I can't find my copy of the _Great Gatsby_ anymore. But in my memory there is that moment in the end when someone, I think it is Nick, is talking to someone, maybe Gatsby's father, and they look at some book in which Gatsby has written some sort of schedule for self-improvement, for class passing. I have scary profound moment of identification with this moment.

This semester I began with a plan to read a critical book a week. I've thought of it as my Gatsby plan for class passing.

I started reading as punishment and then this is a sort of how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy the bomb type story. I got addicted to reading the criticism. Enjoyed making lists of books to read in the future. Wrote them down each week on my calendar like talismans or trophies. Felt good about myself for a few moments. Here is how it went.

January 3
1. James Clifford, _Interviews_... I like Clifford's work so the read was fun. But the book feels a little old and like one of those homage books that get published because Clifford's work is good and not because there is a need for it. It was good though to start out with something short and conversational.

January 10
2. Michael Taussig, _Law in a Lawless Land_... Diary-like, quick read. Story of two weeks in Columbia in a town that is having a cleansing. The diary part of it makes it an easy read. And also limits its perspective. It feels so on the street, so limited to the few weeks in which it was written that it frustrates a bit. I am often frustrated by his work though. I think I carry in my mind expectations for his work that are too great so when I read it I get a little bit bummed. Nonetheless, I will probably pick up his new one, _My Cocaine Museum_, shortly and try again.

3. J M Coetzee, _Elizabeth Costello_... Weird, twisted book. Like his others. This one not as good as the stunning _Disgrace_, which I can't stop thinking about. But funny and worth reading. Robert Duncan shows up. As does Paul West, a hero of mine from the days when I read experimental fiction (undergraduate mainly). The Paul West story in particular is very strange and fascinating and it is hard for me to figure out the tone of this story.

4. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, _Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity_... Obvious read for what I call my "project" which is an article I’m working on about colonialism and language and modernism. I found the book "helpful." It was weird to me that colonialism--which brings such complicated language politics with it--never shows up in it. I sort of eased into the criticism with the Coetzee novel and the Taussig and the Clifford. But arrived with this book.

[N.B. I had a lot of plane trips during this week and the previous one. And then I was doing a residency at Goddard and it was so cold that I spent most of the time in my room reading. So I got ahead and it was useful because I got behind later.]

January 24
5. Marianna Torgovnick, _Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives_... Also obviously on topic for “project.” It reads like it was written with a sledgehammer, which is somewhat of a good thing to me. To me reading it for the first time now, it feels like a lot of the ideas in the book have already filtered into the general academic discourse. Which is probably a sign of it being a part of the culture now.

6. Sergio Ramirez, _Hatful of Tigers: Reflections on Art, Culture and Politics_... Short, essay book. It might be cheating a little to include it. But it is written in short vignettes and I found it useful as a model for something I might want to do. It is also written in homage or in celebration of Julio Cortazar. Interesting on how literature mattered to the Sandinista movement.

[Unrelated read: Elizabeth Kadetsky, _First There is a Mountain_. A book about yoga that mentions and then drops the interesting fact that Iyengar seems to have nationalist ties. Could have heard a little less about how doing yoga was like joining into a disfunctional family that mirrored her own. But I actually have to admit I enjoyed reading this book.]

January 31
7. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, _In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time_... A strange little book. I am fond of it in some ways. I had looked at it a few times and kept recommending it to people without actually sitting down and reading it through. I like how he organizes his chapters around things like "elevators," etc. Another useful model for writing literary criticism. But also found it strange how much he concentrates on commodities and how little he mentions the major political changes and conflicts that were happening at the time. I left with the feeling that 1926 was a great year to buy things. Or ride in an elevator. But didn't learn much about the general strike in the UK that year.

February 7
Another airplane weekend. Went to Ithaca, New York. Ended up spending a number of hours in New York City airport because there was something wrong with the plane on the way to Ithaca. Got a lot of reading done.

8. Brent Hayes Edwards, _The Practice of Diaspora : Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism_... One of the most useful books that I read during these months for the project. I was totally inspired and I hope to steal much from this book. Lots of archival work with journals (I will steal this impulse for my own project). Lots of historical work. Great readings of Langston Hughes and others. Very helpful book. Also appreciated focus on international and not local.

9. William Vollman, volume 1 of _Rising Up, Rising Down_... Great airplane reading. But I haven't gotten back to the other volumes. I'm fascinated by his writing which I find messy and well done. I often disagree with him, especially in this book (he sometimes doesn't seem to understand things; does a really bad reading of Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_, for instance). But I still like anyone with a clearly insane and connective mind. I plan to get back to the other six volumes shortly.

10. J.M. Coetzee, _Foe_... Just a classic that I'd never read.

[Unrelated... picked up Elizabeth Treadwell's _Chantry_ and read that also this weekend.]

February 14
11. Michael North's _Around 1922_... I've learned a lot from his _The Dialect of Modernism_. This book also very helpful. Serious historical work. Doesn't ignore the hard stuff like I felt that Gumbrecht book did.

February 21
12. Naoki Sakai, _Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism_... Recommended by Walter Lew. Also very helpful. Something about reading someone writing a national literature other than the U.S. was eye opening. I made a lot of notes about how Sakai looked at things and thought I might try and use his vision in the future. Great chapter on Cha also.

February 28
13. Joan Retallack, _Poethical Wager_... I assigned this for class so I'm not sure it counts. But since it just came out I couldn't read it before the semester started and the book is so beautifully dense that I get nothing else read this week.

March 6
I carry a bunch of books with me on a trip to Seattle and Vancouver but don't get much reading done. However beautiful drive around Olympic peninsula. End up bringing a bunch of books home from Vancouver and reading them on the airplane home. But they are poetry and don't "count." Among them Jeff Derkson's _Transnational Muscle Car_, Erin Moure's _O Cidadon_ (which I love and causes me to think about making her my new favorite poet for a few months), George Stanley's _A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000_. All are good, make me think.

March 13, March 20
This is where I get behind. Also there are notes in my calendar that I'm getting lots of headaches. The headaches make it hard for me to read because neon green lights dance before my eyes and get in the way of the words (which is one reason I'm typing this up actually; I've got a headache and can't read; somehow typing is more instinctual, requires less eyesight).

March 27
14. Maria Rosa Menocal, _The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain_... (already discussed)

April 3
15. Kristin Ross, _Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture_... Her book on Rimbaud really changed my life. This one was useful. The cultural studies type stuff felt less rigorous. But there is a good chapter in here on the concept of man. Of obvious use to "the project.

At this point I'm officially done. 15 books in 15 weeks more or less (April 10 is week 15). But somewhere along this process I start to realize I like reading a book of criticism a week and decide to continue on.

April 10, April 17
During this period I abandon a few books. I start a collection of essay by Sartre, _Colonization and Decolonization_ and put it down. I start for the second time Jean Genet's _Prisoner of Love_ and put it down. I spend a weekend in Santa Cruz and that puts me behind also.

16. Doris Sommer, editor, _Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations_... I like Sommer's critical work a great deal. I find it smooth to read and also very useful. This one was a bit of a forced read. The essays included aren't as good as her work. There is an excerpt from Yunte Huang's book, which is good, but something I had already read.

April 24
17. Rudolf Mrazek, _Engineers of Happy Land : Technology and Nationalism in a Colony_... Another one of those history books that concentrates on things. I went to a lecture by Bruce Robbins last week where he was complaining about commodity books (the history of tea or coffee, the story of mauve, cod: the fish that changed the world, etc.). So I'm suddenly a little more suspicious of these books about things (also the Gumbrecht which I keep returning to). One of the risks of these books is that the humans get written out and the history of tea appears as if its plantations are inevitable and natural. This one is focused on colonialism in Indonesia. I found it useful. Really interesting last chapter on Pramoedya Ananta Toer. But I have to admit there were not a lot of humans in the earlier chapters.

18. Kristin Ross, _May 68 and Its Aftermaths_... I came back for more Ross. This is an amazingly useful book. Really interesting look at what happens to May 68 in the 80s and 90s. Helped me understand things in the US a little more. I highly recommend it. Not at all useful for the “project” though.

This week... Michael Warner's _Publics and Counterpublics_. But I'm only about thirty pages into it.

no, padcha. yr employment situation is different b/c of thailand. we'll talk more.

CHAPBOOK

Please try to send your submission to me and/or Romney soon so we can start working on the chapbook. Preferably one SHORT piece or excerpt. Thanks!!!

PS: Juliana--is the article for me, sort of?...(sigh...)

If there remains anyone out there who still thinks a PhD might be a viable/better option, the Village Voice has a good article called "Wanted: Really Smart Suckers" that recounts all the horrors and there is some related discussion on Michael Berube's blog.

