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.
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.
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