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byshwetaupadhyay · 7 years

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BEYOND LYRIC SHAME: BEN LERNER ON CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MAGGIE NELSON TWO FRESH INVESTIGATIONS OF THE PROSE POEM

Language poetry—and to my mind the best Language poetry was written in prose—was a machine that ran on difficulty. Reading a prose poem deploying what Ron Silliman called “the new sentence” was intended to be an exercise in frustration: the reader attempts to combine the sentences—which are grammatical—into meaningful paragraphs. The sentences are vague enough (“Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity”) that a logical relation between sentences will always almost seem possible. But the reader discovers as she goes that many successive sentences cannot be assimilated to a coherent paragraph, that paragraphs are organized arbitrarily (“quantitatively,” as opposed to around an idea), that no stable voice unifies the text, that her “will to integration”—her desire to produce higher orders of meaning that lead away from the words on the page into the realm of the signified (“a dematerializing motion”)—is repeatedly defeated.

The solicitation and then tactical frustration of the reader’s will to linguistic integration had an explicitly political object: it was advanced as a kind of deprogramming of bourgeois readerly assumptions. Such difficult prose would teach us that meaning is actively produced, never naturally given; that language is manipulable material, not a transparent window onto reality; that the “speaker” is a unifying fiction more than a stable subject; and so on. These deconstructive strategies were conceived not only as a critique of other writers—for example, lyric, “confessional” poets with their privileging of subjective experience and inwardness; mainstream novelists with their “optical realism”—but as an attack on existing social and political orders that depended upon the smooth functioning of dominant linguistic conventions.

Many of us learned something from the Language poets’ taking up of a constructivist vision of the self and its literature: their insistence on language as material, their combination of Russian formalism and various strains of French theory into a compelling reading of experimental modernism. (And many of us learned to appreciate certain texts associated with Language poetry in terms other than and often opposed to those provided by essays like Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” with its anti-expressive and anti-aesthetic bent). But who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?

Indeed, for many ambitious contemporary writers, disjunction has lost any obvious left political valence. Does the language of advertising and politicians, for instance, really depend on seamless integration? Transcripts of speeches by Bush or Palin or Trump would have been at home in In the American Tree. When aggressive ungrammaticality and non sequitur are fundamental to mainstream capitalist media (and to the rhetoric of an ascendant radical right), the new sentence appears more mimetic than defamiliarizing. In this context, “difficulty” as a valorized attribute of a textual strategy gives way to the difficulty of recovering the capacity for some mode of communication, of intersubjectivity, in light of the insistence of Language poets (and others) on the social constructedness of self and the irreducible conventional representation.

Language poetry’s notion of textual difficulty as a weapon in class warfare hasn’t aged well, but the force of its critique of what is typically referred to as “the lyric I” has endured in what Gillian White has recently called a diffuse and lingering “lyric shame”—a sense, now often uncritically assumed, that modes of writing and reading identified as lyric are embarrassingly egotistical and politically backward. White’s work seeks, among other things, to explore how “the ‘lyric’ tradition against which an avant-garde anti-lyricism has posited itself . . . never existed in the first place” and to reevaluate poems and poets often dismissed cursorily as instances of a bad lyric expressivity. She also seeks to refocus our attention on lyric as a reading practice, as a way of “projecting subjectivity onto poems,” emphasizing how debates about the status of lyric poetry are in fact organized around a “missing lyric object”: an ideal—that is, unreal—poem posited by the readerly assumptions of both defenders and detractors of lyric confessionalism.

“Who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?”

It’s against the backdrop that I’m describing that I read important early 21st-century works by poets such as Juliana Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs), Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and, very recently, Citizen: An American Lyric), and Maggie Nelson (Bluets). I mean that these very different writers have difficulty with the kind of difficulty celebrated by Language poets in particular and the historical avant-garde in general. Their books are purposefully accessible works that nevertheless seek to acknowledge the status of language as medium and the self as socially enmeshed. I read Rankine and Nelson’s works of prose poetry in particular as occupying the space where the no-longer-new sentence was; they are instances of a consciously post-avant-garde writing that refuses—without in any sense being simple—to advance formal difficulty as a mode of resistance, revolution, or pedagogy. I will also try to suggest how they operate knowingly within—but without succumbing to—a post–Language poetry environment of lyric shame or at the very least suspicion.

I call Rankine and Nelson’s books works of “prose poetry,” and they are certainly often taken up as such, but their generic status is by no means settled. Both writers—as with many Language poets—invite us to read prose as a form of poetry even as they trouble such distinctions. Rankine’s books are indexed as “Essay/Poetry” and Bluets is indexed as “Essay/Literature.” Bluets is published, however, by Wave Books, a publisher devoted entirely to poetry. Rankine’s two recent books are both subtitled “An American Lyric,” begging the question of how a generic marker traditionally understood as denoting short, musical, and expressive verse can be transposed into long, often tonally flat books written largely in prose. On an obvious but important level, I think the deployment of the sentence and paragraph under the sign of poetry, the book-length nature of the works in question, and the acknowledgment of the lyric as a problem (and central problematic) help situate these works in relation to the new sentence, even if that’s by no means the only way to read them.