My weird Menocal reading experience story... I got her new book, Ornament of the World, out of the library at Berkeley. It is a general interest book. Not an academic book. Shards of Love seems to be something in between those two. Ornament of the World, according to jacket copy, "tells of a time and place--from 786 to 1492, in Andalucía, Spain--that is largely and unjustly overshadowed in most historical chronicles. It was a time when three cultures--Judaic, Islamic, and Christian--forged a relatively stable (though occasionally contentious) coexistence." The copy I had had been read by an enemy reader. The reader had written extensive notes in the margins, in pencil, that took endless issue with the book. The notes were funny and sometimes weirdly pretentious. Often using "we," as in "aren't we assuming things?" And constantly asking for footnotes. But it was this great reading experience b/c I know nothing about 786 to 1492 so I had no idea who to trust--Menocal or pencil-note-writer. Menocal wants to argue everyone got along. The pencil-note-writer felt that the Muslims were mean. Some of these same issues can be seen in the reader comments on amazon to this book.

Also check out Hank Lazer's The People's Poetry in Boston Review.

It includes this silliman-esque moment . . .

The challenge for an immediately next generation (of post-Language writers) is to make use of the Language poetics as a means toward new modes of composition. While the Freud-Bloom model of generational conflict, a series of oedipal struggles and successions, may not be applicable, it is nonetheless hard to determine what this next generation seeks to overcome, or correct, or enhance. A slightly younger generation, a next-next generation—poets involved in magazines and presses such as Verse and Fence—has been schooled in a dizzying and seemingly miscellaneous range of styles and forms, and runs the risk of writing a tepid, eager-to-please poetry based on stylistic accommodations. Their poems often exhibit a sassy, glib, moment-referenced humor and the technical mastery of a range of experimental styles. A major hazard for this generation is a bland eclecticism, with technically adroit writing that remains superficial because the cultural and historical tension of the formal gestures has evaporated. But many of these poets are also beginning to advocate and explore renewed ways of engaging sincerity, expressivity, and personal statement, explorations that may generate desirable crosscurrents to the pressures for stylistic accommodation.

Heriberto published his talk from the UCSC conference on his blog, Mexperimental.

If anyone is interested, and I'm not saying you should be, Kasey's blog, limetree, has a long exchange with David Hess, Henry Gould and Taylor Brady in its comments section the conference.

Great stuff on Schwitters, Dennis.

1. Poets die young,

"...Kaufman said poets should not worry, but should perhaps look after their
health...."

Poets Die Young - U.S. Study

2. NEA Announces Writing Program for Troops

3. The New Criterion does a special issue on poetry. Includes . . .
Eric Ormsby, "Of Lapdogs & Loners: American Poetry Today"
The continuing institutionalization of poetry in North America, with its concomitant proliferation of writing workshops, professorial positions, validating agencies, and award-giving bodies, not to mention such pointless offices as that of poet laureate, has had a stultifying effect on the creation of good poetry over the last few decades.

and a few other articles but you need a sub to get at them.

these are at the website
Dana Gioia, Elizabeth Bishop: from coterie to canon
David Yezzi, The morality of Anthony Hecht

and the good news is . . .

Pamela Lu reading last night was excellent. Renee and Chris also excellent but since they've already been around the Mills block I'll just mention Renee read a piece with a sex scene in the middle of it and Chris read translations by other people that his new press will publish.

Pam read a long piece that seemed to be about a group of people who made "ambient licks" and in the middle of it was a long description of what might have been a butoh performance that was about thirty hours long and took place in a car that had been crushed by a concrete pillar and that might have been happening somewhere in the flatlands.

and new books from Arras to cheer you up after worries of early death and youthful ambition

__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com

--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Spring 2004 Titles
http://ubu.com/ubu
--------------------------------------

This year's titles range from the visually sophisticated Concrete poetry of
Gustave Morin, a native of Windsor who spent 10 years on his "novel" A Penny
Dreadful, to an obscure volume of satirical translations of Baudelaire by
the English poet Nicholas Moore, from the experiments in frame and format
that Caroline Bergvall and designer Marit Meunzberg explore in their daring
resetting of the poet's Eclat, to the equally daring, if entirely
unscrupulous, logorrhea that is the 130 pages of another "novel," Name, by
Toadex Hobogrammathon.

The big news this year might be the introduction of color into the pantheon
of effects being used in our e-books: both Bergvall's Eclat and my own Alpha
Betty's Chronicles rely heavily on it, in ways that would have been
unsuitable to html and impossibly expensive to print in a book. Likewise,
the volumes by Morin and Lytle Shaw - two of his uniquely low-tech Shark
chapbooks - are primarily graphic works, while the titles by Craig Dworkin,
Robert Fitterman and Larry Price attempt to re-conceptualize the page of an
Adobe Acrobat file as a middle-space that ironizes the permanence of type
(Dworkin's use of Courier fonts) or digital flow (Fitterman's box-like
containers) as well as the "writing on the wall" soixante-huitard-style
(Price's poster-style typography).

Of the republications, we are happy to present the final section of Ron
Silliman's The Age of Huts, The Chinese Notebook, probably the most
influential of his early books outside of Kejtak, two small works by the
increasingly-prized Jean Day, whose 1998 Atelos volume, The Literal World,
woke so many up to her understated talents. Robert Kelly's quasi-fiction -
yes, yet another "novel" - called The Cruise of the Pnyx has long been one
of my favorites of his, but has never appeared in another book, nor has the
original Station Hill edition of 1979 been republished.

New writers include the playwright Madelyn Kent, whose Shufu plays - part
Butoh, part Richard Maxwell-like deadpan, with a touch of Clark Coolidge --
are bound to become recognized as innovative theater, and Aaron Kunin, who
is becoming known in New York and elsewhere as a writer of uncommon
intelligence and tremendous technical precision. The English poet Ira
Lightman drops in on the series like a lightning bolt, spreading his art in
a sort of spirit of personal renaissance, while Barbara Cole's Foxy Moron -
a text I see as existing somewhere between poetry and drama if only because
she reads it so well in public - strikes a little lower, not so much toward
"renaissance" as sexual catharsis, over and over again.

Lastly, we are especially happy to have Deanna Ferguson's long-awaited
follow-up collection to her 1993 book The Relative Minor (which appears as a
reprint in last year's series). Several of the poems in Rough Bush have
already played parts in some of the signal poetics statements of the
nineties; it's good to finally have such a stash of Ferguson's recent
writings in one place.

Enjoy!

--Brian Kim Stefans

/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu

--------------------------------------

Eclat
Caroline Bergvall
http://ubu.com/ubu/bergvall_eclat.html

Situation Comedies: Foxy Moron
Barbara Cole
http://ubu.com/ubu/cole_foxy.html

Linear C & The I and the You
Jean Day
http://ubu.com/ubu/day_linear.html

Smokes
Craig Dworkin
http://ubu.com/ubu/dworkin_smokes.html

Rough Bush and other poems
Deanna Ferguson
http://ubu.com/ubu/ferguson_bush.html

This Window Makes Me Feel
Robert Fitterman
http://ubu.com/ubu/fitterman_window.html

Name, a novel
Toadex Hobogrammathon
http://ubu.com/ubu/toadex_name.html

Cruise of the Pnyx
Robert Kelly
http://ubu.com/ubu/kelly_pnyx.html

São Paolo
Madelyn Kent
http://ubu.com/ubu/kent_sao.html

The Mauberley Series
Aaron Kunin
http://ubu.com/ubu/kunin_mauberley.html

Trancelated (from Coinsides)
Ira Lightman
http://ubu.com/ubu/lightman_trance.html

Spleen: Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire's Je suis comme le roi...
Nicholas Moore
http://ubu.com/ubu/moore_spleen.html

Spaghetti Dreadful (trailer for A Penny Dreadful)
Gustave Morin
http://ubu.com/ubu/morin_spaghetti.html

Circadium
Larry Price
http://ubu.com/ubu/price_circadium.html

Gulf & Alpha Betty's Chronicles
Brian Kim Stefans
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_alpha.html
http://ubu.com/ubu/stefans_gulf.html

Low-Level Bureaucratic Structures Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound
Lytle Shaw
http://ubu.com/ubu/shaw_low.html

The Chinese Notebook
Ron Silliman
http://ubu.com/ubu/silliman_chinese.html

ONE MORE READING...
support your fellow mills graduates

Canessa Park Reading Series
708 Montgomery Street @ Columbus
San Francisco, CA
Admission $5

Sunday April 25th @ 3 pm Meetze/Ward/Young

that is James Meetze, Dana Ward, Stephanie Young

No, meg, I don't think you are too forgiving.

