Friday, February 27, 2004

I think blogging can be a fulltime job.

I can’t recall how the conversation got there, but, at White Horse, Jessea asked if there were differences between the so-called traditional VS experimental work. This topic is immortal! I think we have talked about this over and over and over. Some (like Jessea) think it’s all the same. Some (like me) think you could argue in a very very diverse way. Some (like me (and Jessea?)) think it shouldn’t matter if there is or isn’t a difference between them.

I think the followings:
If you think it’s all the same, you are aiming at the commonality of what’s called writing, huge and general. After all, there are twenty-six letters in the English language; it is just how those letters are employed to convey/provoke thoughts in the endless number of combination those letters allow. Language will always make you think, make you brain function, make you want to get something out of it, make you want to reason. Anything that is language (or has the feature of being a language, like music, as Jessea says) will always make you react that way. Writing takes place within language; therefore is conditioned to what language itself is for—to communicate. All that is written communicate.

If you think it’s not the same, you might be thinking at the more specific levels of what’s called writing. The twenty-six letters start to behave differently; some ask you to listen and be quite; some ask you to get up and jump. You could be saying things like traditional works ask you to me more of a receiver of what’s said while experimental works ask you to think along. (Now, Jessea, I could hear you scream right here and say that you always think along regardless…I know I know…bear with me, ok?) The receiving and the thinking have to happen in both cases, I think. They have to. I think that’s what happens when one reads. But, because the different things that enter your brain are likely to produce different occurrences in your brain, (e.g. full sentences vs interrupted phrases; “roses are red” vs “a moment yellow” (from My Life) ) people can argue that it is possible for writing to be of differences.

Traditional and experimental are not at all parallel in any way to good or bad. I think arguing differences is not arguing values. Values are a whole new blog.

If you think this shouldn’t matter, I agree with you. I think a piece of writing is going to do exactly what it does to you. It’s a fluid space, this space of poetry. It has to be. So I think it doesn’t hurt to know that writings have the potential to be categorized differently; it doesn’t hurt to believe that all writings share similarities or sameness. It’s completely valid to like or dislike a piece of work because you do. There will always be contradictory things in all levels. There will always be agreement and disagreements. So suit yourself and make the best of it.

OK. This came out simpler than I thought. Thanks for listening,


you guys are making me laugh. i want to say calm down and go on some god damn tours in some foreign countries where people speak a language that you don't speak and just be stupid for a while and, damn it, enjoy it. jeez. let some people make fun of you. be vulnerable and dumb for a few moments.

i plan to kidnap both kristen and scott and put them on funny bus together for week long tour.

and... there has to be a law where complications, troubles, anxieties, can't be used as excuses for inaction. so don't think, kristen, that you are getting off the hook of calling the b.p. tour back and finding out the time...



I have some comments about Tran's in-class discussion, and it might be related to tour/ism.

When he talked about the Vietnam book, that he felt he was violating culture for the sake of poetry, I could very much identify with what that could mean. Now, to say what follows, I fully realize that where he stands is entirely different from mine (This US is his home; it's not mine. My home is the there; his isn't). But there are some similiarities, I think.

OK. First let me say this. The result of this visit, the book (which I haven't read; I am basing this on Tran's comment)--seems to resonate with Orientialism in a very distant way. It says something like "there's different culture; let's go learn from it." In the case of Oreintalism, there was this "missionary" (aka colonial) ideology to it. In Tran's case, the writer himself was aware of it. This very fact I think is intriquing. The book is a good example, I think, of bounced-back-Orientalism.

What works so beautifully in d&c I think is the sense of honesty, filtered through the work of writing. The sense of honesty is what I assume lacking in the other book. And this lack, I think, made he said what he said.

How one identifies with one's honesty (there's a different between being honest and being personal, I think) is unimaginably abstract. I'm not going to get there. But honesty is really really important to have exhibited in one's work.

Now, if alternative tours witinin one's community help build up that sense of honesty, I'd say go for it. If not, then don't.

BTW: Jessea, I'll blog for you what I have to say about your question if there are differences b/w traditional vs experimental work this weekend. Stay tuned. Going to bars brings very fun discussions!






some suggestions on what to read in joan retallack's, the poethical wager...

my first suggestion is to read all of it. it is very good.

but if you're running out of time, and part of being in graduate school is figuring out what to read within the limited # of years one is in graduate school, these seem the crucial essays...

introduction
the poethical wager
wager as essay
:re:thinking:literary:feminism: (this one is a classic!)

another interesting essay is "SECNÀHC GNIKÀT : TAKING CHANCES" at the epc.

i also wanted to check in some on the workshop. if i can talk you into posting something about the procedure process here, please...

mainly b/c i felt when reading dan's work and then having to do the procedure on it that i got somewhere that i couldn't/wouldn't have gotten to without having to do something, anything. it was very profound moment for me. i think if i had just had to read his work and maybe write a few notes in the margins and then come to workshop, i would have done a much more superficial reading of it. i wouldn't have thought about the limits and/or possibilities of how poems make meaning. his work also made me think about metaphor/metonymy a lot and i wouldn't have thought about that if i was just "reading" it. in other words, doing the procedure...all parts of it--from trying to think about what to do and then to doing it...slowed me down and made me read very differently. and it made me read with way more respect.

responding to meg's went a little differently. i enjoyed the procedure that i did. i actually liked, if that is the word, what i wrote and thought that some of the stuff that i did in the procedure i might carry back into my own work at some point. so that was helpful for me in the selfish sense. i did feel again that having to do something to her work made me think more about what her work did. it was only when i started thinking about what sort of procedure to do that i began to think about what was in and what was not in the poem in terms of content. i'm not sure i would have gotten there w/o having to do something to the poem. but it wasn't as intense as it was with dan's. i'm sure this has something to say about conventions of readability. and that meg is not writing a fugue report.

when i think back to previous weeks also, i realize that i had thoughts i wouldn't have had if i had just had to read the poems (i'm sure i would be "winging" it more also if i just had to "read" them conventionally; saying to myself well i'm not sure what is going on here so i'll go and see what they say at workshop; now i feel like i have to try and figure out something that is happening because i have to base my response on it). when i had to respond to kristen's and jessea's work i started thinking about that issue of tightness of box and how that works or not in various ways which i'm still thinking about. with william's i started thinking a lot about commands and what sort of work they do. etc.

could other people weigh in? also would like to hear from someone who has reworked their poem after workshop, or maybe if you just have a new plan to rework it.

oh jeez. so many issues.

Jessea, when you write "I want to know how this could be avoided." I think are many and no answers here. But more importantly, that this demand is a, I almost wrote _the_, crucial question/demand for being a writer in the late 20th c and early 21st century where there is no longer a clear, pure, undiluted, national culture/community that one can write from. And I think it is related to when I was trying to push Kristen harder on what was bothering her about Yedda's work (where I wanted her to separate Yedda's comment in class from the work itself and figure out what sorts of claims the book was making). In other words, you might not be able to avoid the problems you notice around this issue, but you can't pretend that it isn't going to come up.

Tran was sweetly evasive in a lot of his answers. I haven't read the Vietnam book yet so I can't really speak with much authority. Could someone that has read it, explain how the Vietnam book differs from the rewritten version in d&c? I felt somewhat from our conversation that his answer was to move to the personal, which makes me nervous. But if we read these two books side by side, we might have one person's answer on how "this" could be avoided.

What is "this" again? Appropriation?

We've been over this before, but I think one way of dealing with this issue is to root the work in these issues, to take them on directly, and to make one's affiliations clear and complicated. Also, I think there is something about doing "the work." Whatever that is. Which might be learning the language or studying the history or reading the testimony.

I think there is a difference between tourism and tours at moments. Or tours can be both tourism (6 European countries in 4 days) and community activism/respect/education (perhaps Black Panthers tour?). What if Albany Bulb "tour" makes us ask questions about community art and how museums and art establishment works and then we ask ourselves how we might make poetry that asks same questions and what would that look like? And what if it makes us also ask questions like is it annoying to arrange trash into art and assume everyone wants to look at it? Or when does art become interference?

But keep pushing at these. I'm confident there is not a single answer but that any sort of answer is more a nexus of ideas and convictions, some of them personal and some of them collective. This is the hard work of being a human being who thinks in this moment in time. It should be fun to try and figure this out.




Thursday, February 26, 2004

I want to clarify that my feelings on tourism are my own--my own reservations. In no way am I pointing a finger at anyone else. I don't want to dismiss anything--in fact, because it makes me uncomfortable, I want to think more about it. But I could tell there was frustration over lack of enthusiasm, & I wanted to give my own possible reasons for it (along w/scheduling nightmares & how to organize, etc.).

I'm curious about why we feel the need to include the local in the first place. Or why we automatically assume it is the right thing to do. Or how we think are the best ways of going about it. What does it mean? Are we automatically assuming our work isn't local, or that certain scenery will make it more so, or that we are more a part of where we live if we explore these things. I'm interested in the urge that leads us here to start with. It seems that we presuppose a feeling that we don't include local, or that we don't include it enough.. Am I way off base?

