An Unillustrated Guide to Making a Complete Mess of Your Intellect

This Hub, like many other Hubs, I'm sure, perhaps even ones which you, I dare say, thought sucked, is dedicated to books of various stripes. The person who is off existing while this thing is on here existing is named Ron, he is, in fact, real; so on topics of literature can be trusted. Hopefully. And no false advertising but I also cook a mean enchilada, which recipe might get shared. I would like to take this opportunity to beam a blessing your way, whoever you are, and this is the exact blessing right here aka you just read it. If you enjoyed it then that was what being blessed feels like, its not weird, comedians do it all the time. Yay! Consider the champagne bottle cracked open and all the icebergs cleared, HERE GOES MY HUB!

Right now I'm sick, but luckily I always read much more when I'm lying in bed, contemplating how atrocious the body can behave toward it's 'owner;' and I've also been on the verge of completing the somewhat monolithic collected works of Alice Notley: Grave of Light. My first encounter with Alice occurred under casual circumstances, perusing a copy of Best American Poetry 1990, edited by Jorie Graham. Somehow, just flipping through the pages, I had the fortune to discover her. That poem was her "Descent of Alette," written in a very distinctive form, of mini quotations, cutting into and dividing each line into sometime incomplete units, grouped in the manner of the prose poem stanza. Needless to say I was intrigued enough at this bizarre cross mating of experimental form, plain-speak and a mythic narrative that when I eventually had some money I decided it would be wise to delve deeper, and purchased her collected works anthology, Grave of Light.

So here we have the usual issue, having begun, where to begin? Well, where I began was at the beginning, page 1, having decided to conduct a cover-to-cover expedition through the Notley archives, even though my ADD frequently rebelled, baffling my attempts at every turn. But this is the usual American reader's response, I wanted my good American response, since this is good American poetry. Specifically, if you have to slap a category on it, New York School poetry. Notley cites Frank O'Hara as being one of the first poetic voices she recognized as her own, though not exactly, however it made her's that much more possible. So expect that beautiful casualness with which O'Hara is able to finesse all those little forks in the road which take place in the mind of a city dweller. Though from Needles, CA; Notley is a city poet, in the sense that she contains a throng of voices, casts of characters, events, what have you, which no island oasis could contain.

And to the meat, the stuff, the poetry...Let's see, when did she start ravaging me... Not exactly from the beginning page, no, it takes some time to warm up to her, to get past her strange syntax (which she FUCKS with), the airiness and 'barely there'-ness of her early poems, with their sketch-like quality, little flashes here and there, of life. It is like seeing the synapses firing, of new life, life which you almost understand but for it's combined simplicity and strangeness. And familiarity. And plainness. But then these intricate jewels begin to turn up, phrases like:

"But I and this he (and he) makes ghosts of/ I and all the hes there would be, won't be// because by now I am he, we are I, I am we.// We're not the completion of myself."
(Dear Dark Continent)

"how, do you suppose//the wonders/that would be facts,/from dreams,/get lost"
and
"That every movement naturally produces/noise/which attracts, pursues, tears to pieces,/utensil and wing,/the thing/til she lives"
(I, Songs for the Unborn Second Baby)

This type of convolution, wherein maybe what we see is common sense, common words, in the process of making itself as intricate as poetry. But also a fusion of dream life and real life, which may be that exact process of making intricate just phrased differently. If we wanted to pretend Notley were a metaphysical poet, for instance, her form of metaphysics would be no different from walking around a house, nursing a baby, perhaps occasionally peering out a window, and sitting down before a TV. Many of her works could be headed: "A Meditation on...;" but the target of her meditations are dailiness, as in "Your Dailiness," in which she recalls deaths (of her grandfather, of her aunt, of Neal Cassady) within a narrative string which keeps us very much in touch with the scenes of these thoughts, the life that contains and sweeps them along so that they are hers. Thus we get exposed to this beautiful universality which exists within the borders of what we all live without it needing all the 'trivialities' to be subtracted or 'cleaned' off of it.

