Chad-diction

Melies, Magic, and Aristotle

2011-11-22T15:28:00.000-08:00

David Cook mentions, in History of Narrative Film, that Georges Melies was a magician. That may be neither here nor there when it comes to his contributions to cinema--the fade, sequencing of scenes to make a narrative, et. al.--but it does seem linked with the one illusion that his films seem to feature almost ritually, as a key element in the action--the object or character that's suddenly there, or suddenly gone.

In "The Haunted Castle," there is no castle, or a clear story beyond a series of disappearing things and characters. They are suddenly there, and suddenly gone, therefore haunting, and the setting, one room with some features that add a provisional sense of grandeur, becomes the castle. Gunning's discussion of cinema of attractions, the possibility that early film was more about the spell cast by the technology than any narrative, makes this kind of narrative seem like less of a story than a show, made to display what cinema can do. Cook's argument with Gunning, that writing of the time makes story seem like a vital part of what filmmakers, including Melies, were trying to display, suggests that the show really is the story. This makes a film like "The Haunted Castle" seem like a magician's illusion, part of that illusion being that there is a narrative for the audience to see. Melies' films existed to extend his magic into new technology, maybe.

The difference is, maybe, that magic shows are defined by hiding how they do what they do, and film effects are presented as finally unmysterious, even demystifying if they can occupy that space that illusions carried out on a stage used to. There's still that gap between knowing that they did it and knowing how they did it, but the rush may come with taking the mystery apart, instead of sitting a little apart from it, and finding some seeming inner space in sympathy with it, where an unknown-ness glows.

What makes a conduit between the magic trick and the cinematic effect, though, that Gunning points to and successive decades of effects-heavy Hollywood cinema seems to point to, is spectacle as a fundamental constituent of film, making Melies, and a lot of subsequent films and filmmakers, anti-Aristotelian in the manifestation of their priorities. For Aristotle, the spectacular can't hold an important place in the work, compared to character, plot, and action. For Melies, it's possible to say that spectacle acts as the foundation. There is no character, plot, or action in his haunted castle without this ritual spectacle--the vanishing thing, the vanishing man who must be a phantom because he is part of the vanishing act, and the characters who are haunted rather than haunting, whose only meaningful action is witnessing this illusion like us, but, unlike us, experiencing it as reality.

Bat & Man

2011-11-19T10:35:00.000-08:00

You can now order my chapbook at finishinglinepress.com! Here is the cover, wonderfully illustrated by Mark Cudd.

It's gotten kind mentions at these places:

http://htmlgiant.com/random/reading-comics-chad-parmenters-poetics/

http://writingwithcelia.blogspot.com/2011/12/bat-poet-conversation-with-chad.html

http://lithouse.washcoll.edu/?p=2530

Poetics of the Secret Identity TV Show

2010-12-13T11:54:00.001-08:00

I don't know how many precedents there are for shows about characters with secret lives, who seem to be family people but are something else, but "The Sopranos" has been one big example of the last decade or so, and "Mad Men" and "Dexter" two current ones. In each show, there are at least three concurrent sources of dramatic tension, all centered in the main character. There's 1) the secret life, that the character is most identified by to the audience--Tony as mob boss, Dexter as serial killer, Don Draper as identity thief and impoverished war hero, plus ad man with philandering as integral part of his corporate identity. There's 2) the domestic life, that maybe aligns the character most with tv as a cool, family medium, presenting the normative family zinging briefly away from normativity and back again by the end of most episodes. Then, there's 3) their overlap, which is repeatedly presented to the viewer, and may be the main tension-enhancing threat in each show--that the main character's secret self may be exposed to those on the domestic side. The tension surrounding this one seems to return ritually, maybe not each episode, but as the one where the music really rises, maybe, where other shows would show the main character almost dying.

It's tempting to think that there's a character-death implied by that overlap being exposed, but it gets exposed in each of these shows--Tony's kids eventually find out that he's in the mob; Don Draper's secret past gets wicked up into the light by his blood kind returning from out of it; and Dexter, who may most wholly embody that secrecy, brings someone into it each time he kills someone who recognizes him from his other life. But there's a post-metanarrativity at that point of access that gives it the excitement of watching or reading a murder mystery--having the tension be such that the performance of the text gets pushed into my own mind more overtly than with less gripping stories. In this case, the revelation that the character I am watching is only a character can happen within the storyline itself, and keep that dramatic tension, as the people that the character has kept in the dark join the audience where I am, and/or I join them, with the chance to pick at the narrative weave, but, no, to have that unravelling taken out of my hands, and put into those of the wife, the cop, and whoever else might stand for the one who can't, and has to, find out.

