On mongrelisme: a difficult manual for desperate times
by Joan Retallack
The Isthmus Project
paradigm press, 1999

First, Thank You, Juliana, for recommending this book. It’s an excellent fun reading for me!

Joan Retallack. We all are familiar with her work through The Poethical Wager already. For her bio, click here

mongrelisme is a chapbook containing, I think, one series of poem (Although there are several titles, many look like a separate title for a poem, I read the whole book as one connected piece.) The section entitled "TROUBALUE" is the central one. The book is written in several languages intermingling--English, French and German (these I can tell) and I think Italian and Spanish. It takes on the central "theme" of a diverse family background. But not only that. There's also reference, in subtle ways, to things rooted in high-learning (this will be illustrated) with recurring reference to Don Quixote in the TROUBALUE section.

The first page works to me like an epigraph:
MONGRELISME
of course I don't like isms but /mais/ isme c'est moi

Then, on the page, we get the list of names that end with "isme" like agonisme, altruisme, anarchisme and on. The last one is liberalisme.

By adding an "e" to "mongrelism," I was prevented from reading the word as an English word. It became French, although I am not sure if the word "mongrelisme" does or does not exist in French. I could also read it as separate words: "mon" (French my) "gre" (doesn't mean anything) "lis" (resonates with English "List" and French conjugated verb Je lis (I read), and me (English me) And in the "caption": isme becomes is me. Hence, c'est mot (French it's me)

The interaction between several languages like this is where I locate my fun fun fun reading.

Let me turn to the concerns (aka form and content) of the book.

The TROUBALUE section begins with this poem:

LISME

Mother's family split in two
One side thought
Don Quixote was a comedy.
The other side thought
Don Quixote was a tragedy.

Anon

This sets up what follows, which is a series of disjuctive prose blocks. In the prose blocks are several passages or stories connected in some sort of ways,

be it mini-narrativo:
"big grid of first names at the urban community college las conexciones incorrectas puedan danar el control full of Sigmunds Flauberts Elvis's Aristotles Socrates Raphaels Carmens Illabellas Juanas minus all the great referents Borises Carloses Marias..."

or sound:
"AMICA LECTOR NEXT TIME READ ACTIVE LY MAKE margynal notes on all revolutions of I like clocks radios clock-radios socks smocks flocks docks & but not stocks I am a complex realist thought another page like this will inevitably hit the fan in the fact..."

The content of the poem speaks to and illustrates the experience of multilingualism, which doesn't refer solely to the fact that a lot of different languages are being used, but also to the cultural interactions--agreement or conflicts--that are embedded within it. This becomes apparent and authentic to me because the medium through which the stories are being told is an illustrative (as opposed to narrative) one.

Of course, I think Joan Retallack doesn't expect all her readers to know all the language in the book (I wonder if she herself does speak all of these languages?) In fact, the absence of meaning from phrases in this book doesn't worry me as reader at all. Its context makes it very ok not to know everything and really be ok with it. The don't-know-the-language part of it actually adds tremendously to musicality of the work. It feels great just to hear the music.

(Reading the VIRTUE section, I arrived at the idea of a performance. It presents an "interspersing" translation of a central text in four language We could gather people with different language skills (here we need English, French, German, (I think) Italian; some could speak more than one among these), have them all read the text together, skipping parts they don't know. I think the presence/absence of voices would be very cool to experience. Does anyone wanna try this? )

I would definitely re-read this in greater depth. And maybe then I could come up with smarter response. But as for now, I really really like the book. It's fun and important.

TISA BRYANT
reading/workshop
Wednesday, March 31
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public

When I wasn't writing in my notebooks in a delusional and impenetrably cryptic imitation of Anais Nin (though I was bummed out from her writings about "Negresses," her condescension to her Black maid), I ran the streets, squirmed my underage ass into the The RamRod, Jumpin' Jack Flash, the 1270 Club, and did a lot of drugs. I had to balance things out. Most of my friends had odd jobs, none of them were writers or wanted to be, as far as I knew. We didn't get that deep. We just made money somehow and partied. Dying fast was romantic. Getting old, especially in an office, was just not. The other girls, the roommates, and me moved upstairs in the rooming house 20x20 foot spread. Random kids, our breakdancing, tagging, boom-box-having friends, were less constantly sleeping on the floor.
--Tisa Bryant, Home Training to Crash Pad in _Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader_


Tisa Bryant's family emigrated in the 1920s from the island of Barbados to Boston, Massachusetts, where they remain today. Although she was raised within African American traditions, she grew up very much aware that the recorded histories of predominantly southern Black people in the U.S., while related to her, did not specifically address the experiences of Caribbean people. Her book, _Tzimmes_, was published in 2000 by A+Bend Press, began her exploration of West Indian bodies, both flesh and earth, and their contested assimilation into American and African American culture. She has recently had work published in the anthologies _Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories of Growing Up Black in America_ (Pocket Books, 1999), _Beyond the Frontier_ (Black Classics Press, 2000), _Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature_ (John Wiley And Sons, Fall 2000), and _Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader_ (MIT, 2002). She lived and worked in Oakland in the mid 1990s and much of her current writing is about her experience as a worker during this period.


