thx for your post, juliana. so much of what you described in reading moxley is akin to my own experience, & i only first read her work last spring. it was an aha moment, felt very defiant and important. yes, i think the avant-garde issues are still with us. maybe slipping away, but i was shocked out of my own naive world when i came to mills & scott bentley as still talking about fragmentation & non-representational work. naive in that i had been completely out of the poetic community for several years but was still reading & writing, and i just forgot that this was an issue. the who's more avant game. it hasn't come up in our workshop much but last year i was feeling very defensive about using the "i" etc.--i didn't think i was really an evil person contributing to the powers of darkness by using it but i had to come up with a reason why it wasn't evil.
the thing about moxley is that she's presenting us with a huge world in her work. a huge historical sweep. she's not billy collins talking about apples on her kitchen table suburban epiphany. well, she might drop those apples in but the next minute she's talking about homer. this embracing of a whole weighty tradition & history, and placing oneself in it, and paying homage to one's influences, seems very important to me.
also i disagree with dillon that there's enough beauy in the world.
anyway, here's the into:
Jennifer Moxley lives & teaches creative writing in Orono, Maine, though she is originally from San Diego, CA, where she was born in 1964. She is the author of Imagination Verses and The Sense Record, as well as the chapbooks Wrong Life, The First Division of Labor and Enlightenment Evidence. She has also translated from the French Jacqueline Risset’s The Translation Begins, published by Burning Deck. She founded and edited The Impercipient, a poetry journal named for a poem by Thomas Hardy, and later co-edited The Impercipient Lecture Series, a monthly poetics publication, with Steve Evans.
Jennifer Moxley’s poetry is a high-wire balancing act, engaging a wide scope of literary history with the quotidian specifics of her American life, quotidian in the sense of the commonplace but also as a recurring fever, where the “Orphic landscape” includes “Dylan tapes” “tupperware parties” and “Sara Lee Danishes,” where a summoning to the Muse of Astronomy might be: “Urania, the orbit of your rounded spheres / telescopes my eye on down your faded levis,” where “Eros” speaks to “the sentient flowers” “all en route to the two car garage.” Where “we were great machines of desire and we hurled toward the night sky’s virile Centaur with our feet firmly planted on the ground.”
In her preface to Imagination Verses, Moxley writes: “Our states, whether social or organic, are composed of effects both chosen (verses) and not (Imagination).” She calls out & names this distinction between social creation, literary artifice, and the other thing, the nameless thing, the ineffable thing. The title Imagination Verses is a call to synthesis of these two forces, but to the ear “Verses” can have another meaning: opposed to in a trial, against. Her poetry happens in this tense arena, where the acknowledgement of literature’s artifice can coexist with lyric’s defiant belief in sincerity. “I am content,” she writes, “when I do not think the disclosure of love is a weakness.”
There is little of the Modernist fragment in Moxley’s work Rather, she extends her sentences as far as possible, moving between gravitational fields, as we follow & twist with her down serpentine lines, sentences unfolding, pausing, revolving around themselves, we follow comma after comma in the air.
She seems to have countless centuries and registers at her feet, the high lyric and the political protest, the domestic, the tragic, the mythic, defying what we may expect from a young “experimental” writer. In an essay titled “Invective Verse,” she writes: “Poetry is the insistence that we partake in the expression of our lives, in all their various contexts and manifestations.” In her work there is the acknowledgement of an immense history, both troubling & lovely, the wars & the sonnets. She is a poetic Janus, deity of gates & doorways, looking backwards & forwards at once. We may also have to invent new names for the other directions she seeks. She writes: “what kind of poems do we want? What do we want our poems to say? I feel that we poets must resist the compulsion to be defined under only the terms of "political man," and yet, simply denying the social, or political, in favor of a vaporous aestheticism, is not satisfying. There is a truth that lies outside both the topical concerns of the day as they are defined by the power structure and the denial of them. A truth art can and must access.”
(for the record, this last quote comes from:
http://www.umit.maine.edu/~steven.evans/3F-20
near the bottom)
the thing about moxley is that she's presenting us with a huge world in her work. a huge historical sweep. she's not billy collins talking about apples on her kitchen table suburban epiphany. well, she might drop those apples in but the next minute she's talking about homer. this embracing of a whole weighty tradition & history, and placing oneself in it, and paying homage to one's influences, seems very important to me.
also i disagree with dillon that there's enough beauy in the world.
anyway, here's the into:
Jennifer Moxley lives & teaches creative writing in Orono, Maine, though she is originally from San Diego, CA, where she was born in 1964. She is the author of Imagination Verses and The Sense Record, as well as the chapbooks Wrong Life, The First Division of Labor and Enlightenment Evidence. She has also translated from the French Jacqueline Risset’s The Translation Begins, published by Burning Deck. She founded and edited The Impercipient, a poetry journal named for a poem by Thomas Hardy, and later co-edited The Impercipient Lecture Series, a monthly poetics publication, with Steve Evans.
Jennifer Moxley’s poetry is a high-wire balancing act, engaging a wide scope of literary history with the quotidian specifics of her American life, quotidian in the sense of the commonplace but also as a recurring fever, where the “Orphic landscape” includes “Dylan tapes” “tupperware parties” and “Sara Lee Danishes,” where a summoning to the Muse of Astronomy might be: “Urania, the orbit of your rounded spheres / telescopes my eye on down your faded levis,” where “Eros” speaks to “the sentient flowers” “all en route to the two car garage.” Where “we were great machines of desire and we hurled toward the night sky’s virile Centaur with our feet firmly planted on the ground.”
In her preface to Imagination Verses, Moxley writes: “Our states, whether social or organic, are composed of effects both chosen (verses) and not (Imagination).” She calls out & names this distinction between social creation, literary artifice, and the other thing, the nameless thing, the ineffable thing. The title Imagination Verses is a call to synthesis of these two forces, but to the ear “Verses” can have another meaning: opposed to in a trial, against. Her poetry happens in this tense arena, where the acknowledgement of literature’s artifice can coexist with lyric’s defiant belief in sincerity. “I am content,” she writes, “when I do not think the disclosure of love is a weakness.”
There is little of the Modernist fragment in Moxley’s work Rather, she extends her sentences as far as possible, moving between gravitational fields, as we follow & twist with her down serpentine lines, sentences unfolding, pausing, revolving around themselves, we follow comma after comma in the air.
She seems to have countless centuries and registers at her feet, the high lyric and the political protest, the domestic, the tragic, the mythic, defying what we may expect from a young “experimental” writer. In an essay titled “Invective Verse,” she writes: “Poetry is the insistence that we partake in the expression of our lives, in all their various contexts and manifestations.” In her work there is the acknowledgement of an immense history, both troubling & lovely, the wars & the sonnets. She is a poetic Janus, deity of gates & doorways, looking backwards & forwards at once. We may also have to invent new names for the other directions she seeks. She writes: “what kind of poems do we want? What do we want our poems to say? I feel that we poets must resist the compulsion to be defined under only the terms of "political man," and yet, simply denying the social, or political, in favor of a vaporous aestheticism, is not satisfying. There is a truth that lies outside both the topical concerns of the day as they are defined by the power structure and the denial of them. A truth art can and must access.”
(for the record, this last quote comes from:
http://www.umit.maine.edu/~steven.evans/3F-20
near the bottom)
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