One character that Aristotle doesn't mention in Poetics, when he's going through examples of different characters, is Odysseus-as-old-man, when he's returned to his homeland in, not just disguise, but an acting job thorough enough to hide him as long as the narrative needs it to. It's interesting to think that he might not just have left it out because he didn't need it to demonstrate any aspects of epic that he had to discuss, but also because that is an example of the epic not ennobling the person. We could say that it shows Odysseus' genius at work again, but he's not the one who transforms himself; it's a divine event. But the maybe-implicit agency of the audience in Aristotle gets its apotheosis as metaphor in Vico's depiction of Homer, as many different voices that the poems hold together; and I like to think that it offers a figure for that mix of tension and revelation in these tv shows. I watch the character move back and forth across that line where he plays different characters for different audiences within the show, and know that somewhere, by some then-invisible network of ratings, focus group abstraction of my taste, and capital, his secret is safe with me.

Shakespeare's Epic Reliquary

2010-06-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

The following is a part of the preparatory essay written for my comprehensive exams, exploring the conception of epic that can be applied to Shakespeare; this question seems intriguingly underexplored, with the one extensive example that I found going kind of Derridean and arguing, basically, that his use of epic is to foreground its absence. This was an enjoyable thought, but one that my own, still-brief exploration of this question argues against. It follows (and sorry for the weird lineation; it's something in the translation between Word and blog):

There are at least two senses in which Shakespeare can be considered an epic playwright: his use of techniques that Aristotle assigned to epic rather than tragedy, and his unique, reliquary way of engaging epic poems. His multiplicities of plot can be seen in the plays that comprise the Henriad, sometimes thought of together as a British historical epic. Richard II weaves the narrative of King Richard into Bullingbrook’s. Both of the Henry IV plays work against the neat
raveling together of narratives, though, since the two main threads have as their figureheads characters who don’t meet economically or in personality—Henry IV and Falstaff. The second, with its climactic fight between Harry and Hotspur, shows another epic trait that Northrop Frye sees in Shakespeare, “warfare of the Iliad: physical prowess by individual heroes fighting in pairs” (25). These loosely raveled narratives carry other subplots along with them, and pave the way for Henry V, in which an epic multiplicity of plots is prefaced with another epic convention
that also functions metadramatically, the invocation: “O for a Muse of fire . . ..” (Prologue.5). The prologue asks the audience’s pardon for the “unworthy scaffold” of the theatre (Prol.10), directing their attention to the physical theatre space. The three primary plot threads that follow, of Henry, the French court, and Henry’s
former friends, are only brought together in the fundamental figure of
disunity—war.

Hamlet , believed to have been written in the couple of years following Henry V, is one of the plays in which Shakespeare uses parts of epic texts for an effect that can be called reliquary. As a reliquary holds the remains of someone whose life testified to the divine, and in that preservation of a fragment show the eternal manifested where the present falls away rather than present decay, so Shakespeare’s distanced, fragmented presentation of epic can be seen offering a kind of allure that engages the audience with epic tradition in glints that make it seem able to be both adored and handled. This effect appears most strikingly when Hamlet, rather
than asking the Players to demonstrate their talent for visually moving work that will stir the king to show his guilt, asks for the speech “never acted, or if it was, not above once” (II.ii.435), of Aeneas’ narration to Dido how Troy fell. Hamlet has nothing to gain from the performance that follows; it is a moment sublimating Shakespeare’s mastery of plot to a scene that points to an epic past rendered present long enough, with enough power, to “have made milch the burning
eyes of heaven, / And passion in the gods” (517-18). With King Lear, the epic reliquary functions as passing but pivotal invocations of gods long gone from the play’s world, and Gloucester’s resounding condemnation, extracted from Homer and delivered from his own, Homeric blindness: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport(IV.i.36-37)."

Looking at Shakespeare's use of epic as reliquary also helps to unravel the mystery of Troilus and Cressida, which centers on whether it was actually performed; the printers of the 1609 edition began a title page saying that it had been performed, then withdrew it in favor of another claiming it as a play “never stal’d with the stage” (qtd. in Riverside Shakespeare, 477). The medieval story adapted
by Chaucer has no precedent in Homer, but Shakespeare’s version weaves that story together with the Greeks’, making Homer’s heroes some of its main characters. The play doesn’t flatter its heroes; Achilles’ vanity lets him sit the battle out, but demand “Know they not Achilles?” of the men who slight him (III.iii.70). But, if Shakespeare did distance the play enough from the public that it could only be read, making the page reliquary to his work of epic drama, then it’s also possible that its characters are flat to better point to the epic that birthed them. They are
relics of Homer’s characters, blending epic and drama in a way that puts both into the audience’s hands, quietly and in the light of print.

Why Hitchcock Might Have Wanted to be Bad

2010-04-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Alfred Hitchcock's later years weren't his best by most standards; there was the lull of "Torn Curtain" and the two that followed, then "Frenzy," which succeeded maybe partly by breaking away from the Hitchcockian polish of "Rear Window," reifying the Hitchcock narrative of the wrong man accused of the raw murder, but in a way that looks like late New Wave, maybe positioning itself elegiacally. By that point, Hitchcock, I think, was watching Disney movies instead of the latest thing; when Truffaut told him that "Frenzy" was a young man's movie because of its original moves, he was reflecting partly on his own past. The daring moves, though, are less toward the minimal and more toward the lyrical; the closeup in which the sound stops, and the narrative seems to fall away, is very much the kind that Belasz means when he talks about the closeup as lyric mode, and one made most for the human face.