Tisa's essay from _Hatred of Capitalism_ and a 2nd section is on reserve.
Please read this before class...

go to: http://minerva.mills.edu/
choose reserves by faculty
enter spahr in the search box
choose english 180
the password is eng180s04

CHRIS CHEN
reading/workshop
Wednesday, March 24
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public


If you count the sun and moon as sole possessions.
If among your possessions you discover the broken lines of a hand
which describe a bamboo forest.
If in that maze of sticks your teeth should chatter,
startled by the flight of a white bird.

Please, do not sully the mother tongue.
Do not ladle it out as soup
or congregate, but let your hair grow long.
Recite the etymology of dynamite.
--Chris Chen, "The Chinese Exclusion Act"


Chris Chen is originally from Kokomo, Ind. Chris Chen lives in West Oakland. Chris Chen is unstoppable when it comes to bowling. Chris Chen is a director of primasia investment services. Chris Chen, composer of "Symphony for a Billion." Chris Chen, neurosurgeon, rocket scientist, sentimental lead singer of Shanghai Slim, the seminal 80s rock band. Chris Chen, author of Uncle Chen's Oriental Slapstick (San Francisco: Incidental P, 2000; at the Mills College Bookstore or available from SPD).

Chris Chen is coming to read at Mills College for half an hour or so. Then Chris Chen is offering a workshop in writing. See http://english250.blogspot.com for some links to look at if you plan to stay for the workshop.

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

First. Congrats to JoNelle :)



Jessea, I hear you. In fact, I have heard the argument that the so-called language poetry (LP) tries to remove authorial intent and therefore creates equality with the readers for many many times...it's getting old but not yet. I think there's still merit in the intent to create equality. How else would equality with the readers enter the consciousness if you don't intend it first (and therefore, necessarily, creates a hierarchy)?

I think what makes it worthwhile is the author's being ok with the knowledge that the work will not make unified sense to those encountered it. And that's ok. And that's actually good. Chances are no one is going to agree that the author was a revelation, or the liberator, since--because the text lacks traditional unification--the destination the work leads is going to be different for everyone.

This goes against the so-called narrative poetry (NP), which, traditionally, hopes that everyone reads it and ends up at the same place. It's like the "Ah...I see" moment. The "Ah....I see" becomes then static. It becomes an established piece of knowledge that the author intended for it to take place in potentially all that read the work. After this happens, then the reader are "allowed" to relate his/her personal experiences to it or vice versa.

In LP, I think, the "Ah...I see" moment is not to exist. The authority of the author is in this removal.

But reading the LP is counter-intuitive though. It's more work because it's not-as-familiar work. I read Scalapino's THE TANGO for class last year and that was really really hard. I ended up applying what I find more familiar to me (philosophy, it was) to her work. The result is: I'm still iffy about THE TANGO, but i really know i like philosophy.

Sorry for being anecdoctal. Hope it illstrates a point.


(request/suggestion: please try a lot of short blog paragraphs as opposed to one huge blog paragraph. It's more user-friendly on a screen. Thanks! )

yay, angie's blogging. don't stop! and jonelle is married--congratulations!

angie, i think your post may have been saying something i've thought of in the past. tell me if i am way off-base, but here's what i hear you saying: this idea of "challenging" the reader through unconventional syntax, abstraction, etc., is just as elitist as the conventional mode of author as superior to the reader. like, these language poets claim that by undoing the traditional model of authorial control, by encouraging the reader to take part in the meaning-making as an equal participant. they say this is a way of undoing systems of control and hierarchy. but isn't it STILL a system of control, if the reader must be exposed to this new text in order to be "liberated"? the author still assumes that s/he, in making the text, is on a higher level than the reader, who will only join the author in enlightenment once they have read the text.

it's still trying to manipulate the reader. it's still authorial control.

