Having foresworn the blog, I sheepishly return to do some economical commentary on the last two weeks of writing, as I'm too behind to write individual ones ("I..... SUCK"- to be sung to the tune of the final cadence in Beethoven's 9th).

I think I want to clarify this whole thing about 'space'. There's all this great stuff in Wittgenstein about 'the size of the thought', or 'the space of the thought' or 'the life of the thought', which I think about in terms of poetry a lot. The sense in these writings is of a thought having an independent life from its final mode of expression. There is an arbitrariness to the typographical representation of language, and certainly of thought, that we have settled on (why does the visual symbol 't' instruct the sound made by striking the tip of the tongue against the front of the palate and expelling air?). Outside of this typography, there's no real sense in which this sentence is 'longer', or 'shorter', or 'the same length' as the last (of course, we might analyze it in other ways- in terms of clauses, or in terms of actual time elapsed in pronouncing the sentences, but none of these map directly on to the the phsycial space these words occupy on the page or screen). Thus, when we draw attention to the length of sentence or phrase in a poem, by the use of line breaks, I think what we are actually doing is making an analogy to the length of the thought in an ideal sense. (I think all of this stands in very sharp contrast to constructivist and post-structuralist ways of thinking about language and thought- i.e. Ron Silliman would probably not agree with this distinction).

In Lara's column-sized poem, there was a terminus to all of the thoughts which kept asserting itself (... when it was mixtape... when it was...) and which also conscripted the sense of the length of the thought. For that reason, the restricted width was working really well for me. In justified paragraphs of any size, I tend to read the word that appears at the end of a line and the beginning of the next, the "line break", as arbitrary. Whether I assume the margin forced the line break, or that the author simply wasn't paying attention, it doesn't effect my reading so much as my perception that the space of the poem is a certain smallness. Suppose Lara were to vary the font size so that each sentence terminated within the margin of that paragraph, then we might see how that margin is the size of the thought she is expressing.

Of course, this idealist way of reading has to fall by the wayside when approaching "Aw! Look what happened to my poem!". The materiality of the poem over-determines its meaning in almost any reading (except the one Lara gave us in class, which was able to read through the cut). I liked the way the shadow between the two fragments pointed to the materiality of the xeroxed page- like you oculdn't ignore that what was in front of you was the end of a physical process of creation, part of which becomes the narrative of the poem. For me the presentation had two broad effects: some kind of violence was intimated in the cut, and then further in some of the language ("somebody hung themself", "emotional forensics", "the variation always indicates the struggle beyond", etc.), on the other hand, the "title" "Aw! Look what happened to my poem!" served to ironicize or somehow subjugate the intentonality of the piece. I kept thinking about that scene in I (heart) Huckabees where the protagonist keeps saying: "can I just read my poem, I just want to read my poem, can I read my poem?". There is, after all, something very silly about the whole eneavor of writing poems, especially where it attempts at gravity or seriousness.

In both of these poems, I felt like the formal aspects were doing very interesting things to my reading (however physically difficult reading the cut poem was). In the case of Jennifer's collection, the effect was far more intuitive- as though it were just obvious that this is how these poems exist (without any distinction between 'exist on the page' and 'exist qua exist'). There was mention in workshop of the page as womb, which I think I agree with Laura is a bit limiting, but I do think there is a way in which the space intimates that the members of the poem, mother/child, mother/self, body/child, etc, were talking to eachother. In a larger space, I might have looked for larger spheres of reference, i.e. more emphasis on religious allusions, but I didn't. I saw them as being allegorical on a oneway street, where the relationship between mother and child is the only thing informed and the comment does not reflect back upon the idea of the religious; or as being convenient language. Some favorites:

"...sections off the prelapsarian"
"uncasing redressed/ your rapture/ my rupture"


Especially: "your arrival knowing/ (everything) about/ me-virginal" got me thinking how a child really does know something about the mother that no one, including the mother herself will ever know- what it's like on the inside of her. In some of the work on the experience of child-bearing I've read, there is a notion of the mother feeling alienated from her own body, because of the radical changes, because of sharing it with another, etc, and I think this idea is broadly useful. If we allow duality into our thinking, our bodies are as much of a foreign object to us as the bodies of our neighbor. I wouldn't recognize the inside of my lungs if you showed them to me, yet I am in constant contact with them. I only mention this because it's one of the things I was thinking through in reading Jennifer's work. Other things: how I was a fetus once, how prescient and smart my own mom is.