And then say we all agree that this is true. If so, I think that any attempts to include something, because one thinks one should, will lead to some complications. Not that this is bad, but for me I would need to address these issues. How do you include local without appropriation, without "local color" as scenery? How do you avoid being a tourist? This came up in discussion last night @ J's Fin de Siecle class. Truong Tran talked about his experiences going back to Vietnam with express purpose of writing about it (on a grant from Haas family fund, these people are descendents of Levi's family). He ended up putting a book together that apparently got slammed for being touristy, for "othering" the people of Vietnam, for creating distance. I want to know how this could be avoided.

Maybe this has nothing to do with project & I am just neurotic & you guys just want to take walks. But this is where the project has led me in my thinking.

Romney..I don't want you or anyone to be frustrated for trying to put something together & not getting feedback or support. These are my thoughts..are there others? Just because I am talking about my personal complications doesn't mean project should die or have dark cloud hanging over it.

Meg--I did say we could do both or neither or whatever we want..

I will talk to you guys more (over beers?) and narrow down my ideas for poem response project. Maybe I hate that word project. More to come.
on Walks...

the idea has been gnawing at me for a few weeks now in regard to the Walk project. i feel slightly uncomfortable w/the tourist overtones in it--that in order to "get to know our community" we must get in a bus, have experts lead us around, pay admission, look at our home with a distancing eye.. the phenomenon that suddenly a sewage treatment plant is interesting because we decide to rename it as a tour.. reminds me of driving across America this summer and all the crazy tourist billboards (most heavily located in South Dakota). the spectacle of the spectacle! put up a billboard and you have an attraction, it becomes more interesting because there is an informational placard, or a tour guide..

Anyway, Romney, there seems to be a lack of interest in the project. The project started because we thought we had all this graduate money & wanted to figure out a way to use it..then David Buuck's activities seemed to be along the lines of what we wanted to do.. But we don't have to do that idea, if people aren't that excited about it.

One thing I believe is that whatever we do, we WILL need a person to manage things, organize, rally troops. I don't know if any of us wants to be that person, or has time to be that person, but we will need one. It might be better to agree on that before we get going so no hard feelings later.

Should we regroup on this?

On the project I mentioned (response poems), I guess the attraction is that we can all interact w/each other's work but it would be much easier to organize. Also if it's not interesting in the end we don't have to do anything with it. No risk guarantee! Maybe only fun for ourselves, but who cares if no one else likes it? We can just stuff it in closet or hard drive.

We could do both projects. We could do another one no one has thought of yet!

Printing chapbook will be huge time commitment. If we're going to try to do that, we need to first make sure we have the money. Someone will have to step up and take that on. If no one steps up, I don't think it will happen.

Maybe we should have another chat to reassess availability & how much people want to put in to project & if original Walk idea is still tantalizing.


Wednesday, February 25, 2004

I was gone for the weekend and came back to tons of admin work so I'm way behind on everything. And I think it is only going to get worse because I'm going to Seattle and Vancouver next week. (Thus, no class!)

Few thoughts to try and catch up...

I'm trying to read through the Joan Retallack book because I wanted to suggest some essays on which to concentrate but I don't think I'm going to make it through the book before class today. It is very good. Jessea might find it interesting because it answers that why write poetry question without the politics answer. Also lots on philosophical discussion that Padcha might find interesting. I might be able to do finish the book before I leave for the upper west coast and if I do I will make suggestions. But if not, try and find your way through the book. It is long but it is very good.

I called the bookstore and the book will be there tomorrow.

I like Prynne's work a great deal. I also love considering how exaggerated music is very deeply.

Question of poetic influence is interesting because I'm thinking about doing the craft class next semester around the issue of positive influence.

On Jessea's project idea... In graduate school, jena osman organized this project that got published as The Lab Book. I'm not sure I've got a copy of it anymore. But she had everyone write a poem and then everyone else responsed to everyone else's poem. I'm not sure it is the most interesting book in the world. So I guess the question would be, is there a way to make this so that everyone works together on something rather than just responding individually. Or I guess that would be my encouragement. To make it somehow more dialogic.

I have suggestions for writing in a trance.

William, it sounds like you might enjoy reading that by now classic Charles Bernstein essay, "Artifice of Absorption." Veronica Forrest Thompson (another English poet!) is also good on this issue.

If I get time today, I will try and add the Bernstein to the reserve list. The VFT is a book and too long to add. (I'm trying to build a series of articles that will stay on reserves for workshops semester after semester... let me know if you've got any ideas).

So far...

Commitment Adorno, Theodor W. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES -- -- ONLINE RESERVE Creative reading techniques Padgett, Ron ELECTRONIC RESOURCES -- -- ONLINE RESERVE
How are verses made Mayakovsky, Vladimir ELECTRONIC RESOURCES -- -- ONLINE RESERVE
Oulipo : a primer of potential literature / translated and ecited by Warren F. Motte, Jr. (no author)
Poems for the millennium : the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry / edited
Poems for the millennium : the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry / edited
The Princeton handbook of poetic terms / Alex Preminger, editor ; Frank J. Warnke and O.B. Hardison,
The Teachers & writers handbook of poetic forms / edited by Ron Padgett.

and, for this class in particular...
The midnight / Susan Howe. Howe, Susan, 1937- Reserve-Circulation Desk -- 811.54 H858m 2003
Nest / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 1947- Reserve-Circulation Desk -- 811.54 B53n 2003 --

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

miscellany

william sez: 'So now, I view the “project” as being most of the things said in class: subverting the “poetic” reading experience, expressing a purely suburban landscape, and more lately creating a poetic space through the reading that is unique because of its brevity, you can’t latch on to it necessarily. Most of all, I wanted to speak directly to the reader, having a communication that is “talk.” Yes, they are reactions against what I was writing last semester. I don’t know, maybe later I will try this again.'

This is really clear & I think you've achieved it for sure. I am not so clear on the Faerie Queene / "things don't happen" stuff. Are you talking about perception creating the reality, the lack of absolute truths, that kind of stuff? Throw a bone here.

As to Padcha's argument for philosophy earlier--you mention that you study philosophy because it promises you answers to Big Questions. I think I believe Howe when she writes that poetry must pick up where philosophy leaves off--because in my experience w/philosophy we always end up not really knowing what the hell is going on. In my experience, in the end, there aren't any logical answers to things. What's that Kristin line? "Now, we can build with hollow stones"??? Something like that. That's a good answer.

Regarding my poem fun suggestion, I solemnly swear not to be mean.

I'm in for Meg's idea but I don't know about the Renaissance..


i'm in for Jessea (just promise not to be mean!) and i'll get back to Meg. It sounds great; i just need to be more sure about the summer before can commit to it.

Monday, February 23, 2004

thoughts coming in little bits

..so expect more short posts.

ok, so i just had this idea. you know how it's really fun to respond creatively to each others' work, but we're not supposed to get greedy and guilty and steal the work and make it ours? what about going with that?

what about a poem response project, where someone writes a poem, then everyone gets to creatively respond but it's still theirs? would anyone be interested in this? sort of epistolary thievery fun? we could have a separate email list or blog for it.
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx/lynx39.html

a prynne poem..

if he is weird then we're aliens speaking in code, no, whispering. backwards.
William and I looked up J H Prynne. We agree that he's weird. Massive volumn of work, though.
I haven't done anything stunningly worth-blogging this week. Having read the book, I look forward to Trong Tran's visit. I've looked up more on Stein. I am going to read more Stein this semester. I have always wanted to write about her, so it's going to be my paper for the Modern American poetry class. So far, my plan includes (and definitely not limited to) giving a grammatical reading of Stein. I think her main clauses will be pretty straightforward.... !!
ENGLISH POETRY POLITICS....
(got this via email from keston sutherland; was in the times)

February 22, 2004
Oxbridge split by the baffling bard
Maurice Chittenden

LATE at night a man sits writing verse in a deserted Cambridge college
library before heading home with his latest work in the basket of his
bicycle. Could this really be Britain's greatest living poet? The belated
"discovery" of J H Prynne, a bard who usually sells his work in pamphlets
with print runs of no more than 500, has split the worlds of academia and
poetry.

A new volume of the Oxford English Literary History, intended as a
definitive account of our written heritage, dismisses the "lingering
languor" of Philip Larkin and the movement poets of the 1950s.

In contrast Prynne, a 67-year-old don and chief librarian at Gonville &
Caius college, is hailed as an important influence on modern poets, more
than 40 years after he first dipped into what he calls "the great aquarium
of the language" to deliver his first verse.

The problem for many who read Prynne is that the words seem to swim over
the page with no decipherable meaning. His abstract work contrasts with the
more straightforward style of poets such as Larkin.

However, Randall Stevenson, reader in English literature at Edinburgh
University and author of the new Oxford volume, 1960-2000: The Last of
England?, writes that Prynne's "full significance for the period's poetry
began to be realised only at the end of the century".

Prynne, an engineer's son originally from Kent, is rewarded with a full
bibliography of his works at the end of the book while writers including
Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, and Muriel Spark, the novelist, are
ignored.

The claims for Prynne's greatness have divided dons. Some have likened the
row to the "ancients versus moderns" dispute aroused by the emergence of
Jonathan Swift's satirical works in the 18th century. Others speak of a
resurrection of the "curse of Ohel", the acronym for Oxford History of
English Literature.

James Fenton, the former professor of poetry at Oxford, once asked in a
poem: "Jeremy Prynne, Jeremy Prynne, isn't your oeuvre rather thynne? Don't
hit me with your rolling pynne."