OR on the other hand, there really is no such thing as a "passive text." no matter how "easily digestable" the content, the reader STILL, ALWAYS must partake in "meaning-making." if i say to you "bob ran 5 miles and then he ate an apple," there is still lots of "work" to be done on the part of the reader. lots of filling in of information, lots of imagination, lots of interpretation.

either way, language poetry isn't the end-all way to blow someone's mind.

scott, what about the idea that humans need both logical & illogical forms of language. they need the campfire stories and they need the grunts & ecstatic chants? we need both.

you know what my brain is chewing on now? confessionalism. i'm writing a paper on sylvia plath for stephen's class, arguing that she's not a confessional poet. if anyone feels like it, tell me what you think about confessionalism. what it is, if it's good or bad, and why plath is really that different from lyn hejinian (i don't think she is!). like, using the "I". that conversation.

scott, don't know what to say about your last post except: EMBRACE THE PARADOX!

oh and p.s., i read ishmael reed's book about walking tours in oakland, and i don't think i even need to go on black panther tour now. he basically gives the entire tour verbatim in the book.

p.p.s. juliana, thank you so much for making me read jennifer moxley. where has she been all my life?

No Scott. I really want to quote you on that. It might actually show up in my Stein paper for Stephen, if you don't mind, I mean.

first, we all need to congratulate JoNelle on getting married! I saw it in the mills paper. I’m so proud of s.f. right now.

i’m behind. i’m typesetting chain which makes me mean b/c i feel like everyone makes too many demands. it gets real bad when proofs get back. at that point, stay out of my way.

i did take break to see the amazing kevin davies read at Buddhism conference at Berkeley on friday. leslie and giovanni very good also. but hearing kevin read is real special treat.

i am planning to go to the mary louise pratt talk tomorrow at berkeley. (info here: http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/townsend/)

but just reading the last few days. this is great debate!

i hear jessea saying, “i also think that if there is a poet in class who wants to write narrative poetry, the discussion shouldn't be "why narrative poetry doesn't interest me or matter since l=a=...." it should be how to write narrative poetry.”

i think this is good and i hope that this isn’t just about the last workshop because i felt that at moments we did this work (although i hear also that we might want to work harder on our responses being smarter in the future).

and then scott saying “instead, you say, "Drop your gun, sonofabitch; and do it now!" Then you arm wrestle. Then, in the best of worlds you dust yourselves off and go have a beer.”

and i’m thinking we need both. we need the big discussion because that puts a valuable pressure on the work. and also the helpful stuff. but i also think there is something valuable here about remembering to keep all the tools in one's tool box.

i personally want to have all the tools. and yet i think i have to understand the histories and the stories and the brain wave patterns of all the tools. i don’t want to be committed to a tool just because it is the tool i’ve been taught to like or because the culture has been taught to like it by certain, specific but unacknowledged histories. so when i use lyric or narrative, for instance, i use it with its history. and when i want to use some sort of language spew, i use that also with all its histories and associations. etc.

Kristen, do you have copy of Cornelius Eady poem to share? maybe I can put it on reserve.

also kp, remember when you bring up the experimental is privilege and conventional is better for direct action argument (which i can’t tell if you are making or just referencing) that a great deal of the techniques that we now call experimental do not come out of privilege but out of oral and pre-literate forms of many different geographies with long histories. what we now see as conventional are forms that come out of europe and have much briefer, much narrower histories.

there is a great trinh minh ha essay on this clarity/direct statement and politics question.

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of “clarity.” . . . The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as “clear” (paradox is “illogical” and “nonsensical” to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions—schools, churches, professions, etc.—and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words. Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save—at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classical form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things—a language as language—and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement.
--Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

jessea, please keep going and explode yr sonnets and then think about what ones do what and why. but please do not reduce my post to saying “if-you're-not-writing-revolution-you're-with-the-system.” could we call it my if you think you can get off not thinking about these issues you are delusional post instead? meow. i’m sensitive about my dogmatism.

ah...that's great! Thanks Scott!! Can I quote you??
Nonetheless, is the so-called narrative poetry so damaging that the two can't coexist?
I'm asking this to be diplomatic and democratic... &
Congrats on the last period on the thesis!

Hey Scott;
I said that because I think, in relations to all of us (or me, at least), you have the clearest sense of your aesthetic. It seems that the narrative conflict is greater in us (or me) than in you. I can rethink it now.

But from what you just said to Jessea (I happen to overhear), how then would you respond to a claim that poetry, because it's about something other than the daily needs, establishes hierarchy--that poetry is a hard thing to understand and therefore only the poets should be engaged in it? This is scarily exclusionary...

Or (now I am pretending to be you responding to me), one could argue that, by breaking sentences, authority is broken....ouwww....I used to be convinced by that. But I'm not too sure anymore.

In order to break something, one has to know the something first. In order to appreciate the art of broken pieces (or sentences), one has to know the whole. To say that broken sentences break hierarchy implies that hierarchy comes first.