Both Bluets and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely open with a mixture of detachment and emotional intensity that simultaneously evokes and complicates the status of the “lyric I.” In the first numbered paragraph of Bluets, quoted above, a language of impersonal philosophical skepticism—the “suppose,” the Tractatus-like numbering, the subjunctive—interacts with an emotional vocabulary and experiential detail. The italics also introduce the possibility of multiple voices, or at least two distinct temporalities of writing, undermining the assumption of univocality and spokenness conventionally associated with the lyric. “As though it were a confession”; “it became somehow personal”: two terms associated with lyric and its shame are both “spoken” and qualified at the outset of the book—a book that will go on to be powerfully confessional and personal indeed. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely opens with a related if distinct method of lyric evocation and complication, flatly describing what we might call the missing object of elegy:

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? We asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Throughout Don’t Let Me Lonely the traditional lyric attributes of emotional immediacy and intensity are replaced with the problem of a kind of contemporary anesthesia—the repression of the reality of death, the leveling of tragedy into another kind of infotainment in a culture of spectacle, the mediation of experience by technologies ranging from television to pharmaceuticals. The problem of the deadening of feeling—the negative image of traditional lyric content—finds its formal correlative in a flat prose in which verse can appear only in citation or paratext, for example, quotations from Celan embedded in the prose, a Dickinson poem reproduced in the notes. Instead of imagining difficult prose as a technology for deconstructing the self, a highly linear and plainspoken account of the problem of the “I” is offered as Rankine attempts to work her way out of social despair: “If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is ‘I’ even me or am ‘I’ a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?”

Rankine forgoes difficulty as a strategy for disrupting subjectivity in order to acknowledge the difficulty of calibrating a responsible self socially. We could say that the anti-lyricism of Language poetry is gestured toward in the banishment of the traditional trappings of the lyric—verse itself, musicality, intense personal expression (what Rankine often confesses is a sense of inward emptiness)—but here these lyric strategies are less willfully rejected than made to feel unavailable. And the felt unavailability of the lyric is a result of Rankine’s explicit invitation to read her markedly nonlyric materials (essayistic and often flat prose) as lyric—to invite us to think of lyric as a reading practice as much as a writing practice in which the ostensibly “shameful” attributes of the mode (e.g., an egotistical, asocial inwardness) are replaced by a collaborative effort on the part of reader and writer to overcome “loneliness.”

Bluets explores many of these concerns with related if ultimately distinct means:

70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Nelson’s “blue bower” evokes not only the actual bird, renowned for how the males construct and decorate “bowers” to attract mates, but also the traditional association of lyric with a metaphorics of birds and birdsong. It further evokes the Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a shamelessly lyric poet if there ever was one) painting of that name, as well as his poem with the received title “The Song of the Bower.” To build a “blue bower” out of “propositions” is to cross a lyric and anti-lyric project in the space of prose, implicating and complicating both. It is hard to find dignity in the privacy of the aestheticized bower—indeed, one might be ashamed of such inwardness—and one of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.

The color blue functions as the organizing metaphor for both the possibility of intersubjectivity (“15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.”) and its limits (“105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no ‘color thermometers.’ How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver.”). Nelson’s accumulating “propositions” do not integrate into a “bower,” but the relation between sentences and sections has little in common with new-sentence disjunction. As in Rankine’s prose poetry, difficulty here is not deployed as a political/poetical tactic irrupting within the norms of prose; instead, the difficulty of finding a defensible, dignified ground for intersubjectivity is narrated explicitly.

“One of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.”

The shift from the tactical deconstruction of ostensibly natural narrative or lyric unities to the effort to reconstruct them with a difference is legible in part because Bluets foregrounds its relation to avant-garde prose poetry. Nelson’s use of Wittgenstein as muse and model, for instance, invites us to position her work relative to new sentence experiments. Silliman not only cited the Philosophical Investigations in “The New Sentence” as an important precedent, but Silliman’s own The Chinese Notebook models the tone and structure of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing. More generally, the work of Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) and others has made clear how the philosopher’s inquiries into language as a form of social practice—and his own peculiar linguistic operations—have been central to scores of experimental (“difficult”) writers. If Nelson weren’t also the author of volumes of verse, and if Wave weren’t the publisher of Bluets, my experience of context and thus text would be different: those facts function as a quieter version of Rankine’s subtitle, inviting—or at the very least enabling—us to think of poetry as a reading practice as much as a writing practice, and to experience verse techniques as withheld or unavailable in Bluets instead of as merely forgone or forsworn.

As in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, in Bluets, actual verse is exiled to the space of citation: William Carlos Williams, Lorine Neideker, and Lord Byron, among many others, are quoted; line breaks are replaced with slashes. Indeed, Nelson doesn’t have much faith in the effects of actual poems: “12. And please don’t talk to me about ‘things as they are’ being changed upon any ‘blue guitar.’ What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.” Or: “For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all” (proposition 183). And yet, the relegation of verse to the virtual space of citation lends it a certain power, displaying it while also insisting that it’s nearly out of reach. This allows Nelson’s prose to be haunted by the abstract possibility of a poetry it can’t actualize, somewhat like the Mallarméan fantasy she at one point describes: “For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.” Moreover, Bluets—taking its cue (and lifting many of its locutions) from Wittgenstein’s attacks on Goethe’s Theory of Colors—often refers to outmoded regimes of knowledge or technologies (e.g., the 18th-century “cyanometer,” which sought to measure the blue of the sky). One begins to wonder if verse—lyric poetry in particular—is another set of defunct measures, outmoded conventions for communicating experience.