But Stevenson, who says that the late Ted Hughes is the pre-eminent poet of
the late 20th century, said last week: "Prynne is an important influence on
English literature. I think speaking well of him is a scar to wear with
pride."

John Carey, former Merton professor of English literature at Oxford, who
gives the volume a scathing review in the Sunday Times books section this
week, accuses Stevenson of favouring the extreme violence and cruelty of
radical socialist playwrights of the 1960s and early 1970s. He said: "The
notion that Prynne is elevated in this way is bizarre. Such a dismal
assessment of Larkin is really unfair."

John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University
College London, recalled that the author Peter Ackroyd had once sent the
late Stephen Spender a pamphlet of Prynne's verse, saying: "It can be
called a gift, but hardly a present."

Sutherland added: "Prynne is incomprehensible, but he does have his
admirers who say he is interesting and on the edge."

Some poets are similarly baffled. Motion said: "Prynne divides the
poetry-reading community into a large number of people who find him
impenetrable and/or dull, and a much smaller number who think he's the
bee's knees. I've read him and been impressed by his integrity and
erudition -- but he's not someone I return to."

U A Fanthorpe, the poet who is criticised in The Last of England? for
failing to be innovative, said: "I have heard Prynne read and found him
hard to follow. I don't think being innovative is the big thing."

Roger McGough, the former member of the 1960s band Scaffold, who is praised
in the new volume for challenging convention, said: "I find Larkin very
accessible. Whether you go along with the doom and gloom, the message is
clear. Prynne I do find difficult."

Cambridge academics are similarly divided. Sir Frank Kermode, a former King
Edward VII professor, said: "He is a very friendly colleague but I have not
been able to make a great deal of his work. I don't understand why there
has to be a confrontation between him and Larkin. Why can't people like
them both?" Rod Mengham of Jesus College, a poet who has published some of
Prynne's pamphlets, said: "Many of us here are fans of his work."

Prynne usually shuns interviews and refuses to be photographed for the
sleeves of his books. This weekend he was bemused by all the excitement.

Interrupting a discussion with students at Gonville & Caius, he said: "It
doesn't surprise me in the least that some people do not understand my
poetry. Certainly it has not made me a rich man."


Thursday, February 19, 2004

one last note...

Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager should be in the bookstore shortly. It is dense so you might want to get a start on it since you've got the week of the 3rd off.

NEW WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

3/3
still no class

3/10
JoNelle (Kristen)
Angie (Padcha)

3/17
spring break

3/24
Dennis (William)
Scott (Angie)

3/31
Romney (Dennis)
Kristen (Scott)

4/7
Padcha (Romney)
William (Kristen)

4/14
Jessea (Padcha)
Dan (William)

4/21
Meg (Jessea)
JoNelle (Dan)

4/28
Angie (Meg)
Dennis (JoNelle)

TRUONG TRAN
reading/workshop
Wednesday, February 25
7 pm
Mills Hall 322

there is absolutely nothing poetic here to see nothing lyrical to hear go home to your families tell they you saw nothing forget what you thought you may have felt or touched language serves no purpose than that of meaning
--Truong Tan, dust and conscience

Truong Tran is the author of three collections of poetry including Placing The Accents, The Book of Perceptions, in which he collaborated with Oakland based organization Huong Viet Community, and dust and conscience which recently received the Poetry Center Book Award. He was born in 1969 in Saigon, Vietnam. He received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MFA at San Francisco State University. He is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Arts Council of Santa Clara, the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund and The San Franciso Arts Commission. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals including ZYZZYVA, The American Voice, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) and The North Dakota Quarterly. Truong is currently living in the Bay Area and working as Executive Director for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest Asian American Arts organization in United States.

Series sponsored in part with funds from the Irvine Foundation at Mills College, from 'A 'A Arts, through a grant it has received from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poets & Writers, Inc, through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.
hold the date...
Black Panther Tour
March 27
Leaving from West Oakland Public Library
18th and Adeline
$25
Reservations required
The tour is about 2 hours and 45 minutes long, but the recording doesn't give a start time. Kristen will let us know.

kate lilley was super excellent just because the language was funny and dense. something about it was working. i myself couldn't figure it out totally. i was wondering why i was enjoying it so much as i was listening. it made me laugh a lot but not the yuk yuk sort. perhaps example of pure pleasure of play of language.

on kristen's comments... i think you are being too harsh on yedda's work. which i think doesn't claim the biography (this was a comment in class and not a claim made at all in the book). and actually does work on larger, more global issues. which i think is very important. i like her work because it takes on issues very clearly and does not claim a marginality. she doesn't say, as sometimes literature about marginalization/victimization/identity does, that she didn't get enough of the spoils of america.

last night we were talking with catalina about race/class/gender issues in mfa programs. she was talking some about some issues at sfst when she was there. and i was thinking some about some similar moments in hawai'i. the hawai'i moment being when what i felt was a troubling and homophobic story (which i think was just not thought out on part of student; not that it was deliberate on his part) was given a prize by the creative writing program and this was upsetting to me. but i was also thinking about how the answer isn't just to avoid taking on the harder issues of sexuality/race/class/gender by resorting to an ambiguous or personal language. in other words, only talking about one's self/from one's position doesn't let one off these issues.

so i guess, kristen, i want to push you more on the work. what is ok to put in the work and what is not on these issues?

i had to think about this a lot in hawai'i. and i never felt i had _the_ answer. but some things i decided: that even while many people said it was just more colonialism to write about hawai'i when one is not from hawai'i, that to not write about hawai'i's colonial issues was not the solution. that this also was part of the problem. so the question became how to do it. and there were certain things i did not think it would be right to do. like it would not be right for me to write from a hawaiian point of view. or to claim to understand hawaiian culture or religious issues. or to claim that i knew what the right form of sovereignty would be for hawaiians. i don't write fiction, so this one is easy, but i would not write a story with only hawaiian characters or one that took place only in hawaiian communities.

i felt i had to make it clear in the work that i was not from hawai'i. but most importantly, i felt i had to make it clear in the work where i stood on the colonialism issue, that i was against it. and that i supported sovereignty and that it was the right of hawaiians to decide what sorts of government they wanted for their nation.

i would never claim that i avoided the appropriation issue at all. but these were my thoughts on how to negotiate, a negotiation that i always saw as being in progress. and i think that is what this work has to do (this is related some to meg's questions about writing about the mission). i think that one way that writing matters is that it can be a place where one thinks about these issues, thinks about how to talk about these difficult issues. or is written out of these questions.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

bar, the

this is a reminder that thursday nights are poets interacting at bar nights. we thought we would try out "the alley" in oakland because it's closer than jupiter (which sounds funny, ha ha). so if anyone here wants to come down after bill's reading or stephen's class, or both or neither, do it.

here is info:

9ish pm
the alley
3325 grand ave.
oakland ca

CLICK FOR MAP

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The Kate Lilley reading was super excellent fun.

I confess that I assigned the Susan Howe book because I am fascinated with it and yet can't figure it out yet either. And I thought maybe if we read it together, maybe we could figure something more out about it.

How would we do that? I am wondering if we could all trace our lines of connection through the book. Which is sort of what Meg and Jessea did. My copy is in my office but I will try and do this in the next day or so.

There is a review by John Palatella where he argues that it is "all about her mother" here.

Padcha, is the Howe book a philosophical poem?

OK. This is my third draft trying to tackle the philosophical poem issue…shouldn’t have started it. But I did. So, here I am facing the consequences.

I got fascinated by philosophy because 1) it promises me answers to big issues (although I never asked for details) 2) it’s a lot of “removed” thinking—I mean you are allowed to think about life, politics, justice, beauty, being, time; not so much dinner or transportation or laundry. I feel I’m going somewhere exceptional that will answer everything once I come back form it. 3) by the end, just the thinking itself empowers me—no concrete answer to big questions; and I still have to think about dinner and transportation and so on. But I feel I’m smarter. (4) by the very end, if thinking takes place in everyone, it will be really good even if we still need to routinely deal with daily life)

So, philosophy is about thinking, whether this thinking is personal or universal, whether this thinking belongs to one philosopher or to the human good. Philosophers largely get satisfied by thoughts. Writing this way makes me feel more ready to deal with the 'real' world. Writing philosophical poems is a mode of thinking for me. Reading one is more or less the same, although i have to admit, it's harder to read than to write poems that are of this nature.

What satisfies poets??

(I guess my question is still as big and hard as it was before... Sorry. I’ll stop now.)
The 21st-Century Poetics Series & Small Press Traffic are thrilled to
host a surprise appearance by

BILL LUOMA and TOM RAWORTH

Thursday, February 19
at the Miles House aka the Berkeley Center for Writers
2275 Virginia St. between Spruce and Arch in North Berkeley

7 pm potluck, 8 pm (sharp) readings

This event will be collaboratively funded; donations in the form of food,
drink, folding chairs, or the usual (sliding scale, $0-10) gratefully
accepted.

Bill Luoma was born in San Francisco in 1960 and earned degrees in chemistry
and computer science. His latest works include Works & Days (The Figures,
1998), Dear Dad (Tinfish, 2000), New Mannerist Tricycle (with Lisa Jarnot &
Rod Smith, Beautiful Swimmer, 2000), PeaceNick (IATH, 2002), % (No Press,
2004), and Radio Grasshopper (a play; SPT, 2004). He is also a member of
the Subpress collective, through which he recently edited Scott Bentley's
The Occasional Tables. He lives in Oakland.