I think it is a great book.

But I still think though that is an interesting question to think about. Not really in critique. But just to think about with one's own work more.

Jessea, I'm trying to get Heriberto to post his talk on his blog but haven't heard back from him.

I lived 2 blocks away from the Bowery in a one-bedroom apartment that was $1700/mo. rent.

Juliana--do you have the text of Heriberto's talk? He is my hero.

Is anyone going to answer my quantum physics / WWII idea?

Rob Wilson (rwilson@ucsc.edu): DRAFT:

Conference at UCSC, April 17, 2004: “Is Poetry Enough? Poetry In a Time of Crisis”

Talk at UCSB, April 19, “”Worlding California Poetics: Theorizing Some Global/Local and Transpacific Dimensions to the Poetry of Place”

“California is a place unlike any other on the planet. Its culture of innovation, diversity, entrepreneurship, and the-sky’s-the-limit creativity are what drew me here, and countless other Californians have similar stories to tell.”
-- Robert C. Dynes, President of the University of California system.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend.”
-- as the drunken journalist boasts to the naïve lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) clearing a frontier town of cattle rustlers, land monopolists, and thugs to make way for statehood in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence [1962].

The crisis we face, locally and globally at home and abroad, is more than a crisis of poetry, cultural poetics, or representation as such: the US imperial presidency is in crisis (as well it should be), deforestation surges across the planet, off-shoring and middle-class proletarianization get taken as everyday down-sizing practice; and the war-machine of the Pax Americana has turned from its initial ‘shock and awe’ killer-effects in the Iraq War of Bush II into the techno-hubris reversals charted in the cautionary Third Worldist terms of Black Hawk Down. The simulation of democratic politics and presidential debate, globaloney discourse, and the vulgar social-darwinism of US reality TV has reached a mass-mediated level of postmodern cynicism and meanness-of-spirit that defeats any mere Situationist call (as it were) to “Bring the Tropes Home!”

It is a time of crisis and demoralization when, as Walter Benjamin put it theorizing poetry between the two prior world wars: “[even] the dream [of surrealism] has grown gray.” Against huge social odds and the reign of US Empire when the will to global hegemony barely “takes a breathing spell,” I want here to hold out for a place-based yet supple poetics of transpacific vision and California regionality that is a strong and abidingly inter-textual one, with long standing palimpsestic ties to coalitions and authors here, and one which is dedicated (as you shall see) to preserving the activist politics, left-leaning energies, and vision-opening forces of prophesy, coalition, and critique. Regionality, so configured, becomes a key site in which to register and articulate the global/local dialectics of space-transformation and situated tactics of what I would call (deforming Heidegger to counter-liberal local uses) “world making.”

My vision of California regionality will not only assume an openness to “transpacific” forces of Asia/Pacific becoming and Hispanic transculturation, it will also tap into some high visionary sources and a demanding configuration of poetic vocation and an expansive urban nexus. These are the oppositional forces of will and imagination that Blake (as in Kenzaburo’s Oe’s eccentrically prophetic postwar-Japan novel on this High Romantic vision called Rouse Up Oh Young Men of the New Age! which influences my invocation of the revolutionary Blakean poetics here) troped as “Jesus-the-Imagination” and he relentlessly and at great peril opposed to the reactionary hegemony of capital as “the fallen world of illusion” I will be holding out for the vocation in extremis of the poet here in coastal and Pacific-leaning California, as a figure of theory-making and situated worlding here on the left-coast of experimental poetics and geopolitics. This is what I will begin to sketch in here as his/her poetic calling to high contrarian vision in William Everson’s sense in his “Santa Cruz Meditations,” aiming to “throw off this malaise, this evasion, this attitudinizing and sickliness of urbanity” and, instead, “Shamanize! Shaminize! The American destiny is in your hands.” In a time of war upon war and civilization othered against civilization, as Juliana Spahr has warned in “Poetry in a Time of Crisis,” it is not enough for US poetry merely to sooth, relieve, twitter, or console the soul with the sound of iambic bromides and the suave banalities of faux-universalism befitting the Fireside Poets of long ago.

As for my evoking poetic-mentor figures (like Blake, Oe, and Everson, or Jack Spicer and Juliana Spahr for that matter) who would preserve the negational and counter-constructionist power of poetics/aesthetics in counter-revolutionary times like these, these vision-makers working in the poetics of place and across the borders of language-community and bad empiricism, would help a to prefigure and conjure some resources of hope via the tactics of poetry. Unlike Plato’s Republic, my vision of the US “invisible republic” of minor-becoming and mongrel polity needs large and unsettling doses of poesis.

The larger social context of poetry I am outlining here is an oddly enabling one in the United States of Bush 2, perhaps the least poetic president since Herbert Hoover. I know this sounds weirdly paradoxical, but the dialectical situation of poetry in a late-capitalist society of sublimated Empire like our own—poetry constructed as the site of a de-instrumentalized irrelevance, lyric quietude, and social indifference -- has so severely aggravated the working contradictions and historical malaise into a social condition in which the need for the projection and preservation of vision that poetry offers and the ties to sites, languages, experiments, and places of mongrel contestation that is cultural poetics (in the broadest sense) has never been stronger or more urgent. “We do not live by bread alone,” Middle Eastern prophets remind us, and Terry Eagleton would add to this calculus the rather nastier Marxian disclaimer that “men and women do not live by culture alone,” nor (as he later warned in The Idea of Culture) by cultural studies alone, however theory-drenched, coalitional, or vigilant its discursive tactics.

Still, from my angle of theory and pedagogy working in Hawaii and in California here on the Pacific Rim, poetry remains a crucial soul-making and counter-worlding project that helps to prefigure, open a space for, and regenerate “the invisible republic” of dust-bowl poets and makers of refunctioned polity, place, and language-community from Woody Guthrie and Sister Gertrude Morgan to Bob Kaufman. Pamela Lu, Sesshu Foster, Zack Linmark, and Kathy Dee Banggo to name only a mongrel few. For we do live in an era of material opacity, spectral alienation, and the wholesale contraction of visionary forces away from any future-making capacity or collective will: “Therefore Los [Blake’s name for the vision-keeping poet] stands in London [the global city] building Golgonooza/ Compelling his Specter to labours mighty.” Golgonooza (that is, London as a “global city” troped and refigured by William Blake into some new-born Albion/Jerusalem of redemptive political vision and blasted futurity as linked to the revolutionary prophecies of “America”) stands for the fully particularized city-of-art as such.

Again and again, we do ‘make a start out of particulars’ and the grimy contexts of historical locality and the situatedness of social utterance; we have learned that much from the “filthy Passaic” of Doc Williams and the more projective global-locality of Charles Olson’s seafaring Gloucester. San Francisco, in my reading of this post-Beat “contado” surging its urban borders and energy-exchanges from the High Sierras, Cal and Stanford and UCSC, and Silicon Valley to the coastal reaches, timbers, and faux castles of Big Sur and San Simeon, here will stand exactly for such a “city of art” and nexus of mongrel leftist emergences on the Pacific Rim.

Jack Spicer memorably captured this “image of the city” of the Bay Area urban nexus and mongrelizing cosmopolis in the warped disjunctive stanzas of Heads of the Town Up to the Ether (especially in A Textbook of Poetry sections) of 1960-1961, when he urged, speaking of his specific locality of San Francisco as emanating from the local poetry-wars, language deformations, and willed marginality of bars like Gino Carlos and The Place,

Every city that is formed collects its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts.
Poetry comes long after the city is collected. It recognizes them as a metaphor. An unavoidable metaphor. Almost the opposite.

…But the city that we create in our bartalk or in our fuss and fury about each other is in an utterly mixed and mirrored way an image of the city. A return from exile

Michael Davidson nicely illuminates the trenchant situation and long duree of these lines and providential city-vision when he writes in The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century that “Spicer’s model here is Dante, who, exiled from Florence, creates a divine comedy out of historical contingency and in the process turns his local city into a system of belief.”

If San Francisco is to prefigure this poetry-driven and art-respecting civitas dei, then it demands a very left leaning, bohemian, queer, mongrel, porous site of experimental energies and juxtapositions open to the future and to the freeplay of the new. As the one Spicer poem Robert Hass embedded in the grungy poetry walkway on Addison Street in Berkeley near the BART station would remind us, “Hold to the future. With firm hands. The future of each afterlife, of each ghost, of each word that is about to be mentioned.// Don’t put beauty in here for the past, on account of the past. On account of the past nothing has happened.// Stick to the new. With glue, paste it there continually what God and man has created. Your fingers catch at the edge of what you are pasteing.” (Heads of the Town, p. 179). Spicer’s tie to this caustic localism of place in post-Beat San Francisco of queer emergence went along uneasily with the more deconstructive recognition as well embraced by the ironist Spicer--- as opposed to the incarnational if not sentimentalized Gloucester as propagated in the maximalism of Charles Olson personifying himself as an updated version of Melville’s “Pacific Man”-- that “Where we are is in a sentence.”