Now, to arrive at the art of broken pieces, hierarchy has to be figured into the picture first, and then disgusted and abandoned. But the result is that hierarchy is always there because one has to go through it to arrive at its antithesis.

One could argue, though, that the aesthetic doesn't lie in the broken pieces. It's not antithesis but a thing by itself. But this seems to beg the question IF the initial response was to question the authority of sentence.


AND--if you are curious--why the heck I am blog-ative--I am working on a paper and am procrastinating endlessly. You know how that is...

ah...i see...it's a revolution in the making...
no break for me either

break? there's no break in poetry. the revolution never sleeps!

i hope you're not mad..this was just getting interesting.

Gee...I feel my brain is getting smaller and smaller when it comes to this debate. I like Scott's idea of poets' buying drinks for each other and debate on work & I appreciate the no-gun proposal. I like Jessica joke (which I don't think it's a joke), the unless-they-stop-talking-in-sentences proposal. Heated here! Whoa. Whoa. Quick question, though, if we really did come to a conclusion for this debate, would the conclusion really change the way you're going to write extremely radically? It wouldn't change the way I wanna write. I wouldn't decide on it, at the least. I wanna be me (can I be me?) and better me. I feel like the debate itself is becoming generic; the conflicting arena becomes expectable and there's conflict in everyone (well, maybe not Scott). Thus, somehow, I feel like the conclusion, if we ever arrived at it, would be something like "Yeah Yeah Sure" kinna outcome and everyone goes on writing the way s/he believes in, thinking "they just don't get it." So, can anyone help my brain and list why this bears such incredible significance?? I still think the world (of poetry, in general, and the intersecting of both)is too wide to be absolute; we all function part(s) of it so do your best. If the world (of p., of g., of p&g)) is not what you've imagined as best yet, then you (and I) are not good enough...the so-called narrative poetry is not good enough, the so-called innovative poetry is not good enough...so both have work to do. Sorry if this sounds grumpy...I'm not quite the diplomatic self in this post, hah?

Jessea: why don't you save a copy of your sonnet series in a drawer and try the thing out? See what happens. You might hate the new copy and love the original one completely; it might bring something good. Try it!

(not to derail the conversation because it's really good, i just gotta quick question)

so today i read nada gordon & gary sullivan's epistolary email poem book, Swoon and it was HOT. it made me want to completely dismantle my sonnets. they are too boxed up & controlled. i want expansiveness. but that's the point of the sonnet, that it's a box. should i keep going, or explode them? since it's probably not interesting to anyone else, please reply to me @ jessea.perry@earthlink.net if you're just possibly feeling generous and/or bored.

i won't take anyone who says narrative-representational language is evil seriously unless they stop speaking to me in sentences

scott, i gotta give you props for Taking a Stand. i like it just like i liked it when juliana posted her if-you're-not-writing-revolution-you're-with-the-system post. i also disagree with it as much. dogma! dogma. Us versus Them. paradigm of binaries. paradigm of dominations.

your warlike analogies & language are PART of the system which you claim to want to dismantle. you sound like a devotee of bush et al. only with different ideology. i mean, that's great. but i get the feeling that you're one of those guys who, once they dismantle or overthow the system, would be just as bad as the former reigning power. take this all tongue-in-cheekly, by the way, but a little bit serious. like yeah, let's arm wrestle..

what i'm trying to say is that when you try to say that you'd get rid of evil patriarchalcapitalistic society by fighting & forcing, you're doing just what they do..

i think kristin also has some really great points. i don't have the answers to them. i mean, it's not like this is the first time that it's ever been said that ANY poetry, let alone theory-driven experimental academic poetry, is elitist. on the one hand, i think there is a real place for elitism in this world, even in the academy. there is some jusitifcation for the academy being somewhat removed from the "real" world. i was thinking about this today, realizing that the jargon we use, the arguments we have, they sound HYSTERICALLY funny & stereotypical. i mean, just imagine if this crap were broadcast to some folks in their offices in downtown SF. but then, i've had enough of the corporate experience to know that their jargon sounds just as ridiculous. my point is, yes, the academic world may be quite removed from commonplace real world, but so are many professions these days. increasing specialization & micro-management.

but then on the other hand. how dumb is it of experimental poetries to alienate its allies? i think it's pretty dumb. that's why i'm all for acceptance. i'm not very stuck in my ways. i'm malleable. it wouldn't destroy me to learn that language poetics was irrelevant or out-of-fashion.

and on the mills thing, i really think that's something you'd have to take up with the administration. if mills wants to advertise itself as an experimental, "innovative" school, and only admit poets who are into that, great. rip the narrative up. (although, christ, if i were surrounded by NOTHING BUT anti-narrative people, i'd just have to write stories. to be contrary.) but it's not. so the workshop should be open.