Tom Raworth was born in London just before the Second World War and is
living in Cambridge during the Third One. For more than forty years he has
worked, written, printed, published, taught, collaged, travelled, and
indulged the usual physical functions. He likes spicy foods, and needs more
light as he gets older. His Collected (not Complete) Poems was published in
the UK by Carcanet Press in 2003.

Monday, February 16, 2004

does anyone have suggestions for writing in a trance? juliana, our resident hypnotist?

anyway, here are my thoughts on....

the midnight

I think my favorite thing about this book is the overall mood of mystery and investigation. It’s hard to pin down. Reading the Midnight is like sifting through the empty house of a dead collector. Going through boxes in an attic, letters in a desk drawer. There are so many histories and artifacts. It feels very collaged, like Howe gathered all these materials, pieces of evidence. For what exact purpose I am not certain, but I read them with interest because they feel very intentional. I put together little fleeting narratives as I read these. Detective. The small boxy poems are harder to pin down, but they feel very ghosty to me. Spectral. Hushed. (I could use these for my own work, if my ghost poems continue—they might die.) With each little box I get a whole (unintentional or not??) moment. To me these don’t read as though Howe is putting them together randomly, they feel like she’s put together a scavenger hunt for us to figure out. But like I said, I haven’t figured them out yet. Such a strong sense of history and research.. The images are striking and spooky, more evidence. Children with dark eyes, old drawings, so much to do with printed matter. Love of printed material and old books. Gothic. Centuries-old handwriting. Very much collecting evidence of the ghost of these readers & writers. Permission to create my own narrative (as opposed to, say, jackson maclowe’s work..). My, that was scattered.

Back to my unsuccessful phony trance making.

About The Midnight
After having been reading the book attentively for the past week, I still need to say that I find it difficult. It’s so interestingly rich and encompassing. There are two centuries in it! It must be one of those really great books that really require time to read and understand. I feel it but can't pretend to get it because I don’t, at least not in its entirety. Or, the text hasn’t got me yet. It one day will.

These are what I like about it so far: I like the prose, which reads to me like undecorated retellings of stories. They read a bit like newspaper columns but more secretive, more privy; I like the poetry pretty much the same effect—undecorated retellings of stories—but even more, it’s not only undecorated; it was sanded to the bear bone! What I am still working on is the big picture of the book. I’m trying to piece things together. I’m looking forward to hear what you all have to say. (Jessea, you told me you were liking it?)
i like scott's #3.

meredith monk was great this weekend. barge was fun. lyn hejinian and rodney koeneke also great fun. too much running around.

tomorrow night there is what looks to be an interesting reading at berkeley:
Tuesday, February 17
Kate Lilley
was born in 1960 and grew up in Perth and Sydney. After completing her PhD on Masculine Elegy at the University of London she spent four years as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. Since 1990 she has taught feminist literary history and theory at the University of Sydney and has published widely on early modern women’s writing and contemporary poetry. She is the author of Versary (Salt Publishing, 2002), and editor of Margaret Cavendish: New Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 1992).

Margaret Ronda
is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley. She received an MFA in poetry from Indiana University. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Seattle Review, Green Mountains Review, and other journals.

5:30 food & chat
7 pm Reading
in Maud Fife Room 315
Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

padcha: yr questions on philosophical poems too big and hard to answer. maybe you should attempt answer and then we can argue with you or not.
the lyn hejinian blog is a hoax!
some thoughts to toss in thought-pot:

-I wish I were as smart as Scott, but I'm not.

-Any bar is fine/dandy. If no one has objections to Scott's suggestion, I say we make it official. To minimize confusion. Can someone post where it is?

-I think a lot of these discussions are in some way hovering around what Kristin brought up about Ego. Individual poet-genius versus mouthpiece for community experience. This hasn't really been an issue for me in terms of poetry..yet. But now it is. It's an interesting dichotomy that plays out all over the place. I'm inclined to think Ego is okay for humans. I could say otherwise but I'd only be doing that because it sounds nicer.

-As to Padcha's question about the place of loftyphilosophy type issues in poetry. I wonder same thing. Anyone have ideas?

-I also wonder about the idea of Escapism. I forgot to write about this the other day and don't have the stamina for it now. But basically, Wallace Stevens admits that the ideas he develops basically come down to poetry as escapism. Which also brings me back to the Thom Yorke vs. Howard Zinn discussion re. artists + politics. Zinn says if your work isn't political then it's escapist, it's "entertainment." Like you're no better than Britney Spears. And Yorke says, "Yes it's escapist, but escapism isn't bad." And Stevens is on same page as Yorke. Weigh in!

-Dan said he was going to blog about the idea of poet-as-medium, channeler, but he hasn't. So do it! But in case you don't I'm throwing it out there. We talk a lot in workshop about plans and assembling of poems. "My ideal thesis would include a study of all the animals in my local zoo and also some quantum mechanics and some poems about Mexican bicycles." Or in class we're like, "Maybe you should add some language of gardening in here." But what if that whole idea of assembling/recipe making assumes all poems are written this way? What about idea of writing to find out what you're writing about? Of poet as transcriber of poem that comes from Out There?

-I didn't BARGE but Rodney Koeneke + Lyn Hejinian reading was great. I have been won over by the Koeneke. He was a great performer. We should all take acting classes before readings. I resolve to become more eloquent. Hejinian's poems were all cowboy narrativo about...sailing? Help.

Saturday, February 14, 2004

for those of us at Meredith Monk's concert: it's amazing what a Panda can do, isn't it?? Go Panda!

Friday, February 13, 2004

This is in response to Jessea's last paragraph of her Manisfesto. (But yes, Jessea, I read the whole thing! It's really you! I like it.)

To continue with Plato a bit (since Stevens was using the horses and charioteer image in the essay and I think Plato rocks): Plato thinks that when we see something we find beautiful (like "I like this line here"), we recollect itsy bit of the Beauty that resides in heaven. And by this very act, the charioteer is able to drive the two horses a bit closer to heaven; our soul is lifted up closer to the Truth by seeing something beautiful. This is all Plato. Which I think it's beautiful.

How is this political? Again, I remain an idealist. I think I was talking to you, Jessea (was I? right?), that if politics exists ideally to bring about a fair, just, happy society, everyone should be able to do what makes s/he happy on the conditions that anything that makes anyone unhappy shouldn't make anyone happy. Seeing something beautiful and feeling good about it might be a political act by this rather impossible claim.

my politics !?!!

(thanks to Juliana) what is making me happy now is that I am gradually finding the companionship between what might be my politics and my poetics. it's about the english language (sorry if this sounds repetitive. I think it is. I'll be brief). I am getting excited about the fact that what I am writing now might actually speak to what I think the world might benefit from insignificant someone like me. I want the world to think about the english language more critically (in a good, knowledgeable way) and less go-with-the-flow-ly. But maybe the world is already thinking that. on that note, Juliana, may i borrow some of those books over spring break?

helps here plezz: how does something highly "out-there" and supposed-to-be universal like philosophy fit in with poetry? how do they relate? how would philosophical poems get placed politically? The last question is really for me. (wink)
i forgot about beers on thursday night. please remind me.

jessea! interesting!

sometimes i think when this political question dissolves, as it does when the work isn't tied to clear political movements--in the way that trask's is tied to sovereignty or in the way that sandinista poets were tied to that revolution--that i turn to myself. and i say, well my political life was changed by poetry. somewhat. i'm still trying to sort out how much of this was was social and how much of it in the work. probably some combination of both.

i think rodrigo's book platform is great because it is trying to build (rebuild?) ties b/t form and clear political moments. it states its affiliations very clearly. i like that. no chance of confusion?

i think what i like about this question is that i am still trying to think this through. and one question i have is how to tie poetry to various political movements that matter to me. the anti-globalization movement matters to me. ok, now what? what does that mean for my writing? but also for my way of life? (b/c both come together no matter what.)
MANIFESTO

Warning: this is a really long post and maybe not helpful or relevant to anyone but myself. I apologize, but I don’t see any other way to say this. Then we can return to previous discussion of manageable things.

There are so many things I want to say & to figure out. Let me start with Juliana’s essay about the Auden line, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” about her experiences in graduate school & her position on the necessarily political role poetry plays, or should. This question was germinating last semester, in the craft class. I have been writing poetry for many years, not as many as some of you, but as long as I have been able to write. I did my undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz in poetry. And then I was out in the world & poetry became kind of an amorphous presence through absence. Poetry for me, when I was out of school, was something I thought of so much but I did not have the community of thinkers that I have now. What I mean to say is, when I was not talking about poetry, when I was only thinking about it on my own, I was not asked these questions. These questions of politics. Because I never thought about it that way, and I did not seek out the community that would have been discussing it. When I was in the craft class, I was immediately shocked to be outside of my own head, and to remember what should have been obvious and present, but which was not. That is: I had to suddenly confront the fact that there are so many people writing for reasons which I had never considered. They just did not occur to me. When I heard (remembered) that there were these Language poets, whose explicitly stated primary goal was to strip language of what it was, what it is, I immediately understood the idea, but couldn’t understand how one could continue to do this, or try to do this, for a long period of time, over many poems. Yes, the concept makes logical sense: language is a form of control, language and society are interdependent, to break down the control of the society means breaking down the language. But I don’t understand how one does that over and over. How one has the energy and passion to keep doing that. TO write more and more, to write every day, to keep making poems to try to do that. I thought, once you break down language, what else is there to do? What else is there to write? You’re done.