In no excessive, exploratory, and meandering postmodern terms of discursive over-reach and mythopoetic vision, Maxine Hong Kingston has finely captured the post-Beat and thickly archival San Francisco poetic culture and leftist politics of place through her 60s-drenched refigurations of Frank Chin as Asian American street-theater activist in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). This remains for me one of the greatest literary works San Francisco’s mongrel and transpacific-becoming culture has yet produced, as place and self collage and collapse into one mongrel and inter-textual mix by the suicide-haunted Golden Gate Bridge where the “fake book” opens its psychedelic documentary: “San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn—omen, o-o-men, or dolorous omen, o dolors of omen” and home of five-generation native sinner and son, the grandly named Wittman Ah Sing out-troping Bret Harte, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Norris, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Peter Orlovksy, Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, and his namesake bard Walt Whitman in a space-trumping claim to speak the dramaturgy of urban polity and the poetics of self-fashioning and Chinatown as place, myth, and nation-language.

Reflecting a coalitional, experimental, and trans-poetics vision linked to the “worlding” dynamics of Santa Cruz and the global contado of San Francisco as Northern California nexus linked to Asia Pacific and the Americas to the south and north, I would here aim to articulate a situated poetics of transpacific capaciousness and California regionality. This is an extreme, ongoing. and abiding poetics of place and numinous reach, with long standing palimpestic ties to sites and authors here, and one which is dedicated to preserving the activist politics energies and visionary reach of what Blake called “Jesus-the-Imagination” and William Everson brashly incarnated in his vision-keeping works to shape and abiding ontological geopolitical poetics of place, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (1976) and its companion work in the pedagogy of vocation and regional/national/cosmological vision, Birth of the Poet (1982).

From his little cabin and A-frame press in Swanton along the Pacific above Santa Cruz (where he taught for years at Kresge College at UCSC and forged his sacramental vision of place and embodied poetics), this Brother Antoninus turned Dharma-Bum Blakean prophet helped to forge the legends and myths and hyperboles of vision that allow place (regionality as such) not just to exist as geomaterial fact and fate, but as mytho-poetic longing and historical-existential project to become an ‘idea/ archetype” in the beatitudes of place. In Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as Literary Region (Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1976), Everson invokes the East Coast platitudes of New York critical lion Edmund Wilson who blasts the Big Sur poetry and California exceptionalism of Robinson Jeffers in 1941 in these smug and culture-emptying terms: “It is probably a good deal too easy [for Jeffers] to be a nihilist on the [Big Sur] coast at Carmel: your very negation is a negation of nothing” (p. 4). But Everson to the contrary, living in Swanton near Santa Cruz and teaching his huge “Birth of the Poet” course in UCSC Kresge College from 1969 to the mid 80s in the wake of mentor-figures like Jeffers and Rexroth and the Duncan-Spicer circle of Bay Area poets, argues for the abiding special force of west coast poetics and San Franciscan incarnations; he claims that Kerouac and Ginsberg “became the true voice of the western regional archetype,” as these Beats incarnated the primordial, sublime, and wild energies of the region as some kind of “apotheosis” (p. 113) even as Hippies later diffused this energy of place into the public and social body (147)
While some versions of regional locality can be bounded and drenched in nostalgia and sentimentality, I am not being retrospective or rearguard here: The California I am contending for here is emergent, mongrel, multiple, under construction, upon to myriad forces of transcultural and translational becoming. For in such a vision of western regionality, the Pacific Ocean is not an entropic end-point, smoldering “void” (Lawrence), or beautiful “Glass Wall” (Baudrillard, Lyotard) of blockage, entrapment, and closure where US white-settler frontier dynamism ends and suicide, death, sunset, miscegenation, acid trips, bardo flight, and narcissistic aimlessness and cultural folly begin. This misguided sense of a continental-forged California forever closed to Asia/Pacific and native becoming not to mention shut off from the phenomenal South/North transcultural/translational interconnections between Alta/Baja Americas, was most invidiously portrayed by Louis Simpson in a 1963 Pulitizer-prize winning poem called “Lines Written Near San Francisco” which claims utter world-wearyness and second-rate wine-consumption as California telos:

Every night at the
end of America
We taste our wine,
Looking at the
Pacific.
How sad it is, the
end of America!

In “Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region,” Dana Gioia invokes this self-blinded little-narrative poem by Simpson to substantiate his even more remarkably wrong-headed claim that San Francisco had altogether stopped being the center of US literary culture around the imperial-San Francisco heyday in 1898 and 1899 when literary figures like Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Bret Harte, Lincoln Steffans, and the amazingly banal proletarian poet of “The Man with the Hoe,” Edwin Markham, had a broad national if not world impact.

Defending California regionality and the local basis of art, Gioia contends that present-day San Francisco has no “literary ecosystem” or “thriving literary culture” of presses, journals, critics, social theorists, or authors of cosmopolitan regionality or innovative vision to speak of, though he oddly remarks that “Pundits are never in short supply in Berkeley, which is probably why it produced—albeit twenty-five years ago—the last influential local literary trend, Language Poetry.” Such a failure of vision and denial of history are so out of keeping with contemporary San Francisco and is literary-experimental contado, only somebody in New York, Denver, or Washington DC could believe its retro-fitted and nostalgia-drunk claims to defend the mythos of California as writing locality.

The work in forging a place-based poetics is given (by the down-sizing poet of globalizing market forces named Rob Wilson) the un/American cottage-industry name of a small airline company tracing transnational lines of flight and rude invention across and out beyond the American polity in its rhizomatics of Asia/Pacific becoming: Ananda Air. In my own long-cultivated vision of “worlded” poetics and poetry, I have worked to cross over the American Pacific space and codes, thereby to engage and release forces of imperial domination and contestation (“hegemony takes a breathing spell”) in a global movement when New England, the interior Pacific, and East Asia interact and react like adjacent regions and shared communes.

Vision of place and polity is challenged by material blockage and the will to perpetual negation and rootlessness: “Los [the poet] reads the Stars of Albion! The Specter [theory] reads the Voids/ Between the Stars.” This nervous dialectic of image and concept, theory and dream, has been transported to transpacific sites out along the Pacific Rim where Kant (as in fits of sublime lassitude) walks and walks around Taipei. Building-up into the makings of a transnational vision “among these dark Satanic Mills” of Connecticut and the lesser lights and “Mental Fight” of malls and courts and Berkeley classroom clamor.

In these times of crisis and defeat, poetry becomes a way of keeping the soul alive (as in Blake’s principle of Los pursuing Jesus-the-Imagination) in the late capitalist world, say, with its codes of de-sacralization, glamour, banality, plunder, loathing, and dust. Poetry becomes a way of searching for a mantra, miming ontological traces and becomings along lines of dwelling and flight, “walking between the two deserts/ singing.” Poetry early served the forces that drove the flower from the brass fuse, works and days, transfigurations of the Rock the Brass Valleys of Connecticut into haunted tropes and vision-quest graffiti: “One World.” In mongrel and myriad small presses from Tinfish and subpress collective to New Pacific Press and Krupsykia, poetry emerges anew as language charged with meandering, in the strict sense of syntax, a way of becoming; maybe (at times) a tongue or stammer on fire. Selecting and finishing language in some modest act of will and emergent intelligence. At the far extremity of language-deformation and quest, said Bataille, “I write in order to abolish the play of subordinate operations in myself” By such visions of polity and place, to write beyond my self into another language and place of perpetual becoming where the language of dispossession seems act of grace, lost certitude, syntactical torquing, and sudden finding.