"Family Plot," his last film, has been dismissed as lacking the power of almost any of his that came before it, but what might seem like its problems come to seem like experiments by Hitchcock out of his own mode, especially because of what he did after he made it. Nothing, except developing "The Short Night" toward the big hit that he seemed to want to end his career on. He kept on developing it, and the natural view would be that his health kept him from carrying it out, along with Alma's. But the way he stopped development, then started it again, suggests something else: he didn't finish it when he could have, and his comment, at one point, that making it wasn't "necessary," suggests a sense of his legacy that fit "Family Plot" into it, whether or not it seemed like a Hitchcock to everyone, and maybe moreso because it seemed like one to few except himself.

There are many Hitch moments in the film, including his cameo as shadow in an office door's window, the sense of domestic life laid bare to show the mechanisms of treachery, and the overall phenomenon of the everyday person drawn into a world of intrigue that he or she is uniquely poised to unravel, because of social context and ultimately skill. There's a he and a she, who are drawn into the search for a seemingly unfindable man, whose narrative runs loosely parallel with theirs until the network narrative phenomenon of coincidence puts them together. The he of the couple is played by Bruce Dern, and his own performance might seem to take the most away from the film's impact. He's nearly a Disney dad. He mugs. He gapes at the sinister, and his teeth gleam. He anticipates Jim Carrey in his face's elasticity. He is the opposite of Cary Grant. That Hitchcock made the space for him to be that way we can see in his hair, an orange mop that seems to do what it wants.

And that's the key. Hitchcock offers the part to Bruce Dern, and Bruce Dern asks why. The studio is thinking of Pacino. Hitch says that he wants Dern, because he never knows what Dern's going to do next. This cavalier sense with the actor might have roots in Hitch's focus on the mise-en-scene, and the sense that a professional actor should generally know what to do already, but it also bumps up against what's reiterated about him with just about every telling of his legend: that the film is finished in his head before it reaches the screen, and the filming is incidental, even boring for him. Bruce Dern is not in his head. Bruce Dern is himself, and is clearly kind of frightened to be there; the thought that all of this offers is that Hitch might finally, four years before his death, after spanning the century with the seldom mutable studio of his visualization, have gotten to do that thing that he must have wanted to do since he was young, and the colored lights that washed the stage near his home made a kind of screen his imagination could shape, would shape into a world of the nerves and their infinite roots: he got to make a movie and watch it at the same time.

The Long Shot, the Close-Up, and Epic Tradition

2009-11-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

Watching "The Shining" with a friend last night, and reading Robert Polity's article about D.W. Griffith and Poe in the new American Poet a couple of nights ago, I was reminded again of the discussion of film and poetics that has most stuck with me over the last couple of years, thanks to Nancy West's wonderful cinema course: Bela Belasz's writing about the close-up as lyric. He may have said "lyrical"; over the last year or so it's blended for me into Virginia Jackson's writing about the lyric as a kind of blackout of genre, and vice versa.

But Belasz writes about the close-up as its own moment, having its own life outside of the narrative, and the coincidence of that definition with a view of the lyric poem taking place outside of time, outside of the narrative of historical context, and outside of traditions tied to genre, seems like no coincidence.

It's tempting to invert the comparison itself without looking at priority in terms of history, so that the lyric acts as close-up in a very cinematic way. But that also points, as Jackson does wonderfully, back to the absolute mercuriality of lyric as it's been discussed in the last century and a half.

"The Shining" remains, for me, the scariest movie of the twentieth century. That may show how few movies I've seen, but the sense in it is that the whole project of the movie is not to expunge fear like a slasher movie can, or take on that sense of promise of day breaking the ghosts that comes from so many other horror movies, or even to draw suspense out like Hitchcock does, with the triumph of the human spirit that he and studio pressure gave as a defining torque for his stories. Instead, the narrative's unrelenting, multiple forebodings seem tied up in the apparatus conveying them, so that the scenes and the camera framing them take on a ponderous weight extending beyond the screen. In the midst of that, Jack's Cagneyan facial contortions, the inscription of "Psycho" within the film, and the escape of Danny and Shelley at the end become humbled to a greater fear extending beyond all of the above. Kubrick seems less the relief that Hitchcock is to his own project than an extension of its ominous and empty spaces; of course he never appears in the Overlook. He is not of it, and it is not of the domestic spaces that most horror movies seem only to compromise for a little while. He shares in its grimness; he's not Stanley, but an extension of the camera. Or we sense his wish to have been that, and find less release than identification. That's not of the close-up. It's of the faraway.