And in then our class we moved on to this War between the experimental and mainstream, and that was also interesting to me and incomprehensible. Because I honestly hadn’t really thought of poetry in those terms before. Yes, I went to UC Santa Cruz and Peter Gizzi was my teacher and he introduced me to poets I had never heard of. But I don’t remember ever thinking “Wow, this is so different from what I knew of as poetry.” It just seemed like more poetry, more language. I never thought of Adrienne Rich as “mainstream.” I guess I see it more now, but when I first read her I did not discriminate in that way. She blows my mind. So do experimental writers. So does the thesaurus, the desert, music both popular and not, so do movies, so does life. I don’t think I really discriminate in this way. There is something to be found in good narrative poetry. Something to be gained in classics. Something important to life in pop music. And “experimental poetry,” it’s just another style of poetry. It has words, I don’t care if you’re trying to strip the words of their meaning. For this reader, you have failed. I don’t think it’s human nature to accept meaninglessness. We make meaning. We make symbols. It has been going on forever. It can’t stop. And it isn’t necessarily harmful.

So suddenly these questions started swirling for me. Suddenly, I was asking myself and being asked questions which had never been posed for me before. For this, I am very grateful to Juliana. I don’t know if these questions would have been raised as much without her pushing. These questions don’t come up in the “regular format” workshop of which we are all so familiar. It’s hard & it’s important to ask these things.

So anyway, when she posted her essay, I felt like someone had taken a stand. I can’t express how happy I was that this happened. It was an absolute! You are working for the revolution, or you are complicit with the system. Of course, I totally disagreed with this, but I didn’t have the words to explain why. I hadn’t reasoned through it. So I started asking you guys about it. What does it mean to be political? What does political work look like? Does just using the words of politics mean a work is political? Does just using disjunctive syntax mean it is? I was never asking to confirm the original argument, I was looking for my own way of reasoning my way out of it. Because what happened was, in one paragraph, Juliana made me feel like I was on the side of the system unless I figured out a way to either be political or to justify another way of writing.

And then what happened was, I felt, the discussion went soft & vague. “Everything’s political.” “Just being a poet is political.” Etcetera. I was craving strong arguments, but no one had them. I still didn’t feel that politics was the only answer, but I wasn’t satisfied with what was offered to stand by it.

It’s funny, one day after class I was in the Tea Shop with Meg and Dennis. And I was telling them how I felt about all this, and I think I was a little depressed and beaten down and frustrated. And they commented on the religious overtones of my need to know these things. The questions verging on metaphysical issues. This made something clear to me: my question of the role of the poet was wound up with my question of life. Of what it means to live life, what is the purpose. With Juliana’s statement I had ended up in a crisis of faith and a crisis of asking these really Huge Questions of what it all means. When I realized what I was doing, it was a relief and it was scary. Because it meant that while I was never going to get the answers to unanswerable questions, it also meant that this thinking was important and was necessary and was so far away from my years of working 50 hour weeks at an advertising agency worried about working another weekend to get a client’s ads to a magazine or sitting miserably making hundreds of pdfs and Excel spreadsheets.

My first answer to why I write was this: I write because I feel nostalgia and longing for life in the moments as they occur. This made perfect sense to me but I need to say more, because I am currently constantly surprised as I am misunderstood when I say things succinctly. So here it goes. This is life, these are the trappings of mine and of others: work, money, cleaning and mopping, trash, food, driving, reading the paper, piles of books, dusty rugs, bills to pay, tourism, aging. I sit within this life. I sit here at my desk, I sit on my back stoop, I sit in my car driving the freeway to school. I sit alone, I sit with other people. Life made up of these little constant moments of unrealized reflection and observation. And then within this life there are times when things are for some reason heightened. We observe the sun falling at a certain orange angle at dusk, and we feel something. Or at least I do. I feel longing. I feel longing for the moments that lift us out of the dirty dishes and the subway and the traffic and the junk mail. Longing for the sun or extreme weather. Longing for the ability to look on everything as radiant. Longing, even, for the pain of someone I love dying, because it places me in a realm that is always surrounding the mundane world but is not always accessible. Longing for love even when I am in love. Longing for the past, the future. It’s a very anti-Buddhist way of living life but I think it is why I write.

When I was a kid I learned to read very young. I read constantly. I was given these books to read, and everyone agreed it was a good activity. The books made a promise to me that was broken by life. The books said there is adventure and magic. The books said there are passages in a closet that lead to Narnia. The books said that the mundane world is not the most important one. The books said maybe there are fairies and ghosts and time travel and kid detectives. This isn’t funny. This is a real problem. The world gives us these books and they shape our view of the world. And then as we grow up, one by one these things are taken away and are disproved. I would sit ay my desk in Manhattan and say “why am I here worried about the print quality of postcards and billboards?” I never thought this was what life was going to be. They never tell you this when you’re young. I’m really mad about it. I am honestly, humorlessly, angry. Angry that here I am and no one believes in ghosts and the imagination is an instrument of torture for what doesn’t exist.

This is a story, one example, one way of explaining the sorrow that covers life. The emptiness that surrounds of and which we write ourselves out of, which we read ourselves out of. We live lives wanting more than the lives we have. The war is a problem, the broken down car is a problem, the poisoning of the planet is a problem, but beyond these things, the need for more out of life is the big one. It’s really, the most important problem. And this is where art comes in. It has to. Or religion. Luckily I don’t see much of a difference between the two.

So last night I went to Stephen’s Modern American Poetry class and we talked about Wallace Stevens. And particularly the essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” This is probably old hat to lots of you, but it was new to me. And I walked in and two different people said to me, “This essay answers your questions!” And I hadn’t read it but then I read the most important parts. And then today I read the whole thing. And it was like a popping zoom of an answer, finally. This is the answer I got. This is really only concentrating on the parts of the essay that I want to be the answer, and it’s probably a gross oversimplification of the essay, but I don’t care.

Here’s what I take from it. There is the reality, and then there is the imagination. For me, these two things are the words for the contrast I wrote about above. There is the world of stuff and politics and duty and money, which is reality. And then there is the need for more, which manifests itself in religion and art, which is the imagination. And the fascinating thing is that Stevens thinks the two are symbiotic. The imagination, the art, the spirit, must base its creations on the world. And the world, in change, becomes something different and shining when the art is there. Art gives the world its significance. Art needs the world first. It’s a beautiful idea. It’s helpful to me.

So the role of the poet is one who makes the world what it can be when it is important. The poet makes a poem of the bent spoon or the poverty or the war or the love or the silly dead cat or the potted plant, and turns the mundane world into something more. It’s the act of poetry that creates the possibility of nostalgia, and continues it, out of it, for it. This makes so much sense to me. Maybe it’s elitist and old-fashioned and wrong in some way. Go ahead and tell me how. Tell me how the authority of the writer over the reader is just like George Bush taking away our freedoms or something. It just sounds true to me and I can’t deny that.

This is my answer for me right now. This is my gauntlet. Somehow I got here.

On the question of what happens when we read that I was asking yesterday, and how I want some deep answer. That’s right, I do! This is the question. When you read something that strikes you in some way, that means something to you, I want to know why that is, and what happens in your brain when you read it. When we are in workshop and we say “Ooh, I really like this line here.” What do we mean? I suspect my answer will have a whole lot to do with the above long-windedness. In fact it might be the very question that made all that up there happen. I don’t know.


on jessea's question about how one reads a poem...

i know she wants some deep answer. but i realized this winter when i taught a workshop at goddard, a master poetry workshop that i hate to teach b/c i hate the idea of master poetry, i realized that i read a huge amount into the shape of poem on page. everyone had submitted these one page poems that went half way across the page and then they had a similar tone and it was annoying to me.

and then last weekend i opened this book that joel kuszai had and saw it was all poems of 12-20 lines that went half way across the page and i put it down and said this is not for me.

ron silliman had this thing on his blog about a year ago where he was reading Wesleyan U P in the early days, the days when he said it really mattered, which to him is in the negative sense. and he said this about a list of about 30 books: “The form was relatively simple – maybe one ‘major’ poem of as much as twelve pages, surrounded by a series of one-page pieces, coming to anywhere between 60 & 100 pages total &, if you were part of the ‘core’ group, one such book every three or so years.” i imagine Ron’s reading is not totally fair. but i have to admit that i often read with more interest when i see a book whose page breaks this form.

in the other class, jessea was asking of yedda, something like what if the ambiguity is too ambigious. what if we read this book and can't get the politics. and as we were talking about this i was thinking about how the fragmented form has become a certain shorthand for a certain politics. so the form would hold those who read in the tradition to a certain assumption of politics. but it might not if you don't read in the tradition.

which made me think some about what assumptions we atrophy into. i think i've atrophied against the one page poem. and then too quickly forgiven anything that does the opposite.

this is from dennis.... he says it is good!