***
1. “California’s Competitiveness Starts with Research Universities,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 April 2004: B9. In my view, poesis and the humanities help to empower and enrich Dynes’s claim to California creativity and will to regional, if not global, exceptionality, though he centers his claim in the techno-sciences and business culture.
2. During the mass demonstrations and web-rallying that took place in Santa Cruz and San Francisco to prevent the blinded march to another US war in Iraq in spring 2003, I took heart from my colleague Chris Connery’s discourse-and-ideology wary cry to the Bush 2 war-machine, “Bring the Tropes Home! This wry Situationist slogan came down to our era from Vietnam War protests; in related interventions, see the surrealist protest poem by Rob Wilson, “Ending the War in Vietnam by Lyric Fiat” in The Red Wheelbarrow, UCSC, spring 2003, p. 46, as well as anti-war poems posted ad hoc on the poulist Poets Against the War website. (I might add that Santa Cruz, California posted the most protest poems in California, even more than Berkeley and San Francisco.)
3. Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism,” Selected Writings: Vol 2, 1927-1934, trans. By Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 3.
4. These tactics and critical strategies are more thickly described in trans-disciplinary terms in my preface and essay on Gladiator and the Pax Americana in Rob Wilson and David Watson, eds., Worldings: World Literature, Field Imaginaries, Future Practices—Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, forthcoming).
5. Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Trans. John Nathan (New York: Grove Press, 2002 [1986]), who reconfigured his whole interventionist political and poetic vision of “the imagination” in postwar Japan based on a re-reading of Blake’s poetry, as in Oe’s evocation of this line from Milton: “”The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” (p. 128). Capital, as such, is “a fallen world of illusion,” p. 129. Oe, the father-novelist, preaches to Hikari the post-Hiroshima musician-son, that poets and artists are relentlessly urged to set their revolutionary vision of imagination and body “against the Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University” who would prolong Corporeal War and murderously negate global peace and poetic vision (249).
6. William Everson,The Birth of A Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations, ed. Lee Bartlett (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), p. 135. For Everson, Bob Dylan was exactly such a prophetic and shamanistic poet of vision in the US ecumene, extending the protest of Guthrie into the prophesy of Jeremiah and becoming thus “a figure of confrontation than of prescience” (p. 130).
7. Juliana Spahr, “Poetry in a Time of Crisis,” Poetry Project Newsletter 189 (2002): 6-8, originally written for a “Poetry in a Time of Crisis” panel at the 2001 MLA convention,
8. I for one do not take Bush’s loose and mangled American English to be poetry or poetry-like.
9. As in New Yorker verse if not the scaled-down poems worthy of The Dunciad in the leftist journal of mass circulation, The Nation. The lyric is relegated to a condition of irrelevance to the US war-machine verging on what Santayana called in World War I contexts, “the genteel tradition”: this is what Ron Silliman blasts as the US School of Lyric Quietude on his blog site defending language and post-language poetics.
10. On the multi-sited rise of such left-leaning cultural studies work and internationalism after the war and the social dynamism of 1968, see Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of the Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), who invoked Eagleton, pp. 188-119.
11. Though I cannot substantiate this claim here as fleshed out by myriad examples, I would urge the reader to look at Rob Wilson, Pacific Postmodern: Writing the Pacific, from the Sublime to the Devious (Honolulu: Tinfish Works, 2000) as context for such claims. “Invisible Republic” would allude to the prophetic leftist America evoked by Greil Marcus around the popular culture work in music of protest poets like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, The Band, Joan Baez, Ma Rainey, and Robert Johnson et al.
12. “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion,” William Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 650-51.
13. On the material and visionary of San Francisco’s being “the hub of it” and nexus of “the new regionalism” of California-based vision, see Everson, The Birth of A Poet, pp. 162-163, who makes some caustic contrasts with the Fresno county of his birth and the Los Angeles of de-racinated mythlessness. My own geomaterial vision of San Francisco as a huge “contado” of center/periphery interactions and hinterlands as well as a counter-imperial poetics, depends upon formulations of space in Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: Universit of California Press, 1999) which does not turn to San Francisco literature or experimental poetics for a counter-vision of the Pacific and/ Beat contado.
14. Michael Davidson makes the case that “the local” circulation pattern generated around Jack Spicer’s vision of San Francisco did not mean seeking Beat celebrity nor academic ratification, but performing crazed poetry in a bar like The Place in San Francisco: see The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 156-167.
15. The cultishness, phobias, and exclusionary tactics of Spicer’s poetry circle are outlined by Michael Davidson in Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), who nonetheless concludes once again that “Spicer is forging a link between Dante’s projection of Florence into the civitas dei of Divine Comedy by imagining a redeemed San Francisco formed out of the poet’s North Beach milieu,” a milieu of gender and genre experimention Davidson would now and again relate to the west-coast Language Poets his own poetry is affiliated to, pp. 41-42.
16. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 3 ff. In some ways the text forms a situated and Asian Americanized archive of every film and literary work done on San Francisco, with works like Vertigo and Dharma Bums fully embedded in the dream-life and reference system of Wittman Ah Sing, who at times also seems to embody the macho energy not just of Chin but of Earll Kingston, Maxine’s actor husband to whom this “fake book” and exploratory novel is dedicated.
17. Markham’s poem appeared in Hearst’s rival San Francisco Examiner and supposedly was republished in 10,000 newspapers and magazines at home and abroad in 1899.
18. Gioia’s essay was first printed in the Denver Quarterly in Fall 1998 and became the basis for the essays collected by Jack Foley, ed., The ‘Fallen Western Star’ Wars: A Debate About Literary California (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2001). It appears online at:
http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ewestern.htm
19. My own global/local labor invention in poetic re-building takes place across the latter three decades of the twentieth century from Berkeley to Honolulu, Seoul, Taipei, and Santa Cruz and tries (as here) to open up a more capacious vision of region as site of global/local entanglement as well as sustain a sense of mongrel community as linked and deformed under “late capitalist weather on the Pacific Rim.” The dharma-quest road here leads out and across from Berkeley and Honolulu to Taipei, Seoul, Hiroshima, and Beijing, resituating the custody of what Blake called Jesus-the-imagination to the DMZ as site of American expansion and responsibility.
20. Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong, Columbia CD, liner notes. See Rob Wilson and David Watson, eds., Worldings: World Literature, Field Imaginaries, Future Practices: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, forthcoming.
21. It was not long ago that post-romantic poets of trans-American subjecthood (like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Jack Spicer say) seemed to offer up an expanded counter-cultural vision of region and a large-scale improvisational engagement with the un/American drives of history, place, nation, and subject. Add to that bio-poetics of place the scrupulously gnostic deconstructionism of poets like John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens, along with the will-to-visionary dimensionality of William Blake, Emerson, and Kenzaburo Oe which haunt all the global figurations and lyric quests here.
22. William Blake, “Milton,” Preface, p. 514.
23. On the long-cultivated poetics and will to oblivion of ‘going local’ in Honolulu, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz, see Rob Wilson, “In Praise of Doggedness,” The Red Wheelbarrow, spring 2003, pp. 60-65.”

Thanks Scott. Wow. Would you blurb for me when that (if ever) happens?

I was talking with Jennifer Uhlrich about the Brenda Coultas book the other day and she was mentioning the things that were missing from the book. Among them the gentrified Lower East Side, the $30 a plate restaurants, the hipster store that sells the Ames chair for a lot of money (and how did that chair get there anyway). What other things are missing?

NEED MORE POETRY? This weekend is the weekend and week for you!

WED Renee Gladman at Mills

THUR Pamela Lu, Renee Gladman, and Chris Chen at Berkeley
Colloquia, drinks and crackers with the poets take place at 5:30 p.m. in the English Department Lounge, 330 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley. Readings take place at 7 p.m. in the Maud Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

FRI Taylor Brady and Jen Hofer at SPT

Jen Hofer has edited this anthology of work by contemporary Mexican poets and there are a number of events around this anthology for this event. I think I saw Dolores Dorantes read in NYC a year or so ago. I would recommend going to any of these...

Events for Sin Puertas Visibles/No Visible Doors -- an anthology of contemporary poetry edited by Jen Hofer.
Cosponsored by Small Press Traffic, New Langton Arts, Galeria de la Raza, and the Poetry Center.

Panel Discussion with Mexican poets Dolores Dorantes and Laura Solórzano, with poet and translator Jen Hofer
Breaking the Ligatures of the Predictable: Contemporary Mexican Poetries and the Poetics/Politics of Translation,
Thursday, April 22, 4:30 pm
At the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University
1600 Halloway Ave, Humanities 512 Bldg, SF
Contact: 415 338 2227
http://www.sfsu/~poetry
FREE

Bilingual reading with Mexican poets Dolores Dorantes and Laura Solórzano, with poet and translator Jen Hofer
No Visible Doors: A Celebration of Contemporary Mexican Poetry by Mexican Women,
Saturday, April 24, 7 pm
At Galería de la Raza
2857 24th Street, SF
Contact: 415 826 8009
http://www.galeriadelaraza.org/

Salon with Mexican poets Dolores Dorantes and Laura Solórzano, with poet and translator Jen Hofer
Using All the Letters: A Celebration of Contemporary Mexican Poetry,
Sunday, Aprl 25, 8 pm
At the home of Camille Roy, New Langton Arts literature curator
Contact: 415 626 5416 for reservations (required) and directions
FREE

Tuesday, April 27
7 pm
on the UC Berkeley Campus
Wheeler Hall, Room 330 (third floor)

Dolores Dorantes

was born in Córdoba, Veracruz in 1973. Her most recent books include
SexoPUROsexoVELOZ (Cuadernos del filodecaballo, 2002), Para Bernardo: un eco
(MUB editoraz, 2000) and Poemas para niños (Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia,
1999). She is a founding editor of Editorial Frugal, which counts among its
activities publication of the monthly broadside series Hoja Frugal, printed
in editions of 4000 and distributed free throughout Mexico. She lives in
Ciudad Juárez, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.