Perhaps there is a sense for Nelson (and Rankine) in which poetry isn’t difficult—it’s impossible. There is faith neither in poetry’s power of imaginative redescription (the blue guitar) nor in its practical effects as a technology of intervening in history (“I do not think that writing changes very much”). The subject isn’t a dominant bourgeois fiction of inwardness and univocality in need of deconstruction via new sentence difficulty but an avowedly social and linguistic entity deployed over time in the space of writing; expression itself must be constructed, and that process is narrated clearly in a prose that, when read as poetry, makes actual verse present as a loss. Although I believe these authors use the prose poem and the felt absence of verse in fresh and specific ways, I am not suggesting that the logic I’m describing is exactly new. Stephen Fredman and others have suggested that the prose poem arises as a form during periods in which there is a crisis of confidence in verse strategies, and the notion of the lyric being felt as a loss as it becomes prose is at least as old as Walter Benjamin. Here my limited goal is to indicate a few specific ways the new sentence valorization of difficulty can become a frame for a specific kind of accessibility for two important contemporary poets who write primarily in prose.

One can’t pretend to contextualize these books without stating explicitly that part of the contemporary dissatisfaction with attacks on narrative and voice as political strategies is that they can serve to mask what is essentially a white male universalism. The rejection of linguistic integration and anti-expressionist attacks on the lyric subject have recently been described by Cathy Park Hong as a symptom of the avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness,”

its specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.

In a related vein, Nelson’s own work as a critic has been attuned to how “the male Language writers’ occasionally monomaniacal focus on warring economic systems” was both challenged and expanded by women writers inside and outside of the Language movement itself. In ways I haven’t had the space to explore here, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Bluets are engaged with demonstrating how the uncritical acceptance of voice and narrative conventions as well as their “wholesale” disavowal by certain avant-garde writers can preserve racist and sexist ideologies. This is by now an old difficulty, echoing the even older modernism/realism debate—how the emancipatory potential of poststructuralist strategies quickly cools into a conservatism (or worse) like the one Cathy Park Hong describes. Out of this abiding difficulty more complex, accessible prose poetry is likely to arise. How might verse return? And when and why?

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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There is no “at first glance” at Kwaku Osei’s work. All encompassing, multi-perspective, little distinction between background and foreground, his pieces are complicated. We should take time to walk through many, many doorways. The landscape in which he layers images seem to locate unfixed narratives, placing them in conversation with one another, and having them fluidly bombard until what we have is matter to take and use as we can, as we will.

Using music and cultural iconography, symbolism and naming, the following three works speak to the afrofuturist movement. Fragments and ideas widely associated with Americana are reimagined from a “dark” perspective — or what some might say, a non-Western origin — as Osei tackles language, both in his titles and on the canvas, and nods toward these narratives. His work recognizes, then turns away from our convenient assumptions. Looking at Osei’s work, I am reminded of a stanza from Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars”:

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip — When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere, Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones At whatever are their moons. They live wondering If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know, And the great black distance they — we — flicker in.

It’s this “bursting at the seams with energy” that happens all around us, in ways we don’t “feel / nor see” but are ever present, that permeates Osei’s work. It seems through his imagination, and the viewer’s ability to place “solid feet down on planets everywhere,” we’re given a rare opportunity to be restless, to wonder and wander, and travel “the great black distance” of the dark through these works.

— Aricka Foreman, Enumerate Editor

Jungle Juice (2014) 22 x 30 in., mixed media

Jungle Juice, Osei’s first piece begins from the floor, a foreground red and lush, as carpet to an exclusive world. What seems stairs and bridges lead to other fixed realms. At the lower-center of the piece, a four point star, a bone, serve as either marker or mile post. The audience is unable to perceive the distance from point A to point 2, the axis of access constantly shifting. Other worlds loom in the background: planets, moons, a tribal masked figure — perhaps ancestor — overlooking the journey. Most prominent is the prism that, rather than taking light and reflecting (as a Pink Floyd album cover might suggest), holds a number of worlds that have no time origin. Composition and texture, blurred boundaries and unfolding lines, stacked and repetitive shapes, a peak of a fish-headed figure; this layering unsettles and confronts. The title complicates matters in a critical way, where there is an implied colloquially understanding of “jungle juice” as a substance for group consumption. The coded connotation leaves the audience to question whether they are consuming or viewing consumption taking place.

Dark Pop of The Big Bang Theory (2014) 60 x 48 in., mixed media

Dark Pop of The Big Bang Theory positions at the center of a stark white canvas. An allusion to the cosmological theory of creation and evolution, there is no particular doorway. The chaos contained inside a space with margins that make it impossible to tell which direction we’re moving: creating or evolving. Brush strokes of black “spilled” just outside visual boundary within reach of the other. Osei explains that the multicolored, garment-wearing angel of death is “an allusion to Damien Hirst’s ‘Skull’ and [the] elevator pitch where he always refers to black as being a symbol of death.” An amalgam of a wolf and eastern dragon “similar to The Neverending Story’s, The Nothing,” he says, smiles and directly looks at the viewer from inside. These figures, too, seem to gear us toward a bifurcated tradition of myth and the speculative: celestial bodies, again, the sun, and moon; an ankh and adinkra symbol, small and seemingly on the periphery. The pieces becomes decidedly more layered, just right of the center, where we see more patterns, colors. Again, great attention is paid to organizing the composition in a loose way that does not negate the necessary chaos.