The following events are being held in conjunction with Meridian's
current exhibition: Hubris Corpulentus: Political Prints by Art
Hazelwood which runs thru February 28, 2004

Panel Discussion
Functions & Uses of Political Art Now
Panel Moderator: Peter Selz
Panel: Art Hazelwood, Jos Sances & DeWitt Cheng

Saturday, February 14, 2004; 2 p.m.

Artists Show Their Wares: From Rags to Posters
Artists and activists alike are invited to share their anti-war art
work.
If you'd like to bring something to share call 415.398.7229.
Saturday, February 21, 2004; 2 p.m.

New!
The American Friends Service Committee and Meridian Gallery present
Empire: Costs and Consequences, a Dialogue with Dr. Joseph Gerson, Gwyn
Kirk and Christine Cordero
Wednesday, February 25, 2004 at 7pm

Gallery hours
11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Tuesday - Saturday

contact
Corinna Press 415.398.7229

Panel Discussion, Functions & Uses of Political Art Now on Saturday,
February 14, 2004 beginning at 2 p.m.
Peter Selz will moderate the panel made up of Art Hazelwood, Jos Sances
& DeWitt Cheng. The panel will focus on political art as it is
manifested in contemporary society; the relevancy of political visual
art for a wider community in the wake of the war in Iraq. Peter Selz
is
an author, art historian, curator, founding director Berkeley Art
Museum
at the UC Berkeley. Selz is completing work on a book that deals with
40 years of political art in California. Jos Sances runs Alliance
Graphics, the only union screen print company in the United States
which
donates profits to the Middle East Children's Alliance. Sances, a
political artist, recently showed his mixed media painted sculptures at
the Richmond Art Center. He was loudly attacked for his show in
Vallejo, California which used Thomas Kincaid images to parody American
culture. DeWitt Cheng is a painter and writes for Artweek,
DailyGusto.com and SlurryMagazine.com.

Artists Show Their Wares: From Rags to Posters, February 21, 2004,
Saturday at 2 p.m.
Anti-war protests this past winter sparked a cottage industry of
political imagery on signs, billboards, T-shirts, patches, buttons,
bumper stickers, banners, performances. Many people who never before
made political art found themselves driven to put their outrage into
form. This open house event invites artists to share their political
voice with each other and the community. Both artists who have never
before felt inspired to make political art and those who have been
working on political art for years will participate. The artists will
present their work and speak about the inspiration for it. This is an
excellent opportunity to gauge the expressive power of an activated art
community both for artists and the public. If you are interested in
sharing your work please call Meridian Gallery: 415.398.7229.

Hubris Corpulentus: Prints by Art Hazelwood (January 15 - February 28,
2004)
The exhibition of Art Hazelwood's prints continues through February 28.
Hubris Corpulentus is a state of obscene, overweening pride that
produces monstrous realities out of the stupor of irrationality. The
handbooks of psychological disorders offer no such term. The prints of
Art Hazelwood lay claim to such a title in their representations of
Wall
Street, war and the absurdities of society. Over thirty-five of his
prints are on display at Meridian Gallery.


MERIDIAN GALLERY
Society for Art Publications of the Americas
545 Sutter Street, Suite 201
San Francisco, CA 94102

info@meridiangallery.org
www.meridiangallery.org

t: 415.398.7229
f: 415.398.6176

Thursday, February 12, 2004

CATALINA CARIAGA
reading/workshop
Wednesday, February 18
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public


Long time Oakland resident, Catalina Cariaga is the author of Cultural Evidence (Subpress Collective, 1999). Her poems mix critique, history, autobiography, anecdote, and exploration of Filipina-American identity. Cultural Evidence is an intensely serious exploration of family and language, combining the uncanny authenticities of oral tradition and the most sophisticated mixed-use typeface technology, mirroring the diaspora of her family from the South Asian Pacific islands to California's rocky beaches and cities. Publisher’s Weekly notes about Cultural Evidence: “Whether deconstructing myths of anthropology’s objectivity, of ‘culture’ as defined by different, often incompatible world views, or self-sustaining myths of non-fluid time, nation, place or language, Cariaga’s passionate investigations provide ample evidence for their dispersal.”

instructions for workshop are at http://english250.blogspot.com

forthcoming talks/readings/discussions/workshops by oakland associated writers...
25-Feb truong tran
24-Mar chris chen
31-Mar tisa bryant
7-Apr eileen tabios and michelle batista
14-Apr rodrigo toscano
21-Apr renee gladman

contact Juliana Spahr, jspahr@mills.edu, for more information.

Series sponsored in part with funds from the Irvine Foundation at Mills College, from 'A 'A Arts, through a grant it has received from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poets & Writers, Inc, through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.
GRADUATING STUDENTS...

i mentioned this at workshop but since two of the people it might mean something to were not there, i thought i would post it here.

If graduating students desire, they might want to give workshop copies of their entire thesis for their second workshop. If they do this, they might want to direct readers who feel that reading a thesis is too much for them to certain pages within the thesis. But this would allow those who wish to read/talk about thesis as a whole the opportunity to do this. This is, however, not required. Just an opportunity.


this is the waikiki website that i've mentioned before (re: romney's post)... Historic Waikiki.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

blog alert... http://mylifebylynhejinian.blogspot.com/


padcha, keep pushing on english issues b/c i think they have impact on all our writing in u.s. or is thing we all have to think about. what does it mean to be writing in english when english is so invasive right now. poetry is not as big an import as hollywood, but all of u.s. culture is still part of u.s. culture machine.

i do critical work on this english issue some. i'm trying to think about work that writes against this growth of english (b/c also large tradition in u.s. of bilingual writing) so here are some citations on basic introductory works...

there is a lot of discussion about global spread of english. a good, simple introduction is david crystal's global english. see also:
Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. New York: Oxford U P, 1992.
Pennycook, Alastair. The Cultural Politics of English As an International Language. New York: Addison-Wesley P, 1995.

lots of discussion of english in african literature context. big fight between ngugi wa thiongo who stopped writing in english and writes only in kikuyu some years ago. achebe takes other side.

here are classic citations:
Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975. 55-62.
Ngūgī wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986.
Rushdie, Salman. “’Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism: 1981-1991. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. 61-70
Wali, Obiajunwa. “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 4 (1963): 14.

this book is good on english at the expense of other languages:
Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. New York: Oxford U P, 2000.

i have most of this in photocopy and/or book if you want to read.

i like dan's formulation of workshop as one way you learn how to read.

on meg's questions: i like these questions b/c i think if you don't ask them then you get bad anthropology. the questions have to be somewhat in the work. what might you have to say that might be useful about the mission? what sorts of political movements would you have to align your work with to have it be ethical? or would you? is there a difference between tony hillerman and muriel rukeyser? what would it be?
Sorry if that post is there twice--Blogger's freakin' out on me & won't let me delete.
Poetry as poison, poetry as crime circuit, poetry as espionage. Hi! It's quite lovely outside though ants are attacking my desk. So much to talk about here.

The workshop & the workshopped poem. I get this idea. I mean, I see how it's feasible that we end up with a "workshopped" aesthetic, considering how similar most workshops are that I've been in, aside from the people. I mean the basic format. But I wonder, does that really produce homogeneous work? I wonder how you guys would say your work has been changed by the workshops. There have definitely been changes made to my work, but more to the technical stuff. Like, hi, bad grammar issues. Or if I see that everyone is reading a line a certain way (I'm pretty democratic about it) which I don't intend, I'll probably change it. Because I won't be there to argue with the reader when it's in a Real Book. BUt other than that, I think the real value of the workshop is community building. Just being in a group of people that share your concerns and passions for the work. I am an extrovert & I get energized by talking to people. I think it actually helps my brain become sharper.

And then in our new Juliana format workshop, I really like the idea of the creative responses being a way to show how you read. In our craft class I was too scared most weeks to try a creative response. I thought it would have been easier to explain what I thought the work was doing to me. But it was never easy! I ended up being very vague & pointing out insignificant things. It was a poor translation of the actual experience of reading. I think the best way to examine how we read a poem is to write a poem back. When I did the cowboy narrativo version of Scott's poem, I think that was just one possible poem that I could have written to say the same thing, which is: how Scott's original made me feel. It's like, say, you make a big sculpture of a staircase & you paint it pink. And this makes me feel all these things. And I could try to explain it but it would be better to write a poem about/out of a mailbox which is missing numbers. Because in my mind the two things are related somehow. And though my response might not be logically, causally related, it might do just as good of a job of "explaining" how I read your sculpture. In the end this might be more valuable for you, and might be much more valuable then me saying, hmm I like the staircase but I'd like to see more steps and less bannister, just because.

Then there is English and then there is bleach. I just bought some bleach at Walgreen's. I have weird feelings about buying it at grocery stores because I don't like poison in the same bag as my food. I don't think I would ever put it next to my baby.