Oh yeah, the ending. I fucking loved the ending. I had one workshoppy thought on it. A lot of times when I'm seeing improvised music, they group gets into something at the very end of the song that is the most coherent and compelling stuff, then they stop. They stop because that musical making sense appears to them as a kind of summary, or natural conclusion, but the audience is left thinking, "wow, I want more of that". Of course there's no way to say if you actually would have enjoyed "more of that", because your whole thinking about it is wrapped around its being an ending (and your having a moment of silence to think those thoughts). That's kind of like what this ending was. I'm not saying the stuff leading up to it was meandering or unfocused (that part of the analogy doen't connect, though I think it's true of a lot of first drafts, especially essays). The ending was so focused and delicate and generative that it launched all these emotions for me. I'm not sure if I want them subsequently worked out in more poetry, or if I need that ostensive ending to have those emotions flourish. If you were writing an essay, I would tell you to keep flushing the idea out, because that's where the meat is. But of course the last thing I want you to do is go on repeating that form ad naseum, and it's not as if the ending is a complete departure (the elements it plays with were there all along). There probably isn't any useful suggestion in any of that (doh!).

Laurel and sex. It always cracks me up how once you introduce a 'sex reading' it becomes ubiquitous. My initial reading didn't find as much carnality as the workshop did, but then I became temporarily obsessed with it. I went back a third time and tried to read the sex out of these poems to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

If I see 'exposure' as undressing, then I am in fact less inclined to read inevitable sex into it. Undressing is really boring to me, as a verb. It's always the fact that someone is undressing, and the attending circumstances, which are either erotic or banal. In Laurel's undressing, something happens, albeit something at a high level of abstraction. The last two lines: "opening arrives/ whole" seems to say that not the material/lining being opened, but the opening itself is the reveal: like peeling an orange and inside finding a black hole. Or, in a less material way, undressing but having the gesture be the purpose, not the thing inside. "Opening" is undressed, or revealed, or better yet "arrives". Opening is genetic "everything begins/ beneath".

In the form of the piece- I already blabbed something about how the combination of the moving margin and the offset spaces (the zipper shape) does a lot to create multi-directional reading. I was almost convinced it had been composed that way- as two separate columns meant to be able to fit together and be read either way. Perhaps it's just a happy accident. Usually I'm resistant to concrete poetic techniques, but I liked how the shape literally points to the ending, like an arrow (with a little flange on it).

In 'ode to my grandmother' I think you invented a new tense. My thinking that is probably a product of not knowing what the actual tenses of the verb to swim are, but I'm sticking with it. If I had to name the tense, it would be the hypothetical preterite. Let me not explain. All the verbs up until then are infinitive or habitual ('mind alters', 'candles become'), making it not so clear you are talking in the past tense. Then there are the newspaper trails: which are from the present or future about the past, yet they exist on the soles of the shoe of a person we assume is being narrated in the past tense, or else in the habitual ('stuck/ to moisture on your sole/ leave their marks'). The status of the shoe and the shoe owner is suspended between having been or only possibly becoming. Then, in the last line, enter the swimmer, who as we found out in class has to be anachronistic because of the current state of the Delaware (not to mention the lines about time turning skin to bruised purple, though still in the infinitive). I want to read that last line as: "when it was still the case that one could tend to swim the Delaware", but I also am conscious, through the title, of its desire to latch on to grandmother. In the end I feel as though grandmother is only being imagined, not as having actually done this thing (though certainly she did swim the Delaware) but only as potentially doing it. Why such a complicated reading? I think it's more intimate to imagine it in this way then as tales of a past the knowledge of which remains priviliged to author and subject. This is what I think the "you" is doing in the piece- the "you" is the reader. This was the most emotionally effective piece in the set.

Jennifer- I demand that it is the sky talking in "Hot Weather Prompts Ghetto Rumbles". I also like how it talks without announcement or without earlier personification. If it did that, it would merely be a stand-in for what the author wants to say but won't (i.e. an omnicient voice which doesn't have to be the author's but doesn't have any other purpose for existing). That said, I am sympathetic to Laura's comment that it feels sudden or under-digested. I'm wondering if there is a way to expand this voice without having it become trite. I already blabbed what I think the line means- that the sky, instead of allowing the beating to be blamed on it, is saying that they have misinterpreted things by becoming violent. Instead of allowing the blame to fall on it being hot out, in the very casual causal picture newspapers adopt in talking about 'crime waves' or 'rash(es) of violence' instead of people doing violence, the sky protests that it has another intention for summer then random violence. I take it as an affront against the kind of mandate many, mostly men, feel they have for violence: that it is 'natural', that it is 'letting off steam', that it is inevitable (I am reminded of all the verbiage created around abu ghraib). I don't know what you're supposed to make of all this except: it is the actual sky talking (like magic realism or something, as opposed to fable) maybe the sky can say more, though don't make it merely speak for the author, especially because it would be an easy out from the journalistic tone you've built throughout.