finally, i know i said up there that i'd only take you seriously if you stopped using sentences. this is a joke & everything, but it illustrates a truth. we need representational language. really! but the problem here is that experimentation/"irrationality" loses every time. it's like trying to use logic/philosophy to prove existence of god. you will fail. the only way to allow for non-logical thoughts & impulses is to experience them outside of accepted syntactic/logical structure. you can't express the ineffable through words, duh, that's why it's ineffable. and that's one reason to write poetry: to try.

to add a little more to what padcha was saying..

i think it's great that everyone has such a firm aesthetic position from which to argue from & develop opinions from.. i also think that if there is a poet in class who wants to write narrative poetry, the discussion shouldn't be "why narrative poetry doesn't interest me or matter since l=a=...." it should be how to write narrative poetry. to explore that tradition & place the poem within it. got to keep in mind that there are so many different ways of constructing a project.. and despite what scott may say, i don't think he can really "prove" that narrative is immoral or evil or whatever. instead of pointing out "hey, this poem tells a story and makes 'sense' and if you switch it up to lose the 'sense' i think it's more interesting," i think we should ask if that's the project in the first place. if not, maybe that kind of feedback is irrelevant.

i'm a fence sitter. i think both sides are right. and if that's making the audience uncomfortable, isn't that a good sign? maybe you can be more involved w/a text that discomfits you. maybe some (what the hell do we call it??) experimental texts are too easy to read because we drop 'meaning' and then what? i'd like to be pushed, by the way, in how i read experimental work. please, if you see me, stop me & give me a pop quiz. i'm into rules regulations test scores and raps on knuckles. point is that fence-sitter is defendable position also. if you disagree let's fight!

anyway. let's just all recognize the gajillions of traditions from which to write from or the infinite number which will be created & not think everything has to be the same.


oh and regarding BAR tomorrow night--i don't think anything organized is happening since 90% of you are starting spring break early and skipping town (i won't tell stephen). so let's all hook up again after the break. the b=r=e=a=k.

A bunch of us had dinner at Tea Shop and talked friendlily. I want to put this out so more could join. Can I?

Again, it's the immortal question of narrative vs not-narrative poems. Maybe a bit about our preference amongst them (but, is there really the them, to start?) These terms, first of all, never get defined for good. But we talk about them all the time! So, from this very fact, that we talk about them all the time, I infer that we sort of know what they sort of are. The immortality of this question might be due to the "sort of" part. Absolute agreement is too good to be true. I don't like absolute agreement either. It will make things static and not lively.

Does narrative or not really matter? I think it doesn't as long as the poem makes itself matter. And what does that mean? Hmm...it means there's something important about it, something that enters into you (or me) as charged with something really good beyond what's actually being said, something communicative because of the words not by the words. This sounds scarily metaphysical. But isn't poetry a metaphysical kind of communication par excellence? Narrative poetry can be extremely beautifully metaphysical too, if you need to hear that.

I think we bring ourselves to our work. And we bring ourselves to our reading of works. And that's a great thing. Most of us have preferences (and I really do wish that the term preferences is sufficient. No more lable necessary) and that's good too. I think we produce best work when we prefer it. (What follows is to agree with you, Jessea) Nonetheless, being informed is different from being influenced. Say, I don't think I'm going to be influenced by Mary Oliver or Scalapino, but I am informed of them. And that makes me a smarter me doing just what I do. Maybe.

Just one or two more thoughts.
Have a good break everyone!

great work on the retallack book so far. my hope is maybe it will help us get back to the howe book. which i still want to work on some collectively.

i love the stein blog, padcha. i have fantasy of doing blog for critical writing i am working on just to put it under pressure of some sort. posting drafts and then seeing if any feedback comes around. (i like internet b/c it is public but it is so big that no one really reads it; seems perfect for putting pressure on drafts of thoughts w/o pressure of feeling it is final.) i might try this this summer.

scott, i liked your statement this: "Go make get $25 million and make a bloody movie about Christ. That matters. Poems don't matter. I mean, sure, they matter to you and me and my friends and maybe my mom and siblings (on a good day)." I like that they don't "matter" in the way that the entertainment wing of the military industrial complex, aka hollywood, matters and then how they matter, which is intimate.

jessea, no vegeance. it's called term paper.

