But, if poetry is a ghost, “these words can be taken seriously.” The poem, according to Maged, is a division of labor—not a unifying force. But he keeps trying, over and again, on paper and on the internet, to disprove his own adage: “Then God—on a bad day—invented the poets.” It was not a bad day when Maged Zaher emerged as an English-language poet. We live in a serious time, and would do well to take his words seriously as they fill our “news feeds.” Join me in clicking “like.” Read on!

Questions for the new year

Happy new year to any of you who still find this place--

I'm preparing to teach a graduate workshop in Poetry as Prose/Prose as Poetry, as well as a single author course for upper level undergrads on Gertrude Stein. So I'm writing lists of questions for myself and others.

First, the poetry workshop. Here's a description of it: http://english.hawaii.edu/course/grad-writing-workshop-poetry-2/

and here are the questions, so far. I'm not a fan of workshops, because they are so difficult to move past the point of pressure points, sensitivities, and opinions. So here I'm emphasizing reading that is done without judgment.

 

Poetry as Prose/Prose as Poetry

Spring, 2016

QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR OWN WORK AND OTHERS'

What do we write (about)?

For whom do we write?

Describe what you or another has written.

Describe it as carefully and precisely as you can, avoiding judgment.

Again, without judgment, analyze the piece you have just described.

What are the pieces and parts of the mechanism, and how do they work?

Thinking as a writing mechanic, which of these pieces works best?

Which piece might require some re-visioning?

Where are the issues? In the chassis, the axle, the engine, or the wheels?

What tools will the writer need to do his or her work?

What is the effect of the piece on you? (Again, without judgment.)

What part of your body does the piece touch, or fail to touch?

How does the writer get to that part of your body/mind?

Find the precise words and syntax that makes it happen.

If you remain untouched, suggest some replacement parts from your toolkit.

What forms do you see within the relative formlessness of the prose poem?

Consider that a mode of seeing can be expressed in a sentence, as well as in a genre.

(Write a sentence that's a nature poem, a love poem, a documentary poem.)

What work are these forms doing?

Take a couple sentences and translate them into other forms (love into car mechanics, documentary into lyrical, haiku into letter and so forth). Consider the effects. Change them back.

Take something out.

Add something in.

Consider the writer's use of pronouns. Switch some. Switch them back.

Consider the writer's use of verbs. Change modes. Active to passive, passive to past tense, past tense to subjunctive (what's left of it).

Consider the writer's meaning. If you are disturbed, consider why you feel disturbed (without judgment).

If you are moved, consider why (without judgment).

Say something critical, without judgment.

Say something positive, without judgment.

The Gertrude Stein course is full, over-full. I doubt many of the students know what they're in for. But, as she's an excellent partner in drawing out our assumptions (and reactions), my questions about her work so far center on them. The description of the course can be found here: http://english.hawaii.edu/course/single-author/

QUESTIONS INSPIRED BY THE WORK OF GERTRUDE STEIN

What do we write (about) and how do we write (about it)?

How do we tell stories?

What is a story?

How do we write poems?

What are poems (for)?

How do we use words apart from their meanings?

How do we find meaning in that?

What connections exist between writing and painting, music?

What is the function of repetition in language?

What is punctuation and why does it exist?

What happens if small words (the, it) assume a larger role in our writing?

How do we read?

When do we stop reading, and why?

What is the relationship between life and art?

What is the relationship between a writer's biography and her work?