The description of the kicking child in "The Glories of Public Transportation" is very apt. I think the poem really starts moving in the descriptions: the careful choice of odd verbs. The poem kind of gyrates in these passages. Maybe the poem could start with "Eventually the bus arrives always swelling". I like "always swelling". Maybe the poem could start "always swelling". Maybe I could stop saying "maybe".

Mandy- I was really tempted to copy you and bring in second drafts of my stuff this week and read off those, especially because I have a lot of editing I would have liked to do as well. Between the two versions of "He is Who He Is" and "Celebration", I felt that while the language got tighter and more finely tuned, some of the politics were lost. In the second draft of "He is Who He Is", it seemed like a quaint irony that London had these abominable views and you are now reading them many years later. In the first draft, I felt like the author was dealing not with the irony but with the actual offense, as if to stand up and say "I bothered to read you in your language and you can't do anything but stereotype me".

In the fireworks piece, I feel like I obscured the meaning in class with my reading about fireworks factories. Wikipedia is telling me that both gunpowder and fireworks to China, so it is conceivable that the ancestors in the poem are being credited with inventing either or both. Is it because gunpowder was used against the Chinese by the British or the Japanese? Is there something about the conditions of working in a fireworks factory that the poem is commenting on? Regardless of which, I liked the fact that it could surprise me, in that I was expecting a trope about the symbolism of fireworks in the U.S.- how everybody treats them as an occassion to party, yet what they celebrate is waging war and bombing people. Here there is dimension of history which, even if it can't be gotten at completely by this reader, is at least a way to begin examining this ritual of sitting on a hilltop watcing shit blow up in the sky.

Jacob. I like how I managed to read you exactly the way you didn't want me to read you. Here you are creating extensive, complicated metaphors and allusions in the weather poems and I'm like: "I like how these aren't metaphorical at all". You should probably have just slapped me. I'm pretty much the densest reader imaginable, so no need to worry about what result you get with me. But, to redeem myself: Sometimes, when we make a metaphor out of something, the thing itself recedes from the mind, such that it's all wink wink nudge nudge and you might as well be saying what it is you actually mean. You are not doing that, and the complexity of what is actually written about the weather is way too much to redcue to glib realizations about the world. I think that's the part I like. You've taken language about the weather, descriptions of the weather, weather about the weather and spun a very deep yarn about and aroud it, and I feel like the metaphors are more woven in then standing behind or underneath or least of all above. The clouds are overhead, looming, the metaphors are off sulking. Maybe not sulking, I don't know what the word is (my metaphor trapped me in prosody- oh, woe is me, tread gingerly). I should have paid more attention to the preface the first time- it's really good writing. Reminds me of The first poem in Charles Berstein's "With Strings", but his is a string of negations instead of similes. Something about the massing and momentum of this list intimates that it could go on ad infinitum, but not in a trivial sense. By naming those particulars, you invite real associations from your reader which might relate or even depart from there. It's a certain kind of paradoxical concreteness that I like in the whole collection: there weather is so ephemeral, yet you are dedicated in some sense to capturing it, or at least capturing its ephemerality, and therein lie the interesting results.

On the evolving form of the whole thing. I thought I had a good idea for what to do about the quotidian elements, but now it's gone. I really think you should read Frank Zappa's autobiography, but then I think everyone should read Frank Zappa's autobiography. I feel like something could be done with taking the authority or pretension out of the presence of quotes, which is not your particular problem, but the problem with all writing relative to the academy: we're all quoting all the time with this nauseating fluidity, yet it seems unavoidable that we do so. There was some clever stuff done with quoting in the last round of assignments in eng 204. Also, I think you should hunt down William Moor (grad from last year) and drink something with him. He has really interesting thoughts on big projects. Chances are, though, he will want to talk to you about chess or punk rock or anything but poetry.

All right, I'm sure I missed some stuff we've read recently, but I've got to practice some piano before I pass out. Peace y'all.

Perhaps short comments--after a weekend of big little boy birthdays, Nietzsche, Juliana, Bresson, and Chuang-Tzu...I'm so burnt.