To defend, according to the book, I think unintelligibility should make new sense, not denying sense altogether. What the book as a whole (well, as much as I've read) says to me is that there something pristinely intelligent about processes, about a piece of work not being labelled as finished, therefore archivable, therefore static, and therefore no active life. The book, I think, proposes that passive life of work as such has been celebrated as intelligibility, as something eternal, while work with more active life--the life livable because of the process it generates with the reader-- is rejected on the basis of its being chaotic and not, presently and/or familiarily, making sense. The argument, somewhere in the book, was that people are still conversing about Dickinson, Stein or Heidegger. These texts still live in this sense even if they are often time regarded as almost impossible to find coherent isense/intelligibility in them.

Just a thought or two.

oh man, watch out world, padcha is loose. bloggin with a vengeance. steining out.

william--that quote's from pg. 103 (essay "the scarlet aitch", which by the by, isn't it funny when people spell out letters?)

i think she's talking about the unintelligibility of theory, poetics(x), "all the noisy deconstruction going on." (the hippies next door to me had some noisy construction going on earlier, involving a chainsaw. who knew hippies used chainsaws?). she's saying things should be complicated & they should NOT make sense.

on walks: william, i'd love to walk to your car with you. will there be a fee? can scott come?

Hey....
FYI (so you don't get this from somewhere else): I just created a blog, http://steinmyway.blogspot.com
This is me and it's ONLY, EXCLUSIVELY, SOLEMNLY to help me keep all my research on Stein for the Modern American poetry in one place. There's so much on her that a paper could be just about the lit. arond her without the actual reading of her work! Gee. Although I don't think you'll want to, feel free to read it; if you want to blog on it, let me know. But I promise it will be sketchier and sketchier and makes lesser and lesser sense as time goes.
Thanks !

poethical wager

I'm really at a loss with this, not knowing what to say about this book yet. But the world runs on time lines! So I must say something.. I am grappling with this book, I feel like it takes me an hour to read 4 pages of it. So I, as well, am still in the first few chapters. "Cartoon version"-ly, I keep coming back to this idea of binaries. I feel like this is a major point for Retallack--exploring the idea that there is a split between masculine/feminine, logical/irrational, mainstream/experimental. At some points I think she veers into Quantum Mechanics (& Buddhism) with the idea that there really is no absoluteness to these ideas, that they are continuums, that they switch places with each other. That matter is not solid nor is it truly locateable at any particular palce at any particular moment in time--it's only likely to be here or there. And then she veers back and says that these binaries are essential, that they need each other to exist, that we need them to define our world. I think that's a paradox & I think she (intentionally) contradicts herself, the argument IS the essay, the form IS the content, and so on.

Regarding Scott's comments on random & patterns--this is at the heart of my own writing & spirituality (no difference between two). I don't believe in random. I believe things can appear to be that way, but there are always patterns. I also admit that this might be a human animal instinct to see life this way, making patterns where there doesn't appear to be any (see: mythology of constellations, creation myths, dream interpretation, etc.). But even if it's a human creation and there is no divine or supernatural force behind this, it doesn't matter. What matters is that humans look for meaning in seeming chaos. What matters is meaning. This comes back, Scott, to what I wasy saying to you the other night regarding meaning in poetry. I say go with it! When I read work that fights its own meaning, I still find it within. I find meaning in a certain brand of gum wrapper I find on my shoe. I don't think this is wrong.

While we're on the topic, Scott, I want to respond to your comment that I shouldn't say that I feel dumb when I feel dumb. Retallack writes: "In the arts & humanities untroubled intelligbility is a sign of denial." I do find myself constantly baffled and at a loss when trying to explain myself logically on these subjects, but I find it liberating to express that bafflement. Admitting what you don't know, etc. I think Retallack makes a great case for the idea that truly contemporary, experimental writing (and all truly contemporary writing IS experimental) defies any current system of logic. Its job is to step outside of that. So we write our essays, our blog entries, we have our class discussions, and try to understand (or explain) something which can't, by Retallack's definition, be explained logically. This is fantastic.

Those are the only arguments I've chewed up and spit out so far. It's funny because everyone keeps saying "Ooh Jessea will love this book" but I am having a hard time understanding the arguments. If someone wants to pick out an argument, say just one essay, and break it down, that would be great. I do love this book. I just don't know how much I love it yet. Any book that promises answers is all right with me.

P.S. New workshop sounds rad. The old one was, too, but it's good to mix it up.

Juliana--will you post some suggestions for writing in a trance?

I was going to blog about The Poethical Wager. But, here I arrived at Juliana’s surprises for us all. They sound really cool. Crossing border always brings fun things to the table!

I'm a big fan of Joan Retallack & as predictable, I am totally IN for The Poetical Wager. I haven’t read all of the essays but it’s really the book for me! I’m gonna read it and re-read it. It’s brilliant. It’s super smart. It’s wittily non-academic but also is academic. I really love it. The problem about loving something, though, is that I don’t have much to say beyond that & I am trying not to allow that to be an excuse for detaching myself from critical thinking. What I have to say might sound really over-praising. But, well, I’ll say it.