Voodoo Child (2014) 18 x 24 in., mixed media

Voodoo Child, may seem difficult to separate from Jimi Hendrix’s classic song — it’s full title, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” — and the reclamation inherent. If in the song, Hendrix created a world where he chopped mountains and forged shattered lands, then Osei’s work is the epitome of “all black everything.” Canvas black. Background, black. Bold and bright colors used to carve out figurations — out of blackness. The piece itself becomes figured: a mouth in the upper quadrant, the sleeping face nestled in the center, two open-mouthed wolf jaws or one jaw caught mid-turn. Osei’s powerful technical identifications of patterns, constructions and texture aids in movement. Here, black doesn’t solely absorb but produces color, creates dimension and depth.

And still, there are stars, in the vast black, of the “old and new.” Kwaku Osei’s series gives us reason to pause. And shudder.

Kwaku Osei was raised in the Philadelphia area. He received his BA at Temple University and is currently attending MICA’s s

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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I’VE BEEN MAKING ANIMATIONS since 2002, when I received a grant to study with a team of DDR-era animators in Berlin. There, I learned how to animate in 35 mm, and I have stayed faithful to this traditional technique, even as I’ve watched the medium obsolesce. I decided to work with this “minor” form because of its roots in social critique. I find within its anarchic and satirical subtext a suitable grammar to share my vision.

Around 2008, I decided to stop making animations—the process was too obsessive, too troubling—in order to concentrate on themes of collectivity through performance, sculpture, and film. When I returned to France from New York in 2012, I began to recognize how little France has processed its collective traumatic history, especially when it comes to its colonial past. My father served in the Algerian war and, like many in his generation, he was destroyed by it. At one point during the war, he got typhoid and ended up suffering from hallucinations in a remote hospital. I began to think about inventing machinery to rehearse the hallucinating mind—an organic machine, influenced both by Francis Picabia’s erotic machines and by the imagery of colonized nature, a machine simultaneously repairing and destroying itself. The cerebral freedom of hallucinations, it occurred to me, is a mirage, as deceptive as military deployment in the service of an imperial agenda.

The drawings in this show were made while I was in Haiti early this year. As it happened, I came down with tropical fever. Experiencing my own hallucinations while I was sick finally readied me to return to animation. After shooting all the drawings (about eight hundred, a number that is actually quite low for animations), I filmed them while submerging them in water, so that the images expanded and eventually dissolved. This secondary process both destroys the mirage of the animation and sets the images free. The animated film that resulted from this process is titled In the Soldier’s Head, 2015, and it is a meditation on directing cerebral fluids through orgasmic forms. The title of this New York show, “Paysage Fautif”—a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s semen on a piece of black satin—had been in my head for a while, but its significance was certainly reformulated by the animation.

Beyond these erotics, it was clear to me that I wanted to talk about mental disruption as a figure for the collective experience of colonization, and that I wanted to carry this out through the disruption of the animation itself. In short, my aim was to make a non-animation, something that interrupted the continuous cycle of images through a secondary process. The final moments of the animation return to the beginning of civilization, or the beginning of animation, in the cave, but the image is fleeting, ungraspable. After all, you can’t really get a hold of a mind in crisis.

#christine rebet

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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THE NEW WORLD

Let’s go back to when we were still undiscovered. To when losing meant losing and we lost everything. Our names, the candle of our bodies. Small tokens of light clipping in and out of us like bullet holes. Our skin a thing for fire. Let’s rub the moon between thumb and forefinger until we disappear. There are galaxies of hurt and in each of them we become masters. We crawl up the throat of the sky like dying animals and beg heaven to let us in. We don’t believe in anything worth saving. The fields flashing in the quiet distance, the stars raked from the chest of the night like glowing leaves. In a way we are as still as the day we were born. A pair of yellow eyes floating in a tree, the idea of flight so close we stretch back an arrow until we are the arrow.

#Philip Schaefer’s collaborative chapbook Smoke Tones is forthcoming from Phantom Limb (2015) and his poems are out or forthcoming in Forklif

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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three poems

CHAMPION after Wislawa Szymborska

I champion silver.

I champion ferocious dunks.

I champion pumpkin everything.

I champion divinity unadvertised.

I champion terror over numb.

I champion all of the donuts over some of the donuts.

I champion &.

I champion Portland & its grieving weather.

I champion my sister slutting it up in a slutty dress over her modestly emptying her lust into the toilet.

I champion Brent’s Deli to Jerry’s Deli & if you don’t, I champion a swift education.

I hope to champion survival over pretending to be alive.

I champion Yiddish.

I champion more work.

I champion Shakespeare disrespected & vibrating over Shakespeare awed about & still.

I champion the everything of doing nothing.

I champion a God that takes you up into arms over a God that asks you to take up arms.

I champion the ocean at night & a blanket over my shoulders & hot black coffee & not having to try to feel holy.

I champion my anger at my mother over my anger at my father.

I champion a warm bed in a cold room.

I champion listening over politics.

I champion sex over whatever I’m doing right now.

I champion haunted windmills.

I champion the image of a beast swinging through the trees over the image of my father staring straight ahead in a chair.

I champion open.

I champion Johanna, those freckles just left of the center of her neck.