Jacob: I am so interested in how this has changed. Mostly because I'm maybe bad at editting my own work and/or changing directions/focus of projects while part-way through. I don't have the patience (a virtue that's growing since motherhood)--instead I throw the whole damn thing out. I suppose I'm admiring your diligence, and noting that its working--some interesting changes. The initial quote is working well in roping in such a large topic. In class you mentioned using a quote to sort of epigraph each subsection of the work--I think this may work, but I also think it's important to let yourself be open. Use the quotes when they function well, like here, and not where they don't. What I mean is, don't force yourself into using a quote because it's the rule you've set out for yourself to use one. I guess I don't completely agree with your earlier comment (2 wks ago??) about form maintaining some consistency within each peice--though I don't think 'agree' is the right word. Keeping to a form doesn't seem to work for me--I always feel like the content is leading me in a different direction (which seems now a bizarre statement since I love form, but perhaps what I love about form is precisely that it is almost infinitely mutatable/muteable).

Some specific parts about these peices that work: "name some ways you associate water with death." You start hinting ever so slightly at maybe why you're so interested (or not interested) in weather. Natural phenomena permeates so much of our imagery as writers, it's what 'ancients' had to go on, and we haven't delineated from it all that much. It seems to be all that is 'concrete,' yet it constantly mutates. I am thinking of Chuang-Tzu's sense of the water mirror--seeing into the depths of oneself through stillness (that which is "deep and shiny and blue all over"), not seeing anything in the ripples and foam of water moving too quickly. How do I associate water with death--water moving too quickly causing physical drowning or causing drowning of oneself through lack of reflection. which leads to: "you will need to know how to get yourself out of bad weather." When I review the points that I found especially productive, it was these points where you used weather to hint at something more personal. In this, you pull yourself in a bit from a huge topic--but I guess this only says the same thing as my earlier quote: "WE--a grounding. Where did people come from, and now there are two?"

PREFACE: cool. I wanted to throw out the "as"--I rewrote it on my paper using colons instead of as and it seemed to get even further down to the essence of things. bare.
voice : sea surface : veil : wake : boast : transport : backdrop : flock : white-noise : interdeterminancy : ruin : market : repetition : accentual : sensual : expanse
: associative : sky
etc. etc.


Okay, okay. I'm tied/tired, and haven't said much usefulness. Laurel and Lara, I'll get to you later, perhaps tomorrow.

from Pamela Lu about readership & community

That's a good question about ideal readership. I think I'm like you, in that I do imagine a general, abstract reader, one who I don't know personally anddon't travel in the same circles as. Maybe because I imagine that reading experience to be somehow "purer" than one informed by coterie dynamics. Of course, I totally value my coterie readers too, and in many ways depend on them most of all. I think I as a person benefit greatly from their reading, whereas when my work is read by a stranger, it's more the work that benefits; that is, I may never personally know about the impact my work has had on the stranger. I think that's what I mean by "purer"-- it has less to do with my personal standing in the world and more to do with the role the work plays in the world of reading. More religious somehow, something to take on faith. Sometimes I think of writers who write pseudonymously, not of the Kent Johnson variety, but the writers who segregate their authorial persona totally from their personal persona, as extremists of this kind of faith. Or maybe they just like disguises.

I like what Jalal Toufic says in Distracted, about his untimely collaboration with other writers dead or not yet living, about these collaborations being like "perforations in the wall," through which some form of communication passes through. I was listening to the Michael Krasny Forum show on the radio once, and they were talking about Dickens. It was interesting that all of the "experts" who were guests wanted to put in their two cents about the personal qualities of the people who read Dickens. "I believe Dickens readers are essentially good and kind people who value justice and want to do the right thing," is what one of them said. In another context I might have grinned at such a corny-sounding statement, but I was reading David Copperfield at the time and could see what the speaker was trying to get at. The sense of a shared value system between author and reader, transmitted through the book. Even if this value system, and the sharing of it, is largely imagined, I think it's still important for the writer and reader to acknowledge it, and imagine it into being.

from an 10/14 email

Laura

attempting brevity--busy academic weekend without much academic time.