It makes sense to look at faraway cinematography, and call it epic. It's not that what was close is now far away, but that the zoom back shows a context for the object, that, depending on the ingredients of the mise-en-scene, can imply lots of things that have been seen as ingredients in epic poems (that may or may not be)--the place of the human in the landscape, the backdrop of some kind of nation, and, maybe most, the presence and mandate of the machine, in this case the camera. The long shots that show Shelley Duvall as a tiny figure escaping from the window of the Overlook don't only show the huge context in which she sits, but imply that a camera is capturing it all, and a cameraman behind it. The kind of inhuman that this is might seem alien and cold in terms of only technology, but, in the epic context, the machinery producing the artwork is something even more frightening--it's divine.

The Meganarrative and Epic Tradition

2009-10-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of years, much or even most of my tv-watching has been devoted to the series on DVD that can be rented and then devoured one after the other, or watched in the same way online. They've definitely got pre-millenial precedents, maybe most obviously in "Twin Peaks" in their tv mode, in the old movie serials before that, but one of the differences now seems to be that they're more likely to be watched in one stream that's unfortunately broken up by things like work and sleep. They're meant less as episodes than as a single narrative to be absorbed asap.

They might be more like native American stories that could take days to tell, but I'm afraid that I know almost nothing about those narrative traditions. I don't know anything about this one, either, but the term "meganarrative" came to mind as a way of framing these serial narratives, because they seem to come after the metanarrative skepticism that helped old narrative modes to be broken down, but to sit comfortably on the ruins of the palatial shells they deconstructed. They seem to float, partly by way of the still-othered cable that most of them exist in, free from easy attribution to one particular, towering ideological machine, and to provide some narrative nourishment for the many who float there, too.

But their impact is tied to the speed at which they're viewed, and the power for that viewing now rests more than ever in the hand of the one holding the remote, who can be as immersed or distant as his or her will. I'm a little too captive to the storylines for my willpower to operate in that way, but even that fixation carries a different weight from either the grand-narrative network world and the antimetanarrative stance in which anything making meaning makes hegemony. It's meganarrative. Maybe.

When Aristotle criticizes epic for being too long, and claims the ability of tragedy to do provide the goal of poetry (pleasure) in a shorter time, he is also tying the different tragedies that he discusses in to larger back stories, that they kind of metonymize. The Trojan War is meant to be invoked in full by a short play giving some of its events, and the pleasure has this root system that he never quite discusses in terms of its meaning or purpose.

But the sense is of a larger story that's able to be absorbed in smaller doses, the inherent promise being that the audience will be able to come back and get more at some further point, and be nourished in the meantime by their own memories of Troy and wherever in it they most like to wander, which burning buildings they most like to see warriors pour into. This is a different shape from the meganarrative, but maybe not too different. Or maybe.

Homer, Plato, and Obama

2009-06-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

I've been reading for my comprehensive exams for the last few months, which has involved digging more into Homer and Plato than I ever have before, which has not been hard to do--my knowledge of Homer is mostly "d'oh," and Plato not much more. But the thing that leaps out immediately from Plato's reading of Homer is how he does seem to find there both the inspiration to call poets divinely inspired, and the start of his inspiration to boot them out of the republic, for being liars, of ill repute, etc., in his hammering away at the rhapsode of Homer, from whom Plato, or Socrates in the dialogue, seems to see a glimmer of the poet's role--one who just reiterates what's given to him from within, so that not only does thought not come into play, but the poetry that he recites has the effect of arguing against thought as the seat of identity, and its cultivation as the highest good. While Plato seems to throw more weight and page space behind condemning poets than calling them divine (which might be seen as an insult also, considering the Greek gods' behavior as represented by Homer), what starts as the root of his argument is that they partake of a higher reality, which supersedes the republic, and from which thought either grows or tries to fly. He takes on the rhapsode's role in quoting Homer himself, or having Socrates do it, and uses that role, or his version of it, to bring Socrates back to life on the page, in a way that suggests his belonging also to a space outside of the republic, not only by dying and going to the underworld, but by contemplating the will of the gods for his whole life before that.

Early in the election, some of Obama's poems surfaced, and were read and critiqued, maybe more as a joke than anything, but the discussion seemed to carry a spark about it, too, that confirmed a personal, original sense of the poetic in his work as an orator. I wonder if the sense of his charisma that comes across to us always carries this underpinning, not of the republic, but of the deeper sense of the spirit that lets us believe in it.

Either way, it is phenomenal to be getting paid to think about this stuff. Mizzou rules. So do you.

Craig Arnold

2009-05-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sorry for taking forever between blog entries, and thanks for reading this one. Yesterday, the team searching for Craig Arnold seems to have found his trail in such a place and way that he probably fell from a high cliff. His incredibly brave brother, Chris, and the other members of the team, are going to its base to see what they can find, and there is still time for a miracle. In the last couple of days, what's been coming back to me about Craig is his generosity of spirit, that shows not only in his work but in his way of encouraging others in theirs--like a friend heading toward a shared horizon, no one's property, open to everyone who felt that strange urgency to search.