I champion saying when it rains it whores when my sister tells me she’s courting three men over saying nothing on the floor of her closet as she tries to court whatever gives her power to continue.

I champion continuing.

I champion continuing over everything else.

TWO TOURS

Here is my left breast, hanging lower than the right. Here is my stomach, tumbling over the belt. Here is the lazy-eyed bison. Here is the trench-war. Here are the folds when I sit, the velvet accordion. Here are the blemishes: old pimples, ingrown hairs. Here is the sweat slick beneath handfuls of dying. Here are the complaining ribs, the dissenting spine. Here is the revolution, the blood marching with picket signs, slower, slower, slower every year. Here are the sugar tigers prowling the veins. Here is the belly-button blood, sloughing off from some unnameable source. Here are the armies of hair, the skeleton of fire. Here is the war against sex. Here are the howling knees. Here is the lower back, a tangle of wires, a lion eating the inside of a piano. Here is a field where lions hunt pianos. Here is the wreckage, the spoil. Here is the damage, the vandalism. Here is where the fucking comes to die. Here is where I am the nighttime, crushing the beautiful trees.

II.

Here is a sky with two pink moons in it. Here is an avalanche of elegant snow. Here is the unkilled bull in the grass. Here is the good crop. Here is a music to dance to & dance with. Here are galaxies of shadow-purple stars. Here is the bright water of astonished living. Here is a mighty, mighty lifting. Here is a parade of opera giants. Here are clouds & clouds of monarchs. Here is the heart’s asking. Here are the hallelujah meadows, the skinny, black trees. Here is the flesh, bared against war. Here are the praising knees. Here is the lower back, a piano sitting down at a piano. Here is a ballroom where pianos play pianos for lions. Here is the rebuild, the blossom. Here is the repair, the high art. Here is where the fucking comes. Here is where I am the sun.

ST. VINCENT LIVE AT THE WILTERN for, after Annie Clark

I. THE DANCE

& anyway, isn’t this what the body was made for? In each photograph she is a dandelion at the birth of a tornado, granting heaven its every furious wish. To see her move - the stuttering ballet, machine gun scripture inked into the muscles of her legs, is to know the body, at last, as not a conduit for prayer, but prayer itself. What grace, to answer in such blatant terms the beaming demands of wildness. To make a dance even of static. To move just as she is asked to move by the divine engines of her own strangeness. Such precise displays of frenzied exultation. She turns & turns & the room turns with her, she opens her arms & gives birth to a fleet of adoring psychotics. Most crucial is the praising of praise & for this, what instrument other than the body? The roof bends, the air shatters, & chandeliers lean toward their mother.

II. HER GUITAR SPEAKS

My Lover? She is a broken silence. She is a grandfather clock full of rattlesnakes. She shakes her hair & my heart unravels. I am the Word-touched congregation in the church of her fingers. All night long I catch the Ghost. My Lover is a field of upside down chandeliers. Her every bone a champagne sword. She spins me like a bride at a wedding. I breathe fire, heaven, ciphered moths. Touch me, Lover, touch me! I am a sex organ trembling under all the tongues of light. I speak every language at once, who cannot understand what I am saying? I say rise & I say rise. I say dazzle, I say boogie. I say untether the wendigos. Unhitch the nightmares. My Lover, she is the finest surgeon, doling out transplants of Northern Lights & rainbows. I am a scalpel edged with a mountain range. I, the opening, I, the letting, book of earthquakes, book of black lightning, drunken angel roughing up the Hell inside the sinners. Come sinners. Come writhing to my Lover’s song. Hurl every rigid jury from your hair. Come bliss. Come rapture. Come with all your unsubdued wonder & shake & shake & shake.

III. THE AUTHOR REASONS WITH ANNIE CLARK’S HAIR

Who the hell do you think you are, Annie Clark’s hair? All ecstatic anemone, ghost vein

cluster, champagne flute shattering on the floor in slow motion. I’m just out here trying to mind my fat, fuckless business

& here you come, lusting up the whole goddamn joint. What am I supposed to do now, Annie Clark’s hair? Pretend I don’t

know you’re out there, some immaculate planet of albino seaweed? Remember that one time

I was satisfied being what I was - a living essay on the stubborn bravery of ugliness, the thick border

between myself & gladness, before you expounded upon all the complexities of pleasure & I dreamt myself a deer

leaping through birch? What have you not redefined? What wraiths have you not broomed from our histories? I’ll tell you

this much: holy fuck. & I mean it in the most literal way. You shiver & angels get busy with each other. Grip wings & bare throats to the sky’s strange

mercy. Flaming swords fall in every district. This is all your fault. These sublime, sublime deaths. At our autopsies they say Good

God, there’s nothing in here but feathers.