on Erika's "&":
on continuity/writing a long peice: I agree with what someone/others/I don't know who said in class that as the peice moves on the voice changes quite a bit--too much so for me. I could go for some increased mathematical language in the second parts, for the sake of fluidity of tone. But, I am only seeking a fluidity of tone, not of form as others (Jacob, Lara, Laleh...I think) seemed to want. I'm with Dillon in that the form is necessitated by the subject matter here--anything goes for you formally and it seems to work. I am not thrown off by the formal changes/spaces/morphings. After "motherload"/"without closeness"/somewhere around there that I start to get lost...my interest wanders. There are some amazing sections/great stanzas (the block chunk to 'what is held in a droplet,' 'how drunk under the table is a status marker,' 'for character or symbol is represented in blasphemy...', 'upright delicate mothers tired of the root the word', but I have a hard time linking them to where we started. They seem to belong in another poem, or even perhaps this poem could use some stronger delineated sections (with subtitles, numbered divisions, mathematically formulaic divisions, mapping divisions, etc.), where in each section there is a different voice (meaning a different tone/diction, not necessarily a different voice/character).


on Sean's "Diction":
a few phrases that worked particularly well for me: "heinz"--evokes banana ketchup, and heinz 57--which I first (for our situation) think of as hapas, but more importantly to the poem, think of as the appropriation of various cultures, both colonial cultures and the multiplicity of indigenous cultures, in the Philippines. "acid wash"--skin bleaching? refering to it in these terms heightening the violence in such ethnic identity stripping? "brown is the color that the dream broke"--I have nothing poignant to say--beautiful. "viscera-sucker"--jumps out since you so often use "asuang" in your poems and you choose to use English here. It performs just what the poem seems to be attempting--to offer new definitions, to be ready to adapt (as pilipinos were ready when the spanish came, when the americans came; as illokanos were when the tagalogs came; as illokanos were when they came to Hawaii, California). Learned behavior--you are re-teaching us definitions, definitions to words we didn't know before (though we are probably not your audience or only a small fraction of your audience--you are more likely re-teaching definitions to pinoy/pinay guardsmark). Not knowing learned behavior--some cannot adapt as well and, by presenting unconventional "definitions" or not definitions, but like Laura said, something else in the definition slot, you warn against being someone who cannot adapt. so then, "I'm going to fucking kill you unless" you learns to adapt? you learns something? you has to learn something or slowly die, killed by her own lack of adaptation?

Just a few things on "Amphitheatre":
I know you said the statistics of people who read it straight across was good enough for you, but I still have other form ideas. Perhaps the second column could be flush right, so that the jaggedness was in the middle, and perhaps the two columns are a bit closer together. So then maybe the two columns are centered on the page, the outer margins justified and the inner margins jagged, not too close though.

As for content, I found what others called "sex" to be quite sterile, too detached. "Sex" in your poetry is usually much more explicit. For one, the guy is peeing which he couldn't do if he were aroused/having sex. He doesn't seem attracted to the crank whore. If read across columns, "I could use addict." The flesh is totally removed, and is the addiction more important than the flesh? The addictive personality? After all, the drugs are much more prevalent and explicit in the poem than anything sexual. Yes, she's a whore, but a crank whore, she does it for drugs, she's addicted to the crank first, sex second. There is a thinking about nakedness, unzipping from the cunt, stripping, but then a flacid penis. (Perhaps from too many drugs, too much alcohol?) I guess I'm just not buying that sex happens here--from Sean, anything explicit would be in our faces and repeated several times, with pauses only for another swig of Jaeger.

Tyrone William's "I AM NOT PROUD TO BE BLACK"--should there be time in class to discuss-- Sonnet 9, 11 and 13 differ in form from the other sonnets.

Community (part 1): those who have a "(personal) relationship" with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan [sorry Jimmy Carter] (as much as I have) ----or those who can remember Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (as much as I can). ---it is not so much a poetic community, but a political community (that is not shy), (with) a integrated world history spanning millenia (yes, noone who constantly blames the U.S. for the world's problems here, no flat hegemony). --and i would not include the flat politicos because they say they are political and don't stick their head out, or the flat book learned history of flat consciousness (you're told to be aware and polite and correct, etc, etc, ). I mean I mean I mean sometimes I should have become an economist or political scientist. Poets appropriate politics, and although I do as well (I retch inside, alas the tension, alas the conflict, such inviting prosody)--the more I am with poetry in lieu as politics or theory, the more I feel I should have been an economist, perhaps a neo-supply-side economist.

A poet dressed as a saloon girl
red dress, black
ostrich feathers in her hair --
that's so unlike her,
she's really a grouchy intellectual

from Alice Notley's "HAVE I BEEN HERE BEFORE IS SOMETHING UNFAMILIAR"
the rest of which: http://www.durationpress.com/kenning/Notley.html

Readership: the pinoy and pinay Guardsmark guards who guard SFMOMA's artwork. They may not read poetry, they may not even have a college education. But they are the audience. And the punk professor (Joshua Clover for example, and perhaps a Chris Stroffolino).....