"The poetry of the New York School---whose original practitioners include Frank O'Hara, Lew Welch, Paul Blackburn, and later on Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Anne Waldman---has all the paradoxical easiness of a Zen koan. It is flux without the rhetoric; spun on wit, the seriousness of trivia, it takes place entirely in the conversational mode... Wryly and offhandedly, O'Hara puts his finger on the great discovery of American poetry during the twentieth century: that poetry is living speech, transcribed (William Carlos Williams); that it is a map of a person's mind (Phillip Whalen); that it is an exchange of energy between the writer and the reader. The writer Ann Rower describes this gentle tampering with live speech as a criminal act, like breaking and entering, "smash and grab."

Chris Kraus: "Ecceity, Smash and Grab, The Expanded I and Moment"

This is one of my main scoop-it-all-in interpretations of what the New York School was doing inside of the common language, they were living in it. Alice Notley lives in her poems, the early poems are homey, eccentric, sweet, challenging, ribald, drunk; this is not PR. But in a way it IS PR, in the strictest sense, because she is relating to the public, through public language, through TV, through death, birth, pop music; Notley invest these with her own voice in these early works. She is getting at that thing with which everyone in America is bound up with, dailiness, and she is making it hers. Here's some more words:

"O me being me/designed/to satisfy the gods feeling it/just as one//need not know it that/every experience is a mystical/one/the sun/shines the lamp shines the Albers/glows/What a nice day!"
(Endless Day)

But you all know all of this, or maybe you don't, but eventually either you will or won't; so I have to wonder again about the context of this little essay, and how to re-begin again. So now we know who Alice Notley is, check; we know who she's like, check; we've heard from her a bit, discussed what I think that sounds like she's doing, but is there a non polemical way to get at this 'stuff' other than be saying it's good or 'it means this?' Because, reading Notley, it does become very difficult, worrying what you're saying, what she's saying, what you're reading; all these problems get neatly strapped up in a tough little package.

Here’s something I did: when I’m struck by a poem, I’m always taken by a somewhat cruel, maybe a little egoistic, whim: to recreate what it is they are doing in my own way. Of course, it ends up being more what I think they are doing than what they are actuallydoing, barring all philosophical digressions. Doing this I spend a few moments thinking as she appears to think, on the page, trying to see how is it that she uses these thoughts that enter her, what spin does she put on her past, where is she looking? So I did that, what did it mean, what happened to me? When poetry happens, how does it happen to you; that is a good question. Somewhere in Grave of Light Alice notes how she understands her dreams as a surface, or maybe feels them as a surface. But if you’re skeptical maybe you’re like: sounds like typical poet bullshit, dedicated to post-Freudian knowing winks. I guess these could be on the mark, to an extent, but they don’t cover all the bases; for Alice, poetry is an extension of her life, just as analysis was for Freud, but the goals are not the same at all. ‘Notley dreams as a surface‘ means that dreams are something else, sticking out in time, where her events are gathered, somewhere where words have to go for her; but the specific problem for Alice is: “how do you get back to real life from there?”

Let me break a second, took Thera-Flu, now feeling kind of like a balloon, not fun at all. I wonder how my body will speak differently now, keep making misspellings, impatience, feels like I’m kind of pulling out of the mood a bit. If the body is the center for all these words, my body, living over here, wanting to talk about itself, it’s life, all that stuff, how is it anyone can make something affecting. Biggest challenge I think, for writers, not being ego maniacal, and not making too many misspellings. Alice Alice Alice what is the I saying, who is the I of this essay, perhaps the art of the essay is to keep an I stable and confident for the duration, so how does this work with “the expanded I?” Won’t that just be confusing? Unless there are threads, or unless there are other ways of reading, being clear. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, getting out these words; sometimes it is a flow which barely could stop even if I wanted to. What is the range of her I?