As so many of us have been searching for him electronically and internally in the last few days, that automatic process of trying to find his trail up the mountain has come--how deep its greens and the multiform shadow of its peak, how blue the other Japanese islands dyed by the ocean between them and him, how infinitely soft and full of molten things the calm on the volcano must have been to listen and lean into. What a necessary courage his work had and has, not just in blazing those spaces, but in the natural, most heroic move to take us with him. Please keep his family and loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

Ninth Street and the Mirror Stage

2008-08-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I was walking through downtown Columbia to teach my morning class, and watching the people, the diverse crowd that always seems to include some students, some homeless men and women, and some people whose jobs or paths or lives have given way to walking there for a few minutes. I saw a girl, who may have been about three, looking at her reflection in the window of one of the stores, and making this noise of joy at what she saw there. Her mother said, "Do you see yourself there?" She didn't answer for a second, and I walked past and didn't hear whether she said yes or no. Whatever she was thinking, I was thinking about Lacan's description of the infant finding a specular self in the mirror, that's separated when we see that the mirror is a naturally occurring thing that only represents what's put in front of it, and that this helps to break us away from the necessary narcissism of infant dependency.

I've been thinking, too, about how Lacan apprenticed himself to Freud, and seemed to find his genius not by a process of deduction but by this sense of entering his own mirror stage with Freud, after the infancy of being immersed in Freud's work, not leaving his sense of questioning behind but examining its continuities, its harmonies, and, finally, finding the place where the study of the mind and the study of the signifier met, both of them aligned in his thinking so that the imperative to start to speak to his community began, powerfully enough that his force and passion drew crowds to whom his reasoning came home. In this passing on of language, not solely for its logic but also for the beauty of its construction, he was carrying out the role of the poet that Plato describes in Ion, demonstrating it himself, first and foremost, by being a conduit for the ideas of Socrates.

The girl staring into the window, making a sound, was making poetry, and we can see her not being stumped by the question of who the girl is in the window, but seeing her own face superimposed on the colors and shapes in the store, the people moving there, at the point when the mirror turned into glass.

Is Poetry Matter?

2008-08-16T15:14:00.001-07:00

There's almost nothing that I don't know about quantum physics, except that it involves all of these things that I normally consider mindboggling made even moreso, to that point just a twist short of mysticism where they don't be, but mean. But that idea that matter might be a substance all its own, in which all other substances can be found, feels like an analogue of the one that poetry is this one, distinct thing, and different subtypes and traits can be found in it.

What's remarkable about the second one to me isn't just that people think it, but that people have been thinking it at least as far back as Gorgias of Leontini, who calls poetry "speech with meter" while, maybe, doing what a quantum physicist does when he says something like, "I found a muon"--implying lots of unsignifiable dimensions and systems of order too chorded to the soul, or its verbal equivalent, to be set down as this one thing. But poetry is, for him, and roughly a zillion who come after him, even though it doesn't keep stable traits, aside from verbality, maybe being verbal art, like Jakobson says, but its linearity and functionality are championed too much for that to be it, either. The main thing that can be said to remain, maybe, is the term, the signifier bobbing there and trailing its shunt roots. Maybe.

Maybe it would be better to say, "Is matter poetry?" But asking whether poetry is matter brings not only lots of late 80's connotations and still-present questions about poetry's future, but the one that I'm going to call quantum to seal my ignorance of the meaning of quantum: the word poetry, uprooted from stable meaning, becomes a sort of material thing all its own, and confers that autonomy on what is then known by its name. If this thing is poetry, it becomes elusively knowable as such. If this thing is not, it may be far more easily defined, or its ineffabilities are too subtle, yet. It reflects a more fundamental approach than the one of negative capability, or postmodern skepticism, in which the text itself is a thing, a substance, maybe virtual, apart from its meaning and the various kinds of fiercenesses its deconstruction may lay bare.

But I don't really know. I do know that "Gorgias" lucked out with a name so close to "gorgeous," and may have won the Sophist-v.-logician battle after all by virtue of homophony.

My Facebook Friendship With Leonardo DiCaprio

2008-08-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

It started a few months back, and ended fewer months back. The whole thing left me as it was meant to, shaken, as I'm sure it did Leonardo. It began when I got a friend request from someone I'd never heard of, and I defied Facebook etiquette, even lying, saying "yes, I know this person," feeling like I did know her because my constellation of friends seemed to mirror hers, and because our becoming friends seemed less an act of will than a suggestion by the universe that we find each other. Proceeding that way, and still not quite believing my new network, I found a friend of hers, who had Leo and a whole slew of celebrities as friends. Something in me was now pulling me forward, and that something seemed to be confirmed by my invitation to the Paris Review benefit dinner, that had my name in the same list as his. While I couldn't think that he felt drawn by the same pull, I felt like Lacan must have when, before writing on the mirror stage, he saw the blank page that didn't show his face back to him, but suggested a host of possibilities in the form of this new exploration. Leonardo DiCaprio as text, but, more, as friend in the sense that nonreflection befriends.