I completely agree with Tyrone in that we can't control our readers--who we are, what they do with our work. That's specifically why I 'chose' poetry, the appeal of its ambiguity (I would also argue equally that poetry 'chose' me, though I'm not one of those many fated poets whose bio says they've been writing their whole lives or since their teen years etc.--I only started writing about 3 yrs ago. Perhaps something needed to choose me and it only took it & me longer to unite--which I first misspelled as 'untie' and which may be equally appropriate. I'm a late bloomer). I also think it's a lesson learned after ones poetry has a more public role--after publications, distributions etc., when more and more people are Xposed to it. I'm witnessing Sean go through this in his study of what people are saying online about "The Dark Continent." There's a definite realization of loss of control that we amateurs are still naive enough to sometimes ignore. About a month ago I created a powerpoint poem and subsequently read up on the debate about powerpoint's usefulness/limits in catalyzing complex thought--the main point being that in the program's general business meeting use content is so drastically dumbed down and over-directed that there is no room on the part of the audience for thought. Using powerpoint as an artform attempts to overcome this problem of course (and those of you who've seen my peice can judge for yourselves whether or not this was succesful), but there is still an increased control--I had control over how quickly lines were read, when you had access to them, I could really force line breaks that, had the poem been on a flat page, may have been ignored. Since creating this work I've been thinking often of how one attempts to control (or relinquish control) how one's peice is read. Of course form is the most obvious way of doing this--I think of Jacob's spacing (or Sean's triptych and 'silent' scroll, which wasn't so 'silent' at his WIP reading of it). BUT, I do think that relationship between poets and readers will be/is going through a transformation with the proliferation of poetic blogs, etc. Who knew William was reading? Are there other alumni peeking at our pages? Dillon mentioned the alumni last year writing from Thailand...Who else are we reaching by doing this???? AnYoNe??

Laura mentioned in class (which now feels like ages ago) being 'in dialogue' with writers who we admire (or writers with whom we feel conflict). I have often thought of myself/my poetry in these terms. Of course my last submission refered to several writers, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, Joshua Clover (who was at the Claudia Rankine reading). I also have a wierd relationship to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, probably since I saw the recent (2003?) release of "Sylvia" with Sean, where in the opening of the movie Plath (played (un)convincingly by Gwenyth Paltrow) felt quite overshadowed by Hughes' publications. (But of course, now we know who is more well known...perhaps thanks to a powerful oven). Perhaps my fascination with this was one of my first realizations of the difficulties of a poetic partnership--someone will be more 'succesful' in the commercial sense so what do you do with that? I'm also now having affairs with poets personal lives, mainly, who was in relationships with whom, who had babies or didn't, etc., in order to study how it affected their poetics (the autobiographical reasons here are obvious). Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton began a friendship while their children were young and while they were both just beginning publication--they are also very different women (Kumin described herself as frumpy and Sexton as looking, though not acting at all, like a Stepford wife--I don't feel I'm either). In these cases of Plath, Hughes, Kumin, Sexton, I don't feel so much in dialogue with their poetics, but how their poetics interacted with other areas of their lives. Yeah. Maybe.

Hey William. A surprise to see you here...rather than on the corner playing chess. Welcome.

Am I still a hipster if I started the trend? Oh well...

Lara mentioned autobiography/backstory. Autobiography implies an amount of truth...my poetry is highly exaggerated at times. Example: Laura mentioned drug use in my poems. Yes there is some, but sometimes words come and they work and they're not factual. I'm not so much interested in the factual. 'Crack' served the purpose of going insane, 'needles' came out of a thought about tattoos, but the heroin reference worked and was okay with me. I left it. I didn't feel the need to tell everyone, no, I wasn't shooting up, because it was on the page as such and that's what I presented. Here's how I think of it. As much is on the page as needs be for the poem to work. Maybe more information, stronger links, etc. are needed to make the poem work so I divulge some personal information and maybe in return someone else, now with more info about the event, points out how the poem can function better on the page. Sometimes I'm asked about backstory and I don't answer--I dodge the question and if it doesn't work I flat out say that I don't want to answer it. Hmm, the only terms I can think to talk about this is to actually give backstory to my pieces and then show how its not relevant. Nepenthe--the restaurant, Sean and I had dinner there the night we suspect Taeo was conceived. The restaurant does tie in with the literary landscape I'm painting and the word has the other meanings that I'm alluding to, but the poem doesn't require such explicit info as a line saying..." We went to Nepenthe, a restaurant on the coast of Big Sur, ate roasted garlic and goat cheese on crostini and had a few pints. That night after we went home, we had sex and conceived our first-born son." Ugg. Boring. No matter the great language I could use to say this, nobody cares. In this case, I'd prefer to let the poem speak.