Laura Solórzano

was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1961. She is the author, most recently,
of lobo de labio (Cuadernos de filodecaballos, Guadalajara: 2001) and
Semilla de Ficus (Ediciones Rimbaud, Tlaxcala: 1999). She is on the
editorial board of the literary arts magazine Tragaluz, and currently
teaches film studies and writing at the Centro de Arte Audiovisual in
Guadalajara.

The poets will be introduced by their translator, the poet Jen Hofer, editor
and translator of the groundbreaking Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of
Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (published by University of Pittsburgh
Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003).

Sin puertas visibles (No Visible Doors) is a bilingual anthology of poetry
featuring the work of emerging women poets whose writing exists at the most
exciting margins of Mexican literary hierarchies. All three poets
represented here have had at least one book published in Mexico, yet none of
their work has been translated into English until now.

Although Mexico is home to one of Latin America's most important poetic
traditions, the breadth and range of contemporary Mexican poetry are
virtually unknown to readers north of the border. These poems are by turns
meditative and explosive, sensuous and inventive, ironic and tender; in
short, they are subversive, provocative, bold. Reflecting the diversity and
complexity of Mexican poetry, they provide a taste of the adventurous new
writing infusing the tradition today.

"One of the most exciting anthologies of poetry in any language, translation
or original, that I have seen in recent years."-Forrest Gander

"An exceptional anthology that illustrates the many different realms through
which emerging poetry written by women ventures. . . . An extraordinary
book."-Beatriz Escalante

"[Hofer's] translations are both artistically daring and rigorously precise,
true recreations that could only have been realized by someone who possesses
a similarly unique poetic vision and language in her own right."-Pura
López-Colomé

on the AWP21stC issue, to me the difference b/t Hejinian and Graham is a difference b/t an interest in collective experience v/ individual (epiphanic?) experience. they use similar disjunctions, but for different ends.

Some of us went down to Santa Cruz on Saturday. The talk was fun. Thanks Juliana for the invitation and for presenting there.

I want to pick it up from where I left of. Meaning VS Significance. Here goes:

I think I might be agreeing with Scott's blog,that the use of the word "meaning" is either getting too narrow or needing adjective to define what kind of 'meaning' exactly is in question. Scott used the word "subtextual." I like that, and I take it to refer things usually proposed when one discusses a poem formally, like " I think, by X, the poet means Y because X and Y are related during the century the poet was writing." Or "because phrase A and phrase B are together, the poet means C."

Now, to introduce what I am proposing by the word "significance," I want to say the following (maybe this is related to our "stake" portion of our workshop, actually):

A poem can be significant without "subtest" (or representional) meaning.
But to be significant, the poem has to be something or do something. Such as, it can make us scrutinize language, it can make us question our understanding of things, it can take us somewhere intelligent in variety of aspects.

I guess significant poems educate me in some ways. Usually the non-traditional way.

To Jessea's Q: I guess, in my earlier blog, I hadn't nailed the term down quite as firmly as I am doing here (maybe? what do you think?). I'll say Scott's work and JM's work fight with the "subtest" meanings. That's what similar about them. But how Scott's work and JM's work is significant is not the same thing.
(btw: thanks for dinner suggestion yesterday. excellent choice!)

Jessea--I wanna talk more about meaning VS significance. But right now I gotta get ready for Santa Cruz. See you there!

(also related to thrust #2 described below: after WWII, the only way to make sense of a crazy world was to write fragments, destabilized. how to deal with spiritual worldview after the holocaust. i see marguerite duras as an example of this response to the world. not as a way to change it, as protest, but to accurately describe.)

(padcha, you say that denying meaning is still a reading of a text--that it has no meaning is a meaning. but what about this: no meaning is only One Reading. but accepting that there is meaning means there are infinite interpretations. allowing for meaning means doing more "work" as a reader. saying there is no meaning allows you not to create more than one interpretation. it allows you to dismiss, in a way. it allows you to say that scott's work, for example, means the same thing as jackson maclowe's, etc.)

thanks, juliana. right. I think that circles right back to the ideas about escapism being an act of protest.
Let me add another one, also from Menocal, that's referenced in yr introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century.

"When the world all around is calling for clear distinctions, loyalties to Self and hatred of others, and, most of all, belief in the public and legal discourses of single languages and single states--smooth narratives--what greater threat exists than the voice which rejects such easy orthodoxies with their readily understood rhetoric and urges, instead, the most difficult readings, those that embrace the painfully impossible in the human heart?"

I don't have my head wrapped around this introduction yet, but here I go fumbling toward some ideas. I'm trying to understand the question of why, say, Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian might produce work that appears to share much in the way of aesthetics, but who are doing it for different reasons. HEre's what I think (cartoon): it seems that there are two main thrusts to using fragmenting/modernist techniques in writing: 1. as an act of protest (scott, Language poets), writing against conventional syntax with the desire to change the world, and 2. (i think brenda hillman might fit in here) as the most accurate way to describe the world as it already is. I keep coming back to quantum physics. It seems that there must have been a huge consciousness-shift once it was proven in a laboratory that matter is not an absolute, that immateriality is the basis for all physical objects. Once this happens, doesn't it make sense that there would have been a similiar movement in the arts? How do we account for an apparently illogical (in terms of scientific logic) world? We make seemingly illogical art--but in fact, it is an attempt to mirror what we now know is physically true.

I just skipped right on past love poetry--I think I have landed in the place where I'm thinking about the lyric, content-free.

It seems the only way to justify the "I" is if it's destabilized--but will it be read that way? That's the problem.

It doesn't make sense to me to leave the "I" out--it's a thing in the world, the self, a self. We should try to include all things in our work.

For all the violence sprung from the official versus the unofficial book, where literature is found has less to do with its force than who we are when we find it. Are we ready to receive it? Many have come to literature from strange paths and pieced it together to their own liking, ignoring all the established orders. Poetry is not for the passive. It is, as Mayakovsky knew, at its very root tendentious. Even the love poem agitates the beloved to fall in love with the poet.
--Jennifer Moxley, Preface to Imagination Verses

then two from Menocal's Shards of Love . . .

p. 88
...we can point to the ways in which the multiple ambiguities and paradoxes within the texts are tied in chainlike fashion: the Beloved is always an Other--and the painful love of Others is the painful love of God. This union of love thus constitutes the ultimate challenge to the self (whether the external and transiet manifestation of the self is fhte flesh adn blood lover vis-a-vis the object of carnal desire, or the Christian vis-a-vis the Muslim, or the supplicant vis-a-vis the Lord). Within the context of a difficult and fading multiculturalism, the Beloved may emerge as that ultimate theophany, all Others. And the Love poetry of the poets of such circumstances may well play back what we can scarcely hear in periods defined by different tensions.

and then a few pages later

p. 92
Among the thousands of different answers that have come with the morning, one singular and unexpected one, the love lyric, has been a powerful and charming defense, a form of resistance commonly taken for retreat.

RENEE GLADMAN
reading
Wednesday, April 21
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public

The group goes anyway, though everything has changed; other organizations show too. Some still in their bedclothes, which they must have been wearing when they heard the news. We have to keep moving—that’s what the media says. But our plan to protest globalization in a coherent circle around the towers is ineffectual without the towers, which were destroyed earlier today. So we’re all skipping to part II of the plan: post-op assessment.
--Renee Gladman, The Activist

Renee Gladman is the author most recently of The Activist (Krupskaya). The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution and it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exits, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently.

She is also the author Juice (Kelsey Street) and she has edited the Leroy Chapbook Series, and has recently launched Leon Works, a perfect-bound press for experimental prose.

Let's get the blog going again, shall we?

Reading Jessea's blog, I feel a new interesting debate coming our way: I- You and Love Poem. Sounds good, doesn't it? So, let's go:

I feel like the yes-no question--Does X-kind of poetry matter?--is getting too limited to use. Maybe we should ask HOW does X-kind of poetry matter. And then we might be able to address the question from there.