I watched my hand send the friend request, and watched my own nervousness miraculously drain away. The thought that it had to happen, and that it couldn't, both dissolved in whatever came of the day itself--translating Ronsard, drinking good coffee, watching the flood of Mizzou students that seemed pulled by a similar poetics, composed of the same amalgam of sun and stone that rooted the campus buildings. I wasn't a pattern of electricity in the network, and neither was Leonardo. Both of us were going about our days, and I realized that he had days, and this reminded me for awhile that I did, too. My next day started, and then started again when I saw that he'd accepted my request. Maybe it had been his personal assistant, or one of the many members of his posse, but it was definitely his profile. It said, "I am what I am," like God did to Job from the thundercloud, like the meditator's thought says in its moving through and leaving on the page of the breath. I had only gotten as far as "I am not what I am not," but this let me move forward.

Soon, our brotherhood hurtled into its newest phase. I saw pictures of his vacation in Hawaii, and it's as if he knew that the turtle was a totem I'd come to find ambiguous--a jpg of a sea turtle in luminous aqua water, brandishing the fronds of its front legs, let me see what a womb-like kind of brine had supported me, and now looked back at me, asking for representation. I sent him my elegy for Heath Ledger, and let him know that I wouldn't be at the benefit dinner, but would be in New York, visiting a friend he'd once met, if he wanted to join us. I could sense him starting to embrace what, on Facebook, becomes the completely nonrandom, synchronous connection of people who otherwise wouldn't be connected, in a space where the star system merges with the earth. More, I could see the same in my inner Leo.

I started to sense that our relationship was in trouble when his status announced that he was "no longer adding random ppl!" I wanted to assure him that our relationship was anything but random, and that I knew how the kind of living mask that acting is is also a kind of poem that's practiced daily, and also knew that I could hold tight and let the universe, if there was such a thing, take its own shape. It did, and showed me the blue and white silhouette that meant a missing picture. I don't know if this means the end of our Facebook friendship, or just a time for me to move on, into the world of gorgeous French women and faciality that is his to me, where I, and we, have never not lived to begin with. I do know that Facebook is a kind of rhizome, and that its breath is unexpected human connection, its own poem, post-form.

Poetics and Translation

2008-07-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

Now that my neurons aren't all firing toward Ph.D. coursework, I'm realizing just how long it's been since I did any kind of blogging. Much has happened that's been bloggable, in MO and out of it--two trips to NYC this last spring, one for AWP, one meant to take me to the Paris Review benefit dinner to hang out with Tom Brokaw and co., that instead led to two amazing days of subwaying around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond; a trip to CO's gorgeous San Luis Valley, where a big brown bear shook his way through a stand of pines not far from where we were driving; one to the Smokies where I discovered that you can get a rental car up a mountain path meant for four wheelers, and, even better, that it comes back down; in between, Columbia has been full of the lush, fusive humidity that helps the air to seem as close and constant as it is.

In the last few months, I've also gotten to start reading more poetics--Aristotelian, Lacanian, and others within the spectrum that they define. My Fulbright project preparation is helping me to study more translation theory, too, which overlaps wonderfully with the study of poetics. It seems possible to do the Lacanian thing of mathematizing the study, to say that Aristotle (poetics as category) + Derrida (translation as ubiquitous) = Shakespeare, and also to point such thought at the networks of global culture.

It's also been great to read the wonderful Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare bio, Will in the World. That, combined with Shapiro's 1599, give a combination of closeup and panorama that let his life and work overlap with now. All of this is possible because of the generosity of Mizzou, the way the woods around here seem to hold a pollenating light, and you. Have a wonderful rest of July.

Ellipti-cinematic

2007-12-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

On Christmas night, my brothers and I went to see "No Country For Old Men." The Coen brothers' use of close-ups in it, as in their other movies, had the effect of throwing the tone a little off-kilter, by not entirely serving the narrative, but abstracting or meditating on an image to give it the resonance of a photo or portrait--the toes of a dead man's cowboy boots in the foreground, with the Texas landscape white and heat-blasted behind them, or the silver cylinder of an air gun shining in a shotgun seat, without the viewer knowing what it's for. It plays a role in the plot, but, before that, it sits there, glowing with the need to be made sense of. The Coen play with narrative, in these stretched-out moments, dovetails with Tony Hoagland's description of Elliptical poetry, with its "relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation," and the part of Stephen Burt's essay that he excerpts, that they "violate decorum."

Recently, I asked Julie Buchsbaum, wonderful poet and friend, what she thought were the primary qualities of an Elliptical poem, and she said (and I may be misquoting her in memory :) that it may show a lyricism characterized by density. Thinking about it now, I'm wondering if, with a dense kind of lyricism, the language comes to seem more tactile, to hybridize a Languagey materiality with a narrative transparency of the medium, so that they meet. I may be taking this thought, analogously, from the other one that Julie shared, that an Elliptical poem exists on the line between meaningful and meaningless. Rodney Jones, in workshop, used to share Stevens's thought, that a poem should resist meaning almost successfully, and that thought seems like a precursor to this one. Does Elliptical poetry resist meaning, and its lack, with equal success? With complete success?