Today seems to be the hip day for blog posting ... so I'm jumping in on the fun. I also found myself mulling over the idea of readership(s), wondering who--if anyone--is my ideal reader, or for whom these texts are being created (besides the self; I suppose that's a given). Most of my friends are not poets--they are musicians, ecologists, bicyclists, painters, herpetologists, etc., and though they don't overtly care about poetry or poetics, they do encourage and seek out anything original (that is, anything that doesn't bore them). My "closest" readers have always been those of a more worldly--less text-based--sense of existence, and therefore my texts have become something that seeks to avoid boredom, and seeks to exist in a more scientific--or at least dirty/gritty--realm. I suppose one's readership can, in turn, further influence a writing toward something, maybe a distinct focus of sorts (?).

This is where I think Dillon's latest series is a wonderful sense of text-based activism, in that it creates an attempt at universal readership: it attempts equal distribution -- something art often aspires to, but seldom reaches. It seems to be a beautifully socialist ideology. While maintaining a sense of poetic/textual integrity, it also reaches beyond the page into a guerrilla movement of citywide social-poetics in a search for a humbling-yet-uplifting universalism.

...and maybe Jen is on to something with her Epicurean studies. Isn't a readership--and also a workshop--a withdrawal from public uncertainties into private communities of somewhat like-minded folks. A non-prohibitive mini-utpoia experiment that--temporarily--allows us to seek our pleasures in a non-injurious moderation. It all seems to be metaphysically rooted in a deeper nature of things (I couldn't resist a cheap Lucretius reference. sorry). Or maybe the readership itself is the movement from within the workshop structure out into that uncertain public. Like Lucretius's poems, texts circulated outside of the inner-circle in an artistically social/ethical attempt to import certain ideas/aesthetics into an ambivalent culture. I guess that's why he killed himself.

Alright. I'm done.

I am glad Jennifer brings up the readership, purpose & community concerns we discussed last week. I was thinking about the questions I asked and decided to pose them to some of the writers we are reading. I got an interesting response from Tyrone Williams who has said I could post it on our blog and who has also consented to be part of the blog. This comment is from an email to me of 10/4:

"It's great to hear from you, and I am honored that you are teaching c.c. Actually, it's interesting that you ask me this question about ideal/real "readers" because it is, for me, inseparable from my ideal/real "sense" of community, both spatial and temporal (as you noted for yourself). … I have been thinking about the question and related issues. Looking back on my work (I'm working on two manuscripts, one for Atelos), I realize that a lot of my work addresses--not surprisingly--other black writers and, more generally, the black public, though, like you, I often write without a sense of readership (Let's face it--c.c. is all about that), at which point I am, of course, writing about "me." My newer work continues to address other writers and artists, blacks in particular, blacks in general, but it also turns, more and more, on language, as if I am addressing the very language I use. Still, it's important for me to always keep some human being, however abstracted, in view..." -- Tyrone Williams

Laura

A blab/rant about prosody--lacking coherence. (deal with it.)

I'm so used to workshops where I sit silently while others tear my work (read 'tear' in whichever way you please, which may be influenced by whether or not you were interested in my poetry...) that it's nice being put on the spot by Laura asking what we're trying to do--where we're going--how we get anywhere--do we get anywhere--why is there a point in getting anywhere. As a result, these questions are in my head each time I sit down to read, write (poetry or not), etc.

A small part of my "goals" for the class is to increase productivity that has been lacking since the major life changes I've incurred in the last few years--the most productive period of my poetic life was a great moment where I lived BY MYSELF in a beautiful and fairly spacious apartment in North Berkeley. Now my writing is interupted by a waking baby and another writer's quirks (and I know he's equally disturbed by mine).

My productivity has been increased lately by music--or rather music induced trances. I wallow in my headphones nightly, so loud that Sean can hear them from across the room, or tonight from the next room. I sit on the futon and mouth lyrics as I write...I am completely entranced. I find myself playing the keyboard as a piano...I think of my language with a rythym, my hands conduct a rythym as they hover above keys anticipating the proper attack. (I was thinking of this habit of mine while reading the Sudnow for those of you in Walter's class). And in Craft today during Dillon's presentation, I noticed that he also at times approaches his keyboard as if it's a piano, His hand holding the invisible ball and wrist bouncing and curving in releasing a chord. I am probably cheating knowing that Dillon is a musician.

