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.