I have to think more about the English thing. I have very little authority on this because it's the only language I'm fluent in, and it's so widespread that I rarely have to think about it. I will say this, though. The few times that I've been in foreign countries where I didn't fluently speak the language, it was a very psychedelic experience. Like almost being able to understand what's going on, but questioning everything, constantly asking yourself "Did she really just say that? Am I crazy?" Kind of like poetry? Especially in France. Like, yes I understood that word and that word all those words, but not in that string, that combination! Does not compute. So I'll just sit here and pretend they're talking about pink staircases.
Thanks Juliana. I'll write a book of writing. one day i'll have it!

to continue...
as all of you probably know already, I always have an immense interest in the languag of english itself--lingusitically, socio-politically, poetically. Juliana has spotted this from my work which i think is extremely true. it is that I always interact with/think about english as a cross-culture. people all over the world (at least are expected to) speak english somewhat decently and, among them, not many even ask why that is the case. they believe it is just the way it is. which might be true.

don't get me wrong here. i love the english languauge to death. i just want to understand it even more.
what i have been thinking about (and still am) is the question of how to place english in the category of an international language, as free from socio-political baggage as possible. (this applies to poetry too--how do we read non-native enlish poetry, because it exists and might have resulted from "the world of english"!!) it irritates me constantly when i see ESL students from all over the world flocking into summer english programs in the states and elsewhere, learn almost nothing, and go home proud. (OK. I did this before, not sure how to hate exactly it but quite sure that there must be other ways.)

not to say the same scenario doesn't happen with other languages. but it so happans that english is so very dominant.

so here are some of my ideas (which i am not sure now these will actualize or not):
i want to think about how to let the learning of english for non-english speakers be more toward self-knowledge than resume builder. i want the understanding that english doesn't automatically entail superiority to get established somehow. right now, for many parts, english is just resume stuff and that's it. but there's so much more great things about english! one could argue, there's importance of communication here, i know, people need to be able to understand each other. english just happens to be the most common language. even if the result--people still need to learn english--stays the same, i think there's tremendous good to this piece of understanding if people get it.

now. for me. english is also almost the only way of expressing all this and, more importantly, my creative work. because, as compared to the other two languages i know, english has gone through most turbulant "creative" development (as way as other kind of development too--but let's stay focus here).

for example, i think the Thai language needs what has been modernism here. not to say there's anything negative about Thai. but, given the critical lack of interest and the absence of poets in the country--young people find poetry to be old-people's stuff, there are like two poetry books in bookstores--to me at least, something's got to change, no matter how minimally or slowly.

and, thinking this, i also want to try and keep what we call 'the system' within creative writing as out-of-the-picture as possible. get it before it gets here kinna measure. i guess i am trying to articulate all this as i think more about the future of me.
padcha, i like to think of workshops, or mfa programs in general, more as places for thinking and places for connecting with other thinkers. and less as little craft training machines.

thus constant emphasis on doing as much as you can to enter into community of writers...reviewing books, going to readings, participating in email discussion lists, talking to other poets at bar, etc. poetry (and publication) as a social life not as an endorsment system.

this weekend joel kuszai gave a talk on how we should see small press poetry world as international criminal syndicate. he was talking about national writers union, a leftist activist group of writers, from the 1920s-30s as the model. i like this model.

kristin also mentions lifestyle. this is big negotiation. lots of different answers which depend on what sort of money one has in one's pocket on most days. poets, w/o much money in their pocket by fate, work. this might be something that is best seen as a way of learning rather than a liability just because you have to do it either way, why not see it as something that is a benefit and maybe it will become one. i always think k-12 teacher is good job for poet starting out. you get holidays and summers off. i recommend special ed and developmental reading especially (lots of need in these areas; less students). mills has great certification program. but you can teach in private schools w/o certification. also international teaching racket here. check out the carney sandoe agency. they have website where you can register and if they take you, they will place you in a job. other jobs poets tend to do: proofreading, arts admin, bartending, librarian (big popular poet job at the moment).

i don't know where you, padcha, can find out more about the pedagogical issues other than that elephant book that you already read last semester. there are lots of exercise books for teaching creative writing. you could look at those. that sort of new age genre also, writing down the bone. etc. maybe that new daniel kane book would help: What Is Poetry: Conversations With the American Avant-Garde. perhaps you should write a book for us to read.

i was talking with jena, from whom i stole this workshop format, over the weekend. she was talking about how doing the processes, rather than the sort of generic do this and do that feedback, takes a certain higher level of generosity and that is the challenge of making it work finally. that to make it work you have to ask not what poem i would like better, but what am i doing as a reader. that the processes when they work are about interacting rather than rewriting.

on WALKS, i will probably go to barge walk on sunday unless i have to get bill from airport then. i would like to go to peralta house. and kristin, right?, is planning a black panther tour. the albany bowl is worth a walk.

Monday, February 09, 2004

thank you to dennis for the poem and the author's "name." it's great.

I finally have The Poethical Wager, which I had ordered since before Christmas at UC press on Bancroft. Extremely satisfied to finally have it!


This week, a non-poet friend of mine asked me about what people do in poetry workshop, and how do people teach poetry workshop. And how we get grades. My answer, she thought, wasn't at all adequate.

This becomes somewhat a pedagogical question to me. Where can we find out more about it? (Juliana?) The more I think of it, the more abstract this gets in my head. So, if you guys can help de-abstract it, please do.

I think workshop is the place where we are granted attention of a group of engaged audience (and give it too). Essentially, that should be all there is to it. But then workshop can really shape your work if you kinna let that happen. (That has happened to me before!) So we could end up with all the generic "workshop poems" which, sadly, sometimes get praised institutionally. On the other hand, if you don't let workshop have any effect on you at all, why going to workshop? There has to be a balance. Nonetheless, given the fact that merit of work is gained partly through publication and prizes, and in most cases, students get grade from workshop, the balance can be easily tilted.

Just for fun, (and b/c I dream to teach in the future...) let's try describing YOUR perfect workshop. Who's in??
for those working on publication project, check out
bookmobile.com

i heard a lot about print on demand at conference this weekend. it looks decent.

NOW ON RESERVE...

Commitment Adorno, Theodor W. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Creative reading techniques Padgett, Ron ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
How are verses made Mayakovsky, Vladimir ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
The midnight / Susan Howe. 811.54 H858m 2003
Nest / Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. 811.54 B53n 2003
Oulipo : a primer of potential literature / translated and ecited by Warren F. Motte, Jr. 840.6044 O934 1998
Poems for the millennium : the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry / 808.81 P744 v.1
Poems for the millennium : the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry / 808.81 P744 v.2
The Princeton handbook of poetic terms / Alex Preminger, editor ; 808.1 P957 1986
The Teachers & writers handbook of poetic forms / edited by Ron Padgett. 808.1 T253 1987

to access electronic resources...
go to minerva.mills.edu
search reserves by faculty
enter spahr
choose english 270
password is eng270s04

Thursday, February 05, 2004

ELIZABETH TREADWELL
reading/workshop
Wednesday, February 11
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public

Elizabeth Treadwell currently lives in Oakland, California, where she was born in 1967. She is of Cherokee and Irish persuasion on her mother’s side. She is the author of a collection of prose poems, Populace (Avec, 1999), and a novel, Eleanor Ramsey: the Queen of Cups (SFSU, 1997); as well as several chapbooks including two short volumes of her Eve Doe project. Her long poem, LILYFOIL (or Boy & Girl Tramps of America), is available free as an ebook at durationpress.com. A new collection of her poetry, Chantry, will be published by Chax Press. She is currently the director of Small Press Traffic. In 2002 she organized Indigenous Writing Now, a conference at SPT celebrating and discussing current practices in Native American literature(s), and patterns in writing by Native Americans, with Native American poets, writers and scholars representing nine Native nations: Laguna Pueblo, Navajo, Cherokee, Nez Perce, Suquamish, Mohawk, Dakota, Arapaho, and Chippewa.

forthcoming talks/readings/discussions/workshops by oakland associated writers...
18-Feb catalina cariaga
25-Feb truong tran
24-Mar chris chen
31-Mar tisa bryant
7-Apr eileen tabios and michelle batista
14-Apr rodrigo toscano
21-Apr renee gladman

Series sponsored in part with funds from the Irvine Foundation at Mills College and from 'A 'A Arts with grants it has received from the National Endowment for the Arts and Poets & Writers, Inc, through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.
my talk for ithaca conference will be my blog post for this week (this is an updated version of a talk on my website from another editing conference from last year so i really am cheating but it will take me three flights to get to ithaca and three flights back so that is my excuse)...

PART ONE
They went to graduate school in a cold place. There was lots of conversation in this cold place. Lots of attention to the techniques of radical modernism and the legacies of radical modernism. People met in various bars late at night, after they had done some reading and some writing alone in their large yet cold rented apartments, and talked about things. They braved the cold and the ice to talk about things. The things they talked about were things like radical modernism. And legacies. And male poets. They talked not reflectively about male poets as MALE poets, but just compulsively about male poets as if they were not even noticing that they just talked about male poets. They couldn't help themselves. There was a heroic tendency in the cold place that felt as if it was a warm breeze. A heroism that came from dealing with the cold and snow more than most other places in the nation. A heroism that came from a city dealing with a steel industry now gone and the reminder of a once thriving machismo which was now at risk. And a heroism that came from a city dealing with repeated and absurd losses in various superbowls. A heroism of a city of numerous bars.

And there was a heroism of poetic sensibilty.

The poetic sensibility was a heritage. It took the form of bold declarations. And it also took the form of many magazines and an attention to the form of bold declaration that a magazine could make. And it took the form of one up manship in terms of who is most radical. At night at the bar, perhaps one of three bars where people tended to gather, often certain poets were said to not be radical enough because they used fewer techniques of modernist fragmentation than certain other poets. These not radical enough poets were usually women poets who were seen to not be radical enough because they had other concerns, those concerns of collective identity say, the very thing that heroism hates. Or if the women poets were all about their own identity, which was not uncommon, because women too have a tendency to talk excessively about themselves, then that was a problem also. The heroism liked only heroic identity. Heroism felt that the woman poets couldn't help it; it wasn't their fault. They had to deal with the bad society. But it was sad about their work.