In what ways does our poetry change when our prosody changes? When our place changes? So many of you have just moved, from Portland, Philly, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Colorado. How does this affect your work? Jacob requested that we continue the discussion about our ideal readership, the ideal situations in which our poetry is encountered, etc. I am still wrestling with this...esp in working on the poems/writing the poems that I plan to turn in as my next submission. Perhaps I am wrestling with it too much that it's hindering the production of the actual work (not to mention that I'm procrastinating the actual writing of them since I'm blogging rather than writing poetry....damn.)

Dillon--you a such a philosopher. (I am plagued by you and by philosophy this weekend in my readings of Lucretius...thinking, god, I'm glad he majored in this stuff and not me. Very interesting, but slow going--at least for me who's not used to reading that type of material. But hey, that's another class, which 2/3rds of you are in anyway and I would post on that blog, but...oh the death...wacky.) No shit stirred with me--I am wholy irrational so your quite grounded view of voting=city is interesting since it's so radically different from anything that would come out of my mouth (or off of my fingertips in this case). So instead, namaste...(I just finished yoga about an hour ago).

Erika--you are now officially sucked into blogland. oh how your typewriter will miss you.

alright, alright, no time--I have a reluctant date with a dead Roman.

That's a good question.

The idea that the words are merely the necessary conditions of the larger project, and not part of its significance is kind of attractive. However, that's not my intention. I think I would have to make a distinction from the intention of the performance over all and the intention of individual pieces. I don't thinkI could invite other poets to contribute their thoughts on Oakland with the admonishment "your poems, of course, won't mean anything", unless that was the poetics they wanted to explore (is nihilism an appropriate aesthetics for Oakland?). Nor do I think it's necessary for each individual poem to appeal to 'everyone', as it is unlikely that any given poem will be read by more than 10 people (and that's generous). I guess it depends upon your view of probabilistic reasoning whether or not you believe accounting for a random sampling means, de facto, accounting for every possible sample.

Whether or not it's clear in the writing, each poem does try to 'say something' about its subject matter. Whether or not it succeeds is, I think, subject to the same kinds of concerns the interpretation of any poem in any setting or readership is. Jenniefer seemed to indicate earlier that these poems have to take into account a 'non-poetry' readership (though perhaps I misread her)- I couldn't disagree more. We all encounter poetry everyday, in lyrics, in advertising, in speech, or to be more precise: we all employ poetic ways of understanding to navigate the languages we speak all the time, we recognize idioms, we react to prosody and sound, we pick up on irony, we are pointed to features of language as language, etc- thus the continued relevance of poetry. In that sense, I don't think there's any difference at all between the readership one might encounter 'on the street' and the readership one might encounter at a book store poetry reading, except for limited sets of reference to specialized topics which I tend to try to scrub out of my poetry anyways.

Again, the strategy of having multiple poets create the aggregate work is crucial to questions of readership, and I agree whole-heartedly with Jennifer and others that more than just me writing in English or my very poor Spanish would have to construct the work for it to speak in any inclusive way. I thought that from the beginning. It just turns out be very hard to get anyone else on board for such an idea. Maybe if I got a publisher interested, though I have zero interest in a print publication.

Finally, my quick answer to the issue of borders and Oakland. On the analogy to walls- there is very little tradition in the Western U.S. of masonry walls as borders, a feature common to Europe and parts of old, rural East Coast. Fence making in the West post-dates iron manufacture, so iron fencing dominates pasture land. Most of the masonry I've had occassion to construct is things you can walk on, things you can sit on, or things holding back hillsides or things you can swim in. I don't know if that says anything allegorical, just an observation.

On what constitutes the city. I think a city is defined conventionally but not arbitrarilly (sp?) by the extension of where and what one's vote in a reasonably democratic caucus effects, i.e. Oakland is everywhere that the money for a school bond voted for by Oakland residents gets distributed. That this is possibly tautological doesn't trouble me much. That this excludes many who are too disenfranchised to vote does. But for me, voting defines a city in some sense, the notion itself extending from the original Greek polus. Any deeper questions of identity, of a city of a person, of a population, I've given up on completely- the problem being way too difficult for me. Hope that doesn't stir up too much shit.

all right, enough out of me on the blog for a couple years.

Peace 'yal (seriously, peace, like namaste, like lets be friends 'cus this world is a nasty place)