The questions the book discusses are importantly courageous as they challenge what seems to be mundanely normative: that essays should exhibit meticulously-referenced materials, that feminism should be about allowing silenced voice to be heard formally, that Stein was chaotic. The book said no to all these in a very informed, intelligent and “fun” manner. Her comments on Dictée totally got me. If it’s possible, I love Dictée even more after reading those comments.

And (this is a total treat for me) there are all these philosophers! Woo! I am all into it, although I can see this being an annoyance if one finds philosophy something that bugs. Sometimes it bugs me too—she’s referring to a lot of philosophers and I don’t know all of them. I came up with a list of philosophers to read though.

I’m gonna stop now. I’d like to hear what you all have to say and I might be responding to those.

(If interested, here's a talk by Joan Retallack. I wrote a whole series of my work taking an inspiration for this.)

ANNOUNCING NEW WORKSHOP PLAN (you heard it here first...)

I was coming home on the plane from Seattle/Vancouver trip and I was thinking about how I had read this piece in Vancouver and afterwards we had this discussion about it. This discussion was helpful (and at moments I admit not that helpful). But when it was helpful it was helpful because a number of hard to answer questions were asked and even when they were at moments too weird for me to answer, they made me think about how I was writing. And I was thinking on the plane about how as a result of these questions I was going to have to go home and work on this piece some more. The questions were big ones. Like “are you saying that Language poetry is the equivalent of Liberalism?” And “what is the relation of your work to Realism?” And I was trying to think how to get that sort of questioning into the workshop more rather than the sort of here is what I would do to fix it or I really think you need to move section two to section three advice which I feel we keep resorting to in workshop. It isn’t that I don’t think that sort of information can be useful, but rather that I want it to come out of those big questions rather than out of us as readers just needing to have something to say during workshop. Some of the impulse here might also be Scott always grumbling legitimately “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And I guess I would add, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; but be sure you know how it matters because if it doesn’t matter (to you/to friends/to loved ones/to strangers), then why do it.

So I am changing the plan for part two of the workshop. You might celebrate if you find yourself tiring of the procedures or you might continue to grumble if you hate any direction of any sort and just think you should be able to do whatever the hell you want for workshop or if you just prefer to do things like discuss where the comma should go because that feels easy and safe. I’m trying to go for a certain productive and supportive dis-ease here. I’m interested less in smoothing out the poems that get brought to workshop. I’m interested more in all of us trying to think together about larger issues in our work or just in poetry in general. To me, the workshop will be “useful” if the Poet feels they know how to take their project to another, perhaps larger, level or when the Poet decides that this piece is what it is (it ain’t broke) but they’ve got some ideas for another piece of writing that perhaps might have even more ambition or is in another form.

New plan…

Two Poets will continue to present each week as we’ve been doing (schedule remains the same).
Each Poet will have two readers, Reader A and Reader B. Readers A and B will each write up a page response to the work and bring 13 copies for the class.

(The rest of the class will just read the work and be smart about it…so less work will be required of you each week under this new plan overall. However, if anyone is freaking out about the change in plan, please come by my office and talk about it.)

Reader As will describe the work formally. They will notice at least six to ten things about the work. They might notice tense and they might notice form and they might notice structure. They might also notice content but the emphasis should be on how this intersects with form (in other words, Reader A would not summarize what the Poet might be saying except how content intersects with form). They might list what sorts of things are in the work and what sorts of things are not in the work. They might talk about the value systems of the form (such as the Poet values clarity and clearly sorted data thus they embed their narrative in the sonnet form or the Poet values chaos and disorder thus they tear apart the sonnet form). Any sort of formal analysis. At moments Reader A might feel s/he is being too simple but s/he should not worry about this because his/her observations might be transparent to the Poet. Reader As might imagine themselves as Russian formalist critics of the 50s. Those with ambition and interest might refer to work by Roman Jakobson for some insane suggestions here. Reader As will not say things like I like this (or not) in this piece of writing (although they may well want to say this in the workshop and should).

Reader Bs will describe the stakes of the work. They will address why the work matters (and they will assume that it does matter). They might place the work in a tradition and discuss how it differs from or agrees with that tradition. They might hypothesize about influences. They might provide context for the piece. They might recommend reading to the Poet. They, like the Reader As, will avoid evaluative critique. Reader Bs might find it helpful to think of themselves as writing a poetic statement for the Poet.