So, how does love poetry matter?
It matters in such a way that people find pleasure out of it. (And maybe as Jessea said they get hooked up with other people). Then, people might start address it aesthetically or "intellectually," like there's metaphisical transcendence happening in it, or life can still be so beautiful because love exists. Blah blah blah. But it seems to me this is the end of it. It doesn't address a larger scope than personal pleasure. Which is important, no denial on that. It's true, I think, that no pleasure makes living questionable. I'll pick it up again after this:

How does political poetry matter (and by political poetry, I mean...gee...poems whose concerns are bigger than intimacy...let's live with that for now)?
It matters in such a way that it places larger scope as the primary concern. It says something like one's personal pleasure is not going to take precedence over the things that are, according to him or her, "wrong" in the world. This is important too.

So both matter, but in a different scale. Now, when we say scale, there are necessarily more than one things in question. What I want to say is that THEY BOTH MATTER because afterall, it's about human. And being human, we function always in a different scale: we're in a relationship, we're student at Mills, we're residents of CA, we're pupolation of the world. Different kind of poetry might be addressing primarily at the different space. Which at the end will be all connected because it aims at human, multi-scale beings.

OK. I'm getting too philosophical here. Stop me.

But let me throw in one more thing, though. About meaning, from yesterday. I hooked it up with Descartes' cognito: I think, therefore I am. And here is what i wanna say: Even if you say you're not thinking, you ARE thinking (that you are not thinking). Even if you say there's no meaning, you ARE giving it meaning (that there's no meaning) and then that is where you kinna locate its significance. I think nothing can have no meaning so long as we think. (OK. Scott is going to come at my position now...... I'll say let's have another engaged discussion or two before we officially get floated out of here. It will be good!)

I'll stop here.

what does you do?

Thanks for the workshop yesterday. Very interesting.. The synchronicity on Ashbery got me reading a Perloff essay on his work today (avoidance of Modern American Poetry Paper), and led me to this quote regarding his use of pronouns:

"The personal pronouns in my work very often seem to be like variables in an equation. 'You' can be myself or it can be another person, someone whom I'm addressing, and so can 'he' and 'she' for that matter and 'we'...my point is also that it doesn't really matter very much, that we are somehow all aspects of a consciousness giving rise to the poem and the fact of addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what's the important thing at that particular moment rather than the particular person involved. I guess I don't have a very strong sense of my own identity and I find it very easy to move from one person in the sense of a pronoun to another and this again helps to produce a kind of polyphony in my poetry which I again feel is a means toward a greater naturalism."

This is an interesting idea & I'd like to claim it as well, but I wonder just how possible it is for the reader to believe it. I also wonder if when he says he doesn't have a strong sense of his own identity how true this is--if the "I" is continuous in tone, does this mean he in fact doesn't have a strong sense of others' identities? Is this problematic?

It seems, however, that no matter how much a poet might argue that the pronouns are destabilized, it might still read like they are fixed. Even if it's difficult to get a logical reading out of his work, you could still make connections.

This is related to Scott's comments about inserting a "you" always making the poem eroticized. Juliana said something similiar, that the I-you is never innocent. And I wonder if that's always true. I wonder if there are ways to use that construction and have it not be read as a love poem or a fixed-identities individually-centered poem. And then I wonder why I'm even asking the question, and why I'm looking for a way to "get away with" it in the first place.

Have I just been brainwashed by a gajillion years of I-you tradition so I feel it has to be there regardless of modern issues attributed to it? Or is there something else to be uncovered? Is it just a way to make the reader feel "addressed" and feel his/her personal stake in the work? Is it a cheap trick?

Is the I-You the most resonant pronoun pair, in these terms? Are we willing to let he-she-we slide, but I-you is always about love?

answering questions with questions

Juliana said love poetry is the easiest to say why it matters, which seems counterintuitive to me. Political poetry sseems to be the easiest to say why it matters. Even if the writing is not strong, it's for a good cause, so it wins. Dan Bellm had this story about publishing a love poem to this guy he knew in high school and twenty years later the guy reads it & contacts him & they have a lovely connection. So this is what Juliana was referring to when saying why love poetry matters (poem had the POWER to Make People Take An Action). But the joke here is, it doesn't matter! Who cares if so-and-so hooks up with old flame? Who cares how so-and-so's relationship is going? Does it matter for any other reason?

Although I miss the conversation I am enjoying the detailed book reports here.

Padcha: Sommer is in Spanish Dept which is sort of like English with a different language. But Pennycook is a linguist I think. His book is not literature based but is about politics/society and the growth of English language.

I would order books from Rod Smith: aerialedge@aol.com. He works for an independent bookstore in D.C. and I usually send him an email and he sends the books on. He is great on poetry books. Usually has stuff in stock.

Meg: I thought since you were describing at some point doing something on the Mission that I would give you books about cities.

On Doris Sommer’s Proceed with Caution, when engaged by minority writing in the Americas.

Doris Sommer is a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. She has written several books around the theme of bilingualism with in the social context of America and teaches classes that deal with this topic. Most of her classes are listed under Spanish. For her webpage, click here.

Proceed with Caution is a 270-page book of essay presenting arguments and issues with regards to writers such as Toni Morrison, Rigoberta Menchú, Jesusa Palancares, Richard Rodriguez. I don’t know these writers all too well (which is pretty ironic given the fact that they are being addressed here as minority…). She brings in literary theorists like Fish, Iser, Poulet, Spivak, and philosophers like Wittgenstein and Hegel, and discusses their thoughts along the context of minority writings.

Honestly, I’m moving very slowly on this because I don’t know much about the primary writers, I can only distantly recall the literary theorists from Tom’s Critical Theory class I AUDITTED, and, the language used in this book is pretty complex to me. Nonetheless, I did get through the first 30 pages or so and I’m enjoying it very much. It is difficult because it deals with sensitive issues and I think the book wants to be both revolutionary and diplomatic at the same time.

Here is the main argument of the first 30 pages: A Rhetoric of Particularism (and I’ll try to say this both revolutionarily and diplomatically):

She argues that minority writings reside at the “boundary between contact and conquest.” There exists this tension between engagement and surrender (which I think resonates inevitably with minority political status). Writers do want to get their views across but in such a manner that their views remain un-colonized by their “superior” readers. These writings resist the “epistemological desire that drives readers towards data” but insist that they be read with respect.

This is a quick sum-up. The book discusses this issue in great, highly intellectual and grounded in academic tradition kind of details. I feel I need to have my Critical Theory textbooks and my Dictionary of Philosophy with me to keep up with her. Maybe this is a good thing to do, actually.

I want to give a paragraph to what this book might speak to my own work because I think it does (and probably why this book got assigned to me. Thank you, Juliana. It’s great!). I think she got me completely with the fact that I too hope for engagement that doesn’t render me digestible completely by “them” (meaning readers who, as Sommer argues, “naturally feel entitled to know what they’re reading—often to know it with the conspiratorial intimacy of potential partner”). Because I’m different (and everyone deserves to be different). Making assumption is a bad bad thing to me. So I appreciate it that the book fights with making assumptions.

I was talking vaguely about PhD programs with Juliana (I mean I was vague, Juliana wasn’t). So, here is plan, I’m gonna first build myself a library of books around this topic of multi/bilingualism with English being one of the multiple/two. This book will definitely be one of them. And I’m gonna read and read and read. By the end, I probably will be able to be less vague about what I might try to pursue as PhD project. I’ll blog about it if you guys want to hear.

(Juliana—For example, a book like this would fall under the umbrella of English PhD, right? And so would Postcolonialism? What about Alastair Pennycook’s “The Cultural Politics of English As an International Language”? Would that be linguistics or English, or something else? & Where should I order these books from now that I am even more reluctant to use amazon.com? Thanks :) )

ps: Other books will include: Said's Oreintailism, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Freire's Padagogy of the Oppressed. I mean I have skimmed all these. Now I want to study them.

pps: The list will keep getting bigger, I hope. So Suggestions are very welcome! Thanks!

for those of you who are using found newspaper materials in your work, there is an interesting use of it in Lisa Linn Kanae's Ola's Son which is here, at the tinfish site.

hey soon to be gradutes.

the chronicle of higher ed has a career section on the web that has a lot of info about nonacademic careers, here.

the site is geared to phd's but i think a lot of the advice works fine for mfa's.

so what are you going to do with that? has advice for ma's and phd's.

and sellout also geared to phds but mainly about writing jobs outside the academy.