IV. TONIGHT’S SERMON

Smoke Gospel / Party Gospel / Ghost-Map Gospel / Boot Gospel / Rhinoceros at the Reception Gospel / Diamond Blood Gospel / Angel Knife Gospel / Wolves Operating the Lighthouse Gospel / Digital Gospel / Hell-Coffee Gospel / Laughing with a Mouth of Pearls Gospel / Regretless Gospel / Rainbow Birth Gospel / Apocalypse Gospel / Astonishment Gospel / Drunk as Wild Fuck Alligator Gospel / Mirror Gospel / Bullet Cake Gospel / Gladness Gospel / Save Me Gospel / Thunder in the Roses Gospel / Fruit Marrow Gospel / Hysterical Gospel / Mountain of Burning Cell Phones Gospel / Northern Lights Waltzing in Your Belly Gospel / Tongue Gospel / Finger Gospel / Suck Gospel / Open Gospel / Marry Me Gospel / Fuck Me Gospel / The Body Gospel / The Body Gospel / Unapologize for Everything Gospel

V. THE DANCE PART TWO

Oh Annie, it has been so fucking long. My body, an act against joy. How many years will I go without touch, ungoverned celebration, an unmooring from the brain, that dock of dampening panic?

Oh Annie, no more.

Tonight, let my belly swing to & fro. Let the strobe lights long to put their mouths all over it. This body I am told to despair, to secret - tonight let me honor, let me worship at the church of breathlessness, the gloried ache of stomping feet. Let me be the unpenitent dervish making a fool of everyone not making a fool of themselves, & anyway isn’t this what the body was made for? Not to be picked apart or politicized, but sweatied, recklessed, flung into the slobbering mouths of stars? Not wreckage or ruin or aftermath, not god- damn math at all but poetry, poetry, poetry.

Oh Annie. Amen.

Oh Body, Amen.

Ecstatic Body, Amen.

Dandelion Body, Chandelier Body, Shaken Champagne Body, Amen.

Do what you came here to do.

#jeremy radin

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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journal

A fear of boredom (what’s the medical term for that?) compels me to try something different every day here: lists; imaginary poems, novels, and essays; little book reviews. We’ll see. I’m currently teaching a poetry seminar in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and maybe that alone will be enough to blog about. For example, I gave a lecture on the tension between voice and craft a day ago. (Let me know if this bores you.) (I love parentheses.) Ever since an epic discussion-disguised-as-debate I had with my friend Renegade, I’ve been thinking about it. He believes there are specific principles to what constitutes a great poem (or work of art). I disagree. “There are many forms of great, many ways to be great,” I told him. “Claiming there’s a set of predetermined principles—that’s too conservative for my tastes,” I said. (Note: you should never call someone named Renegade “conservative.” Nor should you imply another poet is not thinking like an artist. He’s kind of stopped speaking to me because of it.) Yesterday I was listening to a podcast (like blogs they are a form of tedium, that can occasionally be enriching) on Science and the City where V.S. Ramachandran gave a lecture on “Synesthesia and the Universal Principles of Art.” He claimed in the more speculative part of his talk that principles like: peakshifting, grouping and isolation determine how we judge and respond to art. (You’ll have to check it out to get the details: http://www.nyas.org/snc/podcasts.asp.) All very compelling, but for me Renegade and this dude are talking about art from the outside; from the perspective of the gazer/audience; not the artist. Even if it’s misguided the artist needs a healthy sense of individuality to sustain his or her imagination. The “principles of art” might help guide the imagination, but they should not determine it. Shouldn’t we say as much about Craft, the most used word (other than the word “poem”) in poetry workshops everywhere? Craft is a guide not a formula. The elements of craft are how we know we’re reading a poem and not a short story or newspaper piece. Even in prose poems examining the elements of craft (tone especially, but also imagery, metaphor, structure if not form) tell us whether we’re looking at a poem or a prose paragraph. Discussing Craft allows us to break poems into parts: the frequencies of diction and meter, the concrete blocks of imagery, the equations of metaphor. Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools. It also gives the teacher a way to measure and evaluate poems. Evaluation is easier when one sees poems as machines. But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too. Depending on your stance: an animal with a machine skeleton (say like Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say like Robocop). I’ll say here, that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we do not “own.” And if it’s alive (language is alive, right?), we can’t just saw off a leg without ramifications. In fact, if it’s an animal, we accept it even if one leg is shorter than the other. (One of Jesse Owens’ legs was shorter than the other, and look how far and fast it got him.) If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine), we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream. Hell, every word has a dream that, as far as I can tell, might best be described as a wish to be useful, indispensable, maybe unique. Renegade wasn’t hearing this. Once he and I argued late into the night (argued until I lost my voice) about whether or not Billie Holiday was a great singer. He said in what I remember now as the voice of Mr. Spock that she might have been a great stylist, but that her singing was never technically correct. Her poor technique had, in fact, ruined her voice, he said. I don’t think Billie Holiday was after “craft” or technique. Maybe this is too romantic, but I think she was after something beyond “craft.” And I’m suggesting that there is something beyond Craft where poetry is concerned too. Has to be. Otherwise a mastery of craft would mean a mastery of the poem. We’d expect a mature poet with control over “the principles of craft” to never write poorly. With the exception of Stanley Kunitz, most poets seem to get worse as they “mature,” not better . . . In the lecture I brought in poems by poets who demonstrated a “mastery” of craft in their first books, but inevitably moved beyond craft to something else. Amiri Baraka is an easy example. The poems in 1961’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note show that he obviously knows (or knew) “the rules.” The first five lines of the title poem: Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelops me Each time I go out to walk the dog. Or the broad-edged silly music the wind Makes when I run for the bus . . . But five years later with “Black Art” he announced that he was after something else. The first lines of the title poem: Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts beating them down. Fuck poems Which is better depends on your tastes, I suppose. I tried to tell Renegade I was less interested in good/great vs. bad than in the relationship between craft and voice; tangible and intangible. One of the reasons we don’t talk much about voice is its slippery, atmospheric quality. It’s a close cousin to Tone, which is maybe the most difficult of the craft elements to teach. Tone and Voice are matters of sensibility. You can’t teach sensibility can you? Maybe sensibility can only be shaped/filtered through craft: sometimes enlarged by it, sometimes obscured. (I love the word “maybe” only slightly more than I love the word “perhaps.”) Tell me how you’d define Voice in poetry? Tell me in a way that would make it useful to students. Tell me in a way that would convince Renegade. Maybe we don’t even have a good definition of craft yet. I’d vote for adding “culture” as an element, for example. Where would you discuss the influences of race, class and gender on theme and language if not in a discussion of craft? Including culture as an element helps me argue for the poems Baraka has been writing since Black Art as poems, not polemics with line breaks. His infamous poem “Somebody Blew Up America” makes use of all kinds of figures of speech—especially irony (“Who the richest / Who say you ugly and they the good lookingest.”) even if ultimately those elements are funneled toward a particular (polemical) intention. Intention is, perhaps closer to function than craft because it involves a poem’s purpose; it involves how the writer intends the poem to “function” for readers. (Perhaps craft should/does help one discover function and intention.) “Somebody Blew Up America” is a bad poem, for me because it lacks consistency of craft/design, not because it lacks craft. It possesses a clear Voice (Baraka Persona), but the articulation (construction) of Voice is not necessarily independent of craft. It’s a matter of which comes first, maybe. At what point does craft (the principles of poetry) give way to voice (the sensibilities of imagination)? And visa versa: when does/should the imagination (Voice) give way to the principles (craft) that guide a reader through the poem? (Say, maybe its called “craft” because it’s what transport the language . . .) I’m thinking of folk like Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, and Lucille Clifton. Aren’t their best poems the ones that “match the rhythms of their strides”—to adapt a Wally Stevens line? Shouldn’t we be wary of any “principles” that flatten or normalize those rhythms? Shrug. I could go on, but what would I have to talk about tomorrow. I’m gonna call Renegade soon. Sooner or later . . .