This is where I have to begin to differentiate Alice from the New York School. So if we have this handy list of traits: living speech, mind map, “an impersonal I;” which direction is Alice’s direction? A little later in the book, I discovered a mini “book” inside of it, “September’s Book.”  It’s gorgeous…

But wait, I have to cut in on myself, I slept after I wrote this, despite that the theraflu was daytime (my sister didn’t read the label) but that fact caused my sleep to be shallow, I kept waking up, going back to sleep, waking up. So this led me to have a ton of dreams because my whole sleep was in a shallow state, and who did I dream of but Alice Notley. This is probably just a case of “had it on my mind before bed,” but some of these little vignettes were profoundly strange. One episode from my dream involved Alice trying to demonstrate for me one of her cyphers, a way she decodes and recodes language into dream talk: the main part of this is in separating a word into its individual letters, which I sensed, after that point, become like slivers in the flesh, or in the mind. Specifically, in this way: slivers when they can’t be pried out from under you’re skin tend to develop, not from their own material, but from the irritation they cause in the flesh, they cause puss and scar tissue to build up. Now, disregarding that this image is gross, in fact, elevating it up to the brain, the mind, wiggling maybe up through that little pinprick Descartes thought joined the two at the pineal gland, we find ourselves in the situation of the word. But the splinter word, the word that needs to be built, and this is what she told me, she rebuilds them. Now, this may have several phases but I only explicitly recall one (the more typical) and vaguely recall the image of another: the first is your run of the mill association, so that each letter becomes a new word, this, to me, seemed very basic; the second involved some sort of tabulation, perhaps this tabulation of variables is merely the back end of the association or a whole other procedure in itself, numbers were involved, and long lists. The name for this method was promptly forgotten by me after my first wakeup, though it was a strange word, maybe with a ‘z’ and a ‘k;’ but a replacement word was, in a later dream, provided for me by my friend Darlene, who in the dream seemed to be taking complete credit for the method, which, she objected was derived from Akkadian scripting procedures and was referred to by the name Ak-Ak-akakak (with the first two syllables being distinct, the last pronounced quickly). This scene took place in a model home out of or into which I was moving, make of this what you will…

Frankly, I'm still ill; and information has kept dilating behind my back. Every time you think maybe you have time to sit down and just read a book... So I listened to The Magic Puppy (amazing btw, that I can say that in all seriousness) and realized that I had no idea what the hell it was talking about, perhaps this is always a gamble when chatting with Magic Puppies; luckily we have Google. So I was like: 'hybridity;' 'two-program model?' Sounds like the Economist, but then I was like: 'why not investigate, see how the other half lives.' So apparently I am woefully unschooled in the present-day discourse of "Poetry;" despite the fact that I am a practicing poet and have read pretty widely. This an interesting bit of evidence in itself, what does it mean? Am I negligent, or naive? Obviously the gaps in my vocabulary are owed to the fact that I haven't kept up with works of poetic theory, and also, perhaps, that I only read a poet when I hear them calling for me (whatever you take that to mean). So ok, obviously it's about canonization, it's about the need to make and sell anthologies because people need to know what progress is within language, and it needs to be relayed to them in theories; ok, this I have gathered after frequenting the Debate and its eccentricities on a number of blogs (exoskeleton; acompulsivereader; ). After bouncing within the limits in the Argument surrounding this attempt at codification I will admit to feeling frustration raise itself up within me, but also fascination. What is this we are able to witness in real time, this little disagreement that, around itself, has called into life this little territory which 'takes place' completely beyond the bounds and outside of the book which made it necessary. Ok that sounds a little too postmodern-ey formulated like that, and so here I willl make it chewable and bite size: 1) a book has a finite limit, it can only fit a certain number of poets, regardless of how Bible-thin the pages happen to be; 2) there was an unprecedented proliferation in poetry after about 1970 into a greater and greater diversity of styles, an exponential increase that continues still 3) the internet is indefinite, never needs to be printed, and, as such, can publish an indefinite number of poets all writing in idioms derived willy nilly from God-only-knows-where 4) the blogging community debating about the book online is hilarious for these reasons, because they simultaneously supersede and look jealously back upon it, as though it really were in a better position than they.