RODRIGO TOSCANO
reading
Wednesday, April 14
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public

Rodrigo Toscano was born in San Diego, CA in 1964. He lived there until the age of 29 (with the exception of a year's sojourn in the deserts of the southwest as a truck driver). In 1995 he moved to the bay area and lived there for four years, where he worked as a social worker and labor activist. During this time he co-founded Krupskaya Press with Jocelyn Saidenberg and Hung Q. Tu. He then moved to Brooklyn (Greenpoint) with the poet and essayist Laura Elrick, where he currently lives. He works at the Labor Institute in Manhattan, and continues to carouse with, stimulate, infuriate, and sometimes stump his many compeers (himself included) and the several interlopers who happen upon poetry readings the reason for which he continues to sequence words, and to declaim those sequences in public. He is the author of Platform (Atelos P, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002), and Partisans (O Books, 1999). Jules Boykoff calls Platform a “politico-poetic trajectory, a multi-layered, polyvalent, multidimensional, multilingual tour de force that confronts Capital at every turn.”

forthcoming talks/readings/discussions/workshops by oakland associated writers...
21-Apr renee gladman

Congrats Jessea!

I don't have much to say this week except that I'm in the US long enough to use the regular (as opposed to Non-resident Alien) Tax form! Urggghhh.

Thanks for those who went to my reading...sorry if I didn't see you.

Jennifer Moxley, Imagination Verses

First, le bio: Jennifer Moxley teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Orono. She got her MFA from Brown in 1994, after doing her undergrad work in various locales, including Mesa College, UC San Diego (both in CA), and the University of Rhode Island. She founded and edited The Impercipient, which is now defunct (last issue came out in November 1995) and prominently featured our favorite bilious crank, Scott Bentley. She now (??—I can’t find out if this is still around) edits The Baffler. She was born in 1964 in San Diego.

Imagination Verses was first published in 1996. I picture its release as one of the first pushes of younger “experimental” poets to say hey, the lyric is alright, yo, “giving permission” to everyone else. Several years later, it seems there are lots more poets doing work like this, but I imagine in 1996 there were less.

Moxley is very aware of literary tradition, and explicitly addresses it more than once in this book. There are nods to (in dedications, titles, and asides) Oppen, Crane, Mayakovsky, Wordsworth, Keats, Willis, and Whitman, among others. Indeed, all over this book is a strong sense of “literary-ness,” with its strongest feature that of the lyric "I” telling of its experiences in the world. In her Preface, Moxley explicitly admits this, the poems: “were written out of a desire to engage the universal lyric ‘I,’ as well as the poetic line, with all of its specific formal artifice.” Reading Imagination Verses is following a train of thought through the well-trampled lyric grounds of the lover scorned (“even bored henchmen / would find this outfit tempting / but low and beholden I’m left rolling / in my own digits, 100% silk.”), and reflections on (European) philosophy (addresses to the Greek Muses in “Muse Couplings”). But she also balances this traditional mode with pieces using modern slang (“you can bring along your guitar if you promise me / you won’t start a girl band.”), and much less “accessible” poems, for example “The Ballad of Her rePossession,” which includes the lines:

wait,
and in the leap
privileged peaceable pursuit
“for my God a...
mercenary faith
lays down with reliance (nation)

I would classify the majority of these poems as love poems. However, can’t we always argue that all poems are “about poetry” as well? We can! I can, and I do. Love as a social institution mirroring the institution of Literature. Love reflecting, as all things do, the philosophical discourse of the day. Moxley’s Preface opens up the arena by setting up a dichotomy of Imagination & Verse. She writes, “Our states, whether social or organic, are composed of effects both chosen (verses) and not (Imagination).” So verse, art(ifice), literature are by their nature social creations, akin to law or government or the DMV, as systems for making sense of the world. Imagination is the other thing, the “innate” thing, the ineffable thing, the “natural” thing. The title of the book, then, suggests a move toward uniting these apparent opposites, all the while knowing that the project must fail, must acknowledge its own artifice, but it must still try. But at the same time that “Imagination Verses” claims to unite, to the ear, it is indistinguishable from “Imagination VERSUS ___.” (Diane DiPrima: “THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION.” ) So Moxley has presented us with a confounding little paradox: the way for art to go is to do away with these binaries, but that’s impossible, and in fact, they are at war, but then again, it’s the only way for art to go.

I know I keep coming back to this idea, and maybe it’s applicable for all good poetry written today (big statement!), but I feel that the overriding sense of this work is that of balance. I talked about this a lot with Dennis’ workshop collection. Moxley presents us with the canon, with nods to tradition & the conventional use of the lyric “I,” but in the next move the “I” is destabilized and rootless, slides over to an aesthetic closer to Language poetry. She uses some very archaic diction & classical imagery, but then next throws in a line about Sara Lee Danishes. She acknowledges the “lyric-ness” of her work but then consistently undercuts its own musicality with unexpected line breaks or lack of punctuation which would have given a stronger rhythm. Her forms are all over the place, ranging from conventional left-margin justified to taking up the whole page, letting lines float where they will. The one thing that appears to be out of balance in Imagination Verses is the lack of any cultural references that aren’t Western. She’s got Mozart, Dante, Aristotle, and countless Greek mythological references. I’m not saying she should try to write herself out of her own culture, and this runs somewhat counter to my instincts about the book, but it does feel unbalanced, tilted. And with the rest of the collection so balanced, it’s a little weird.

I definitely felt that this book resonated with my work, so thank you, Juliana, for bringing it to my attention! I do believe that uniting the opposites is important. That’s why I argue pro-lyric in our workshop and pro-Language in Stephen’s. Either that or I’m just a pain in the ass. Even though Imagination Verses was published years ago, it is news to me, and I only feel more justified in that project.

EILEEN TABIOS
AND
MICHELLE BAUTISTA
reading/PERFORMANCE/workshop
Wednesday, April 7
7 pm
Mills Hall 322
free and open to the public

Eileen Tabios will discuss decolonialism through a discussion and reading of poems from Eileen's most recent book, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, and through collaborative performances with Michelle Bautista involving the Filipino martial arts of kali.

Eileen Tabios has released a poetry CD and written, edited or co-edited 12 books of poetry, fiction and essays. Her most recent book is a selected prose poem collection (1996-2002) entitled Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002). Forthcoming is another poetry book, Menage A Trois With The 21st Century (xPressed, 2004) as well as her first short story collection, Behind The Blue Canvas (Giraffe, 2004). Her awards include the Philippines' Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry, the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. She is the founder of Meritage Press (www.MeritagePress.com), a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, CA and author of the infamous CorpsePoetics blog (http://winepoetics.blogspot.com).

Michelle Bautista is a born and raised Oakland native and current resident. She teaches Kali (a Filipino martial art) in Berkeley and in the Laurel neighborhood of Oakland. In addition, she is also a poet and the author of My Life as a Duwende. She has performed numerous Kali and poetry collaborations, an integration of pen and sword. She will be doing a performance with Eileen Tabios.

forthcoming talks/readings/discussions/workshops by oakland associated writers...
14-Apr rodrigo toscano
21-Apr renee gladman

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

Co-sponsored by the English Department and Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College. 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.

i can never make thursday night. i seem to keep having plans on thursdays. but i hope to make next thursday.

one of the things i liked about tisa's reading was the move between the pronouns that she was doing. also liked taylor's reading of it a great deal. so scott, what if we throw out the experimental question? and just say tisa is writing? does that change the demands we make on the work in some way?

william, could you perhaps describe Notable American Women more? i think it is great book. in part for how it negotiates gender issue. i have friend who says cronenberg is great feminist film maker b/c he is so scared of women that he gets at something complicated that you couldn't get at otherwise. i'm not sure fear is dominant in Notable American Women but there is something going on where we are told something about gender that probably couldn't come out of feminist writing as we tell the cartoon version of it right now (although one could say that this book couldn't have been written without the feminist movement of right now). what is this? i would like to hear more about what it reads like and what it says and how it does it, etc., and maybe it will convince some other people to read it.

and romney, could you also give more sense of christensen's alphabet? how it gets made. how it uses fibonacci series. again i want to hear more because one of my hopes is that if you like the book you will write something persuasive enough that other people will read the book.

dan, for instance, would convince me to read point and line. also good post by william on kenny g.

there is an interesting essay by Ravi Shankar on two indian poets here, in contemporary poetry review.

i am changing final project requirements. final project is now optional. i will gladly read something if you want me to. but if you feel you've just written your thesis and are done, then so be it. if you want to submit a letter to me where you talk about what you plan to do next--either for your thesis if you are in first year or for project after your thesis, that would be cool also. but at this point i feel like i've seen so much excellent and devoted work (everyone is exceeding my expectations! it is very exciting for me!) that i don't really need for you to work at getting together some extra paperwork for me. but if you think it sounds fun to get something together and turn it in, i'm more than willing to read it and respond.

TONIGHT, A BAR

9-9:30ish, after SRatcliffe's class
@ JUPITER
2181 Shattuck (btw. Allston & Center Sts.)
in Berkeley (across from main Berkeley BART station).

Let's roll