#Terrance Hayes

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byshwetaupadhyay · 9 years

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ABLATIVE ABSOLUTES

With the bird having been driven home to their dad, soaking wet, wearing blue booty shorts

With the bird’s dad having been executed in broad daylight, but first the hangman gave him an extra set of wings

With the wings having been made of paper, glass, dramatic irony

With the bird having been unbalanced by the weather

With the bird having been bad at being a bird

With the bird’s dad having been dead & unshaven under the ground in a tin can with a purple bow that he would have hated having been tied to his beak

With the bird’s lung having been hollowed out by a system of impulses electric & undeclared

With the bird’s dad having died at a young age when the bird was also young

With the bird’s dad having been compelled to remain alive a great deal later than his death

With the bird’s mom having been quite lovely & having made a significant impression on the young bird by instructing them in a rigorous Latin regimen

With the bird having learned every declension, conjugation, & later on in life every sex position

With the bird having been grown to an enormous size in the secondary womb of the nest

With their bird body having been licked & licked & licked by an offensive stormcloud that invaded the small messiness of their nest

With the bird’s first book having been taught in every fine feathered institution

With the bird’s second release having been excoriated in a televised trial & subjected to public burnings

With the bird’s dad having been well-educated, he once delivered a lengthy dissertation on the exact colour of January exactly one week before he was dead

With the bird’s mom having been well-educated, as bird-moms often are

With the bird having been shocked to learn that someday all dads will die

With the bird having been given more than enough crusty bread & not at all enough butter

With the bird having been warm & wondering what the fuck are we wearing all of these clothes for

With the bird having been so exhausted by Catullus 85 that they tattooed it on their feeble wing

With the bird having been so tired one day they just stayed home & watched Gilmore girls until their nose bled

With the bird’s dad having been so heartbroken when the bird’s mom died, even though he too was already dead

With the bird’s favorite kind of tea being Constant Comment because it made them feel famous & paranoid as if everyone was talking about them

With the wings of the bird having been irrelevant to their fundamental ability to fly

With the bird having been so disillusioned with geography that they opened all the windows of their nest & burned every atlas they ever encountered

With the bird having been lulled into a stupor by the relentless anonymity of subway transit

With the bird having known the exact date of their own death & having been unsurprised at their failure to die on that date

With the bird having had a piss-poor handle of the eccentricities of Ancient Greek, having been particularly unenthused by Simonides

With the bird having been tortured into an ecstatic understanding of their own subterranean sexual proclivities

With the bird having been aged to a perfect ripeness in the prison of the winery where they were born

With the bird’s dad having been dead they dug him up & sang to his tiny birdskull & it sang back

With the bird having been bronzed like a baby shoe in the perfect misery of morning light the day after the funeral of their dad & their mom

With the funeral actually having been the funeral of the bird

With the bird having been quite uneasy with being the kind of bird that everyone thought that they should be

With the bird’s mom having been unable to address them in the way that they wanted to be addressed

With the bird having been consumed by the anger of the city they lived in

With the bird having been sated by the deliciousness of the anger that they in turned consumed in the city

With the bird having turned & turned & turned in the grave in the air that they dug for themself with a headless shovel on Shabbat

With the bird having been so dejected they tunneled into the earth like a motorized emotional screwdriver