Julie was also kind enough to sit down with me during fall semester, and watch "The Lady From Shanghai." Nancy West, awesome cinema teacher and scholar, had mentioned it as an Orson Welles film that's not discussed as much as his others, so I'm working on what may become an article about it, thanks to the scholarship of James Naremore, Tom Conley, and others. Welles uses close-ups in it with what may be an Elliptical touch--Rita Hayworth's face is shot up close for so much of the film that it, like the title, seems to preserve, more than anything, a version of her that doesn't quite fit either the film's narrative or that of her stardom. He cut her hair and dyed it blond for the film, taking away the long red hair that may have, by then, been the most famous hair in the country, or the world. His close-ups show her face, most often, in a light bright enough to give what Julie, and the criticism, have likened to a mask. Other of the close-ups are similarly jarring--the dachsund barking at the camera, the papier-mache dragon in the funhouse, whose head swallows Welles, to deliver him into the mirror maze. This part of the film may have been the main target of the man that RKO hired to cut it; almost an hour of Welles's version ended up being edited out, in an attempt to make it more palatable.

What I'm wondering is, given the criteria presented by Burt, and Orson Welles' statement that his films aimed to be poems, whether The Lady From Shanghai can be considered an Elliptical poem. That thought leads back to the question of Ellipticism's main qualities, and I hope to discuss those more on another blog, more exclusively dedicated to Ellipticism and our upcoming symposium. Happy new year, until then.

Ellipti-schism

2007-12-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

Now that an awesome, busy semester in MU's Ph.D. program is done, I have some time to think about the symposium on Elliptical poetry that everyone's been so helpful with--Joan Houlihan has been phenomenal in contacting people and providing ideas, and Josh Kryah, Kazim Ali, Carolina Ebeid, Lucie Brock-Broido, and others have been tremendously helpful. Thanks to all of you, and the many more who are helping out with it--John Tranter has kindly agreed to post one of the symposia on Jacket, and he and Reginald Shepherd have both volunteered to participate.

All of the above have helped me to think about what currently constitutes Elliptical poetry, and that thinking, in true, Elliptical fashion, has generated more questions than answers. Does Ellipticism still describe the poetics that fit Steve Burt's criteria? Does it more closely fit the particular styles of poets he described as Elliptical, since Cole Swensen, Lynn Hejinian, in ways that may not be identified as Elliptical? Has the term become conflated with the adjective that describes punctuation marks, galaxies, and workout machines? It feels like a descriptor with an exact set of coordinates, but that sense may operate the way Elliptical poems may--hinting at infinity through the cracks made by their fragmentation, and what light plays across their surfaces, with their deeper specificities kept at that depth.

Any thoughts that you have about Ellipticism will be so welcome. One of the questions I'm looking at is whether there can be said to be a divide between two primary viewpoints, 1) that Ellipticism is a distinct poetic practice, and 2) that it's a term without a fixed set of criteria. But being so binary with it may not be very Elliptical of me. I do know that the snow and sunshine in Columbia, MO right now are combining to make a kind of shine that hint at their intermingling, and I hope that you're experiencing an equally dazzling holiday.

Losing My Nose Ring

2007-11-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, I woke up to find my nose bare of the stud that I got put in it about seven years ago. This came, synchronistically enough, soon after my mom, who's 61, got her nose pierced, to the disbelief of her whole family. It was great to have another nose ring wearer in the family, and really cool to have it be my mom, who's a wonderful person, and it was more the fact of seeing my face without it, the bare nose defamiliarized, that has kept it from going back in. If the nose ring defamiliarizes, it may go back in.

Reading Trouble In Mind, Lucie Brock-Broido's most recent book, last night, I was struck again by the unbelievable beauty she's able to draw from juxtapositions of rhythms, of images that are anatomical, pyrotechnic, or a drawing of those and more together, and what incredible tensile strength comes from lines that seem to carry some of the qualities of silver wire in a fairy tale, impossible to look away from, unbreakable in their meditative strangenesses. I wondered if luster might be a quality of Elliptical poetry. I've started a blog devoted to Ellipticism, tentatively called ElliptiSchism, at http://comp.missouri.edu/blogs/cap1/wp-login.php. Click over, and let me know what you think, if you want. Have a wonderful day.

The Cliff Becker Translation Project

2007-10-31T07:16:00.000-07:00

Good morning, and happy Halloween. It's a great day to think about translation, if costumes are translations, and if our current holiday is a translation of All Saint's Day, which may have been a translation of something else. I hope yours is safe, and fun, and as translating as it's meant to be for you.

In just the few months that I've worked at MU's Center for the Literary Arts, lots of great things have happened, and I remain very grateful to Scott Cairns and Sharon Fisher for giving me the position. The Cliff Becker Translation Project promises to be another great thing, and I also have Aliki Barnstone to thank for the chance to be involved with starting it. It's got incredible potential, thanks to everything that she's done with translation, the work of her amazing family members, and the life's work of the man it's commemorating.