They had gone to the cold place because of the heritage. They loved the heritage, its stutters and its declarations and its own awareness of its own importance even if other parts of society seemed completely unaware of the heritage's existence. They loved it. They admitted it. But once they got there, they didn't know what to do with the heritage. It was so big and so strong. It was so much. It defined them. It shaped them. It made them read certain things with great attention and not read certain others things. It asked them to type up memos that it wrote for them. It dismissed their work as being too much about women, or gender specific as it might be said. So they sat around and complained about the heritage, even as they loved it and wrote out of it. This got boring quickly. And so to keep the complaint from being the culmination, they issued a challenge to themselves to edit their own magazine rather than complain. Their expectations were low. They thought they might do a few issues and maybe they themselves would learn to see a new, wider heritage. They might be able to use the magazine to talk to some women that they were having trouble talking with, women from other parts of the country who didn't seem all that interested in talking with them when they tried to talk with them when they came to town and went to one of the bars for the discussion about modernist fragmentation. And also they might just have something to do late at night other than go to the bar and hear some more about who was or was not radical enough.

Because there were so many magazines already going, they had to think of a way to fit their magazine in. They knew they wanted their magazine to be a part of the heritage. This they felt was a right they had and that they needed to assert. And yet they knew that they wanted their magazine to be suggestive of a wider heritage. They wanted their magazine to be radical enough but also have room for things that were not radical enough also or radical enough in a different way. Really, what they wanted was for that question of radical enough to go away and to talk some about things like culture and literature's role in it and literature from other countries or literatures written in other Englishes and to have that conversation be in part about form but have it have room for forms that were not in the modernist tradition as much as for forms that were in the modernist tradition because both sorts of writing had a lot to contribute to literature's shaping of and commentary on culture and literature's potential to be part of the discussion about how best to resist the large evil heritages that mattered in a way that poetic heritages did not, the large evil heritages of militarism, imperialism, and globalization. They didn't want to argue about radical enough or make a canon. They just wanted to think with others. They wanted editing to clear a space in their body for them to think.

At that moment when they challenged themselves they were just thinking of themselves. Just of how to hang onto something. Or just of how to find something to hang onto. They were just thinking of themselves. When they thought of editing they thought of how a pebble drops into a pool of water and the water ripples on the surface but just below the surface the pebble drifts down and as the pebble drifts down it drifts past the beings that live in the water, the tadpoles, the fish, the amoebas, the plants of various sorts and it floats gently down through the thickness of the water, comes to rest on the bottom as the surface ripples become slower and quieter at the same moment. When they thought of editing they thought of a knot finally coming untied after appearing to be impossibly tangled. Or an impossible tangling of a piece of string that is neatly wound around a spool. When they thought of editing they thought of a feeling that there is no end as they were coming to the end of the road, pulling up right in front of the concrete bunker that symbolizes the end of the road, getting out, climbing over the bunker, walking out into the grass of the field, then walking slowly and steadily towards their own writing, all the while holding the eyes wide, full of peripheral vision, holding their eyes on the horizon, noticing the effort that it takes to be aware of the changes that occur as the eyes are held wide and on one point for a long time. There are just a few changes at first they realized when they began editing, like the slight blurring of vision, the heavy tiredness of eyes, the way the horizon seems to move about or changes shape or color but then they would think of springing off the diving board and moving into the part of the dive that feels aerodynamic and smooth, feels just right to the body, the feeling of moving through the air, and then the feeling of entering into the water, the cool water of other's ideas, as if in slow motion as if floating but really with just a certain quick sensation of smoothness. They thought of the inner smoothness that moves plovers, monarchs, whales, garden snakes, ants, slugs, herds of walking animals from one place to another when they thought of editing. The feeling that sets them in motion, a feeling that might not even be a conscious awareness that is moving them toward another place, a place of water perhaps or a place of dryness or a place of coolness or of warmness and the feeling of arriving together and with this motion the comfort that this space of almost unconscious moving must have, an effortless realization that comes with each moment of change. Or when they thought of editing they thought of a noticing their clenched fist and then unclenching this fist and the sensation of the unclenched fist and how this sensation travels up the hand and into the chest and into breath. All of this was the all right of editing. An all right of unclenching. An all right of sitting in a room that is not a bar but is a public place and then breathing in and out audibly in this place with others breathing in and out audibly at the same moment. The breathing in was a taking in of the work of others and giving it space in the lightness inside the body, letting others, the air that just was audibly expelled by others inside the body, into the cells, and letting it do all the transmutations that are essential for humans and then breathing out, breathing out the air of others and their own addition of germs and moisture to the air of others.

PART TWO
All this, all this worked for them. They let the writing of others grow in them and the writing of others changed them and they were grateful to this.

Years went by. One year and another year. They moved around a lot. They moved from city to city but none of this is important because as they moved they brought their editing with them. At one point they woke up and found themselves in the middle of the Pacific ocean. They had an email discussion list that they were on. The email discussion list had evolved from a cc list to a small discussion list. It was a private list and this troubled some of them but relieved others. Sometimes there were fights on the list. Sometimes nothing was said on the list. But at a certain point a group from the list decided to start a press together. They decided to start a press because they felt that presses were disappearing. This had something to do with the constant erosion of government funds that even while they tended to be the sort of people who didn’t get much in government funds they had been, although they didn’t really realize it until now, beneficiaries of a certain amount of trickle down. And they felt there was no place for people like them, people of a certain age, to publish their books. There was no one for them so they decided to be for themselves.

They had a long email discussion about how to start the press. And what they decided finally was that anyone from the discussion list could join the press. And nineteen people did. And all nineteen agreed to donate 1% of their income every year for at least three years. And during those three years, everyone would get a budget to edit one book. The budget was small, but it was possible to publish a book on it if one used a galley printer. The press seemed wonderful and utopian to them. Everyone would edit and see through production a book of their own choice. No one could say that the press couldn’t publish a book. There would be no group editorial decisions. No complaints about who published what. This would let them be a press of acceptance rather than one of narrow editorial vision.

It was wonderful and utopian. It was wonderful and utopian and full of problems. It still is wonderful because it has published at least fifteen books. Books that might not otherwise get published. It has done books that have dropped into their mind as a pebble might drop into a pool of water and it has done books that have made them think of knots coming untied and books that have felt so expansive that they feel as if they had come to the end of the road and then gone beyond it. And the press has done books that read like diving into a pool just right and books that move them from one place to another unconsciously and books that have clenched and unclenched their fists.


PART THREE
[Part three has not been authorized by the mothership and has thus not been released.]

if the horse isn't dead yet...

found this quote from agamben at back of the New Review (a new journal out from Otis College of Art and Design).

The original cohesion of poetry and politics in our culture was sanctioned from the very start by the fact that Aristotle's treatment of music is contained in the Politics and that Plato's themes of poetry and art are to be found in the Republic; it is therefore a matter beyond dispute. The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry.
--Agamben "Project for a Review"

and then these two quotes on form from Susan Schultz's No Guns, No Durian...

One category I've developed is the prose poem as essay (comes after description, story, parody, memoir and the rest). You might consider your poem a place in which to develop ideas, rather like a stadium in which you're seeking out periodic curves and finding them beneath sine wave hills.

and

That we write collages may dispirit us, letting in the very material we want expurgated, or at least investigated.

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

post workshop thoughts...

i was left with romney's comment about feeling as if she needed another six months. and then kristen joking about the extention. and then jessea saying that there will be too much rewriting to do as a result of workshop method. and then scott saying if it ain't broke don't fix it. (which is true.)

and then i thought about how when i was working on my dissertation i would take it to the guy who wrote a book on dickinson and he would say add more dickinson. and i would take it to the woman who wrote on whitman and she would say you need to add whitman. etc. a lot of comments end up being well here is what i would do. there is something in this story here about staying true to what one wants to do or needs to do. but even if one does this, one can take this information and just ignore it or one can think about why one doesn't want to do this. and the second is probably more useful.

and we saw that sort of here is what i would do response in workshop several times. like dennis's claim that he was writing between romney's poem to write a poem that he would write. and i was thinking that this is one way that one might be a reader of someone's work (and not, as a cynic might say, just dennis making romney's work into his own).

and we might as a class want to think not only about how to celebrate what we like in the work but also how to discuss in the procedures how we read the work.

and also to think about what sort of procedures the work takes us to.

but also, i think there is something to be learned from hearing one's poem rewritten in the opposite of how one writes. one can learn how people read. and one can learn the stereotype of one's work. but one is also forced to think, no that is not for me, and then after that why? which might be the big question. why one does what one does. or why one hates the excessive version of the poem someone else has rewritten. or etc.

anyway, good work today. but also think it is good idea to keep thinking about what the author might need as much as we can.

but back to six months... a thesis is a draft. a somewhat finished draft but probably not the last draft. so it makes sense to work on it and get it as good as possible (you just might have more time to devote to it now than you will in the future) but it also might make sense to think about how to rewrite it after it is turned in also.