Poets should submit work that will benefit from this sort of analysis. And they should come to class with some notes that answer these questions also. Poets might want to think of these questions as a gentle sort of pressure on the writing hand and not as anything else. If a Poet finds that these questions make their mind spin and disable the writing hand, then Poet should forget them. They are not worth any anxiety that leads to the avoidance of writing (on the contrary, they should produce more writing). Maybe the Poet will find that someone else in workshop might be able to answer them anyway.

3/24
Dennis (William)
(note: we will respond to Dennis in the traditional manner of the workshop so far; then flip over and start this new response method with Scott)

Scott
reader A: Angie
reader B: Dennis

3/31
Romney
reader A: Dennis
reader B: JoNelle

Kristen
reader A: Scott
reader B: Angie

4/7
Padcha
reader A: Romney
reader B: Scott

William
reader A: Kristen
reader B: Meg

4/14
Jessea
reader A: Padcha
reader B: Romney

Dan
reader A: William
reader B: Kristen

4/21
Meg
reader A: Jessea
reader B: William

JoNelle
reader A: Dan
reader B: Padcha

4/28
Angie
reader A: Meg
reader B: Dan

Dennis
reader A: JoNelle
reader B: Jessea

i'm back now. more or less. great to see scott on 25 million.

this is mainly a housekeeping post...

first, on the syllabus I said I would recommend two additional books for each of you personally to read. you are to respond to these on the blog around 3/31 and 4/14. the list is below. you can do your book list in any order that you want. for some of you i gave you three books. you only have to respond to two, but you are welcome to respond to three. if you have already read the books that I recommend and you want a fresh one, come and talk to me. if you hate a book that I've recommended or find it inappropriate, then we can discuss that also. but in general, i've tried to think of some work that i see intersecting with your writing and i would encourage you to give it a try even if you think i've got some idiot ideas about your work. all the books i've assigned here are great.

responses should be posted on the blog. you might want to begin by describing the book and explaining who the writer is, where they live, etc. (the sort of stuff you do in a review) since everyone is reading differently. I tried to get some overlap going (although a few of you have no overlap at all).

Warning: I bet most of these books are not in the library and I have not ordered them from the bookstore. You are responsible for acquiring them yourselves. Most of them are available from a place like Amazon. But I recommend trying to get as many as you can from something a little more independent like Small Press Distribution or your local bookstore. I often email Rod Smith who works for a small bookstore in D.C. with an excellent poetry collection and order books from him. His email is aerialedge@aol.com if you want to do that. Everything listed here is in print in some form and available from Amazon or SPD.


William
Ben Marcus, Notable American Women: A Novel
Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy
Thalia Field, Point and Line (also D, R, JT)


Kristen
Brenda Coultas, The Handmade Museum (aka Susan Howe, The Midnight) (also M)
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Towards a Politics of Corporeal Bodies (also JP)
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (also M)


Jessea
Jennifer Moxley, Imagination Verses
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Towards a Politics of Corporeal Bodies (also K)
Marie Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (also D)
Anne Waldman, Marriage: A Sentence


Dan
Marie Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (also JP)
Thalia Field, Point and Line (also W, R, JT)


Romney
Thalia Field, Point and Line (also W, D, JT)
Inger Christensen, Alphabet
Cecilia Vicuna, Unraveling of Words and the Weaving of Water


Meg
Brenda Coultas, The Handmade Museum (also K)
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (also K)


Scott
J H Prynne, Furtherance
David Jones, In Parenthesis
John Wilkinson, Oort’s Cloud


Padcha
Joan Retallack, Mongrelisme
Anne Tardos, Uxudo
Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas


Dennis
Kurt Schwitters, Pppppp: Kurt Schwitters Poems, Performance, Pieces, Proses, Plays, Poetics
Christian Bok, Eunoia
Tan Lin, BlipSoak01


JoNelle
Lois Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (also A)
Thalia Field, Point and Line (also W, D, R)


Angie
Lois Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (also JT)
Frances Chung, Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple

BEER

hey, let's all get together and argue again about poetry! tomorrow night @ JUPITER, 9ish pm, post-Ratcliffe class.

2181 Shattuck Ave. (btw. Allston & Center)
across the street from main Berkeley BART.

gather on upper patio by heat lamps.

jupiter is wheelchair accessible via allston street.

different bar every week! post more suggestions for different places if you like..

i'd love to respond to all your glorious comments but i have been feeling dumb. maybe tomorrow i will be smarter.

see you there!

i'm off in half an hour.

meg, i think the retallack book takes on some of these issues with great optimism. i'm not big on the discovery model finally though (which i don't think retallack falls into; but she does see writing as taking part in a larger dialogue about the nature of things that is going on in the sciences, etc.). or models of writing that argue that when it matters it does something that hasn't been done before.

have a good workshop free week.