What is quietism? This could qualify an actual gap in my education, heaven forbid; i will admit i can be a lazy reader, but hey I'm not getting paid for it. couldn't find much on it outside of the blogosphere, namely at exoskeleton blog whose author tosses out a handy definition "it is the dominant literary system in the US as it was organized with the creation of Creative Writing Programs in the 1960s and 1970s." Very helpful indeed. "This system allows for a certain level of stylistic variation (though really not much). But certain values have remained pretty constant. It is also not without internal conflict, which serves to hide its basic homogeneity." Apparently Ron Silliman is the progenitor of this dialectical taxonomic widget, that is: the filing cabinet marker which generously lets us say that's that and this is this. So does that mean Quietism is institutional poetry in general, as though there were a single range in which voices could articulate within a given American university? In that case, which is by no means THE case, it would seem to specify an effect common to poets who have been exposed to certain systems of critique, structured interaction, rhetoric; in that case we could almost think of it sociologically, from an interactionist view, as a state one achieves in relation to a structuring of interpersonal poetic relationships, call if professionalization. But this is an unorthodox reading of my own, have found no precursors to it in the blogs I've perused; on those, mainly, the view seems to be that it is an attempt to retrospectively define a movement or (familiar term alert) a SCHOOL, which is opposed to the other school, broadly classed as "post-avant." Now, "post-avant (garde) school" is shorthand (or longhand?) for non-institutional poetics, experimental poetics which took many cues from performance art, modernist and contemporary avant-gardists, etc. I do have to question myself on my OWN division here (into institutional and non-institutional) (so fun to accuse oneself): isn't modernism/contemporary art avant gardism an institution as well? I'll let that one simmer on the back burner momentarily.

Reading further in the post on the exoskeleton blog, I do find many of my points presupposed; that it is institutionalization (professionalization is implied), he also brings up the reenforcement of this caused within the formation of the award system, the giving of professorships, etc. He however still allows it the status of a school or a tradition (nouns) rather than as an ongoing structural process which arise incidentally alongside and completely as a consequence of the milieu it creates. It is a verb, an active force which can only be viewed within the lives it touches, in the present. This view is Foucauldian of me I guess, he would talk about it as a strategy of structuring visible and audible information; context, basically. The workshop is a context; a site, as much as the hospital or the prison, for Foucault, were the sites, for certain programs allowings effects of power to be circulated and imparted. Ok enough Foucault jargon. But point taken. So carrying it into the realm of experiences, and yes I have been in my share of workshops, what range of motion does the workshop dynamic allow for? I can't go straight for the heart on this one, mainly because I had particularly permissive, low-level workshops, and am very articulate in defending my work; plus I have not been able to witness the very heart of the system which is the graduate workshop. This is where professionalization must take place. I'll poke around and see if I can find any more grist for this mill online.

In his responses to Johannes (author of the exoskeleton blog) Seth Abramson disagrees that Quietism exists at all, he breaks up contemporary poetry differently, along the lines of semiotic/linguistic language theory (pragmatic, syntactic) and refers to issues of rhythm as "surface effects". This is striking, rhythm as a surface effect. This, I wouldn't say heavy handed, but definitely power-effect inducing, usage of terminology calls to mind the primary verbal element of the power dynamic in a workshop; that is, the confident usage of terms and theories to shore up one's position. Because, let's face it, what is it being manufactured in MFA workshops but positions? Is that the case? Well, if one wants to be the target of grants, awards, professorships, fellowships, one needs to be visible on an intellectual horizon ie to take up a position on it, to do otherwise would br Naive, or Art Brut (madness). Articulation occurs through some mesium which imparts effects of power on what is said, as I myself am now doing through the medium of Foucault's work; but does that mediation negate the validity of my observations? Or: not the validity of them, the generality. Because generality does seem to be the prize, doesn't it? Generality is perhaps the highest power of knowledge, as such. Without it all we have are individuals floating in a medium, no schools, no anthologies with tidy little names, no yardstick for the handing out of prizes. But now the argument in me has gone to its limit; I cannot say anything about pragmatics or syntactics, I have no claims in that field, or very few, and only in its most airy regions. So for now this argument will convenient tuck itself in good night.

Phew! Magic Puppy, such things thou hast brought in me! LOL Presently, btw, I am listening to Cybernetic Love by Casco, which is amazing.

So, while I have conveniently wiggled out of the game supplied for me, I find myself facing back towards it, wondering how it plays in, on and through one. What does that mean? No clue. I'd rather address the second have of the Puppy's rant anyway, because it includes actual poets; and I, perhaps it is a shortcoming of mine, I can only talk about poets, I have such trouble in discussing schools, because that all seems too metaphysical to me. Mumbo jumbo and all that. Ok, so who does the puppy invoke with such fervor? Perusing now, will have a wrap up eventually I guess.