With the bird having been ashamed they hid their head in the earth slightly similar to another style of bird that will not be named here

With the bird having been closed off to all possibilities they sank their wings into the tepid ocean & sailed off into the near future

With the bird having been a bird of perfect proportions & lauded as the #1 bird in the whole entire universe as featured on the cover of Bird Magazine

With the bird’s dad having been a fearless leader of birds who marched through the airstreams & fought for birds’ rights his whole life

With the bird’s dad having been assassinated publicly in the dead of night by the secret police of the city

With the bird having been impossibly lessoned in the finer martial arts

With the bird having been of exceptional moral mettle they were often consulted on ethical conundra as well as matters of the heart

With the bird having been possessed of an extremely salacious beak, leading to their penchant for off-colour but socially responsible jests

With the bird having been an eloquent orator & having inherited their activist spirit from their dad who sent them outrageous manifesta from the solitude of his political prison

With the bird having been intrigued by the maimed potential of their own clipped wings

With the bird’s conception of hope having been born inside them as an infant, accidentally thrown from the nest & temporarily susceptible to predation

With the bird’s dad having been a sufferer of various mental illnesses leading up to & continuing on after his tragic death

With the bird’s dad having been primarily a recurrent daydream throughout most of the bird’s life

With the bird having been deprived they invented various hallucinatory adventures of their noble dad including jungle forays & a miraculous escape from the menace of an experimental research facility

With the bird’s mom having been a consistent presence in their life there was no need to conjure up any fictions for her

With the bird having been bored with the stagnancy of academic autoasphyxiation

With the bird having been bored into by a smile the same color as lead

With the bird having been saturated with feelings of physical inadequacy

With the bird having been dissatisfied with their body & its shape

With the bird having been overcome by an intense desire to shave off their own flesh as if it were a block of ice so as to rapidly achieve a perfect state of thin

With the bird having been thin

With the bird having been a bullet wound

With the bird having been beat, hard, beat hard, hard, again & again in the unsteadiness of the city

With the bird having been convinced their city’s cocoon of “progressive” could provide shelter from fist

With the bird having been tethered to the nest

With the bird having been untethered from the nest by the reality their dad warned them of a few months after his death

With the bird having been disconnected from their own femininity

With the bird having been disgusted by the very idea of masculinity

With the bird having been an immense facsimile of the vulva as a symbol masquerading as truth in the obviously false body of the bird

With the bird having been a symbol signifying nothing

With the bird having been unsettled in their self & having been afraid, to be quite honest, of flying

With the bird having been held in the hand of another for a long while without ever having felt held

With the hand having been unable to deal with the weight, it clenched

With the bird having been crushed in that incomparable palm

With the bird having been surprised at how long it took for their compact skeleton to heal & reorganize itself

With the bird having been traumatized by the tyranny of tallness, the tree

With the bird having felt the need to express physical pain publicly so that none were ignorant of it

With the bird having been elevated to the highest height in the forest & doused in ethanol

With the bird having been dazzled & undressed by music one evening, Nina Simone, a deep well, drowning in the memory of their dad’s dead eye that ached out of his open casket on the day of the bird’s birth

With the bird having been taken out of their element by the diseased urging of their unchosen family

With the bird having been exhibited as a mystery, as curiosity, not as a circus sideshow but as an inherent aberration, the black sheep bleating like a goat

With the bird’s dad having been unknown to the bird for the minority of the bird’s life

With the bird’s life having been a poignant tribute to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence

With the bird having been branded with a complex series of barcodes that when scanned reveal the bird’s every unsavory secret

With the bird having been a perfectly ripe pear, impossible to bruise or puncture, impervious to hunger

With the bird’s eye having been open, unopened

With the bird’s eye having been emptied of blue

With the bird’s eye having been belonging to nothing not associated with beauty

With the bird having been painted by heaven the steady color of doom

With the bird having been frequently compared to both Andrei & Natasha especially when attending luxurious dinner parties

With the bird having been flattered by this comparison

With the bird having been very rarely flattered, or even pleased with anything at all

With the bird having been an infinite receptacle, a Greek amphora designed to house & hide away traces of joy

With the bird’s sister having been never discussed

With the bird’s sister having been born a ghost, a breadcrumb, an afterthought, having been unborn

With the bird’s sister’s name having been constantly on the tip of their tongue, but never retrievable from memory

With the bird’s sister having been forever buried at the bottom of the nest

With the bird’s dad having been too distraught to deal

With the bird’s dad’s death having been already a lot to deal with

With the bird’s beak having been designed for seed but often used instead to damage dead flesh

With the bird having been finished with hunger

With the bird having been a bird accustomed to disappointment

With the bird having been a bird with inappropriate expectations

With the bird having been a bright shade of blue that upset the eye

With the bird having been haunted by a dream of blue every night for all of their life

With the bird having been haunted by a dream of their dad & the soft hug of his wing

With the bird’s dad having been dead

With the bird’s mom & dad & the whole relevant world having been dead

With the bird having been unconvinced of all that

With the bird having been dead & not quite dead but since they thought it was the right time to go they folded their wings & sang to all the angels up in heaven

With all the angels up in heaven having been jerks who spat down on the prostrate bird

With the bird having been put off by this they hailed a cab, destination nowhere or at least a better nest

#CHASE BERGGRUN

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