Since Aliki brought up the possibility of this project, I've really enjoyed getting to know Cliff through the memories of him available online. He started at the NEA in 1992, and was involved with some of its great poetry efforts. He did wonderful work managing its grants, and, most recently, helped to start the National Poetry Recitation Contest. He's remembered for being the kind of great man who didn't advertise himself, but worked with passion and humor to address the kinds of problems that it's literature's place to solve.

Among his missions was the one of bringing more foreign literature into English via translation. His quote in the New York Times really grabbed me: "I am a citizen of the most powerful country the world has known, a country that asks me to be part of its decision-making process on a whole range of things. If I'm not able to experience other cultures, not even from a place that is as easy to reach as the printed page, that is outright dangerous."

The scope and nature of the Cliff Becker Translation Project remain to be seen; right now, I'm grateful for the chance to see the importance of translation, and to you for being translated into the blogosphere to read about it. Have a great day.

Two Interviews With Reginald Shepherd

2007-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

The last time I made a blog post, it may have been around 90 degrees outside. Now, it feels about 60, and the trees are turning into firework displays outside. It's great to be back in Missouri for them, to be able to drive down highway 70 where it dives into the shallow, wooded valleys, and have them flash seven different shades between yellow and green.

One of the many, great things that's kept me busy between then and now has been the chance to write a profile of Reginald Shepherd for Poets & Writers. The wonderful poet, and great friend, Joshua Kryah was assigned the profile, and offered me the chance to do it since his work had piled up too high for it. Josh and his awesome wife, Amber, have a something-month-old daughter, Eavan, whose incredibly cute picture beams in my apartment. They're also the new parents of Witness, the wonderful journal.

To top it all off, Josh's book, Glean, winner of Nightboat's 2005 contest, has been getting him much-deserved readings around the country. In the midst of all of this, he still makes time to be a great friend, and had just enough time to make a tremendous gesture of friendship by offering me the assignment. It's been a great chance to look at Reginald's poetry, and the prose that will be coming out in Orpheus in the Bronx, the essay collection to be published as part of Michigan's Poets in Prose series.

With not much time to do the profile (I'm making final edits, with the help of the wonderful editors there, this weekend), I've been really grateful to Reginald for sending quick responses to my questions. Since the profile can't offer the full texts of the two, brief e-mail interviews, he's been kind enough to let me post them here.

The first interview:

1. You talk about identity poetics in your book, and how passion is more important to your view of poetry. You talk about it with real power, saying that you’re tired of being seen as a black poet, with all the agenda that that implies. Was there one particular event that led to this realization? Do you remember where you were, what you were doing when it hit you?

This is something that has been hitting me, hard and repeatedly, all my life. Ever since I was a child I have been accused by other black people, starting with my mother’s family, of not being black or of thinking I was white (which assuredly never occurred to me—I have much too much evidence to the contrary, physical and social). Simultaneously, I have labored under the burden of being too black for many white people—that is, of being black at all. Having so often felt racial identity as an imposition rather than a choice, as a means of being identified (and categorized and labeled) rather than as a means of identification, I am very skeptical of it in all areas of life. In the literary arena in particular, it too often seems that a writer who is black is expected, even obligated, to be “a black writer” in ways that I find prescriptive and restrictive. I’m hardly deluded enough to believe that I can escape my social identity, and the specific version of it I have experienced (there are many such versions) has shaped me as a person or a writer. But it doesn’t determine or define me. I find often myself discounted as a black poet for not following the prescriptions laid down for poets who are black. As Samuel R. Delany has said of himself, I am black, and to that extent what I write is black literature. I would add that it is also many other things. In any case, it shouldn’t be my job to fit myself to a predecided definition of what counts as “black literature,” of who counts as “a black writer.”

It’s somewhat funny that my desire that my race not define my writing has led to my spending so much time and energy on the topic that I am now almost defined as “the black writer who doesn’t want his race to define his writing.” There’s always a box into which one can be put and into which one can put oneself. But then, the world is full of ironies.

2. In Orpheus in the Bronx, you talk openly about your childhood, movingly about your growth as a poet, and humbly about your accomplishments in poetry. One of the successes, for you and for the world of poetry, came when Carolyn Forché picked Some Are Drowning. Do you remember your circumstances at the time—where you were, what you were thinking, and how the notification came?

I remember those circumstances very clearly. It was the summer of 1993 and I was living, briefly and unhappily, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I met several men who’d had friends killed by Jeffrey Dahmer—not the most auspicious introduction to a city. I had thought that I was going to do a PhD there, but that didn’t work out, and I wasn’t sure what I would do instead, though I knew that it involved leaving Milwaukee.

I had become very discouraged about the manuscript, having sent out different versions of it continuously for five years, and was convinced that it would definitely not win anything that year (as it had not for any of the previous years), but that, with all the revisions I had done, it had a good shot at winning a prize the following year. Carolyn Forché called me while I was packing to move to Chicago (where I ended up living for six years) to tell me that she had picked Some Are Drowning for the AWP Prize. Apparently it had not even been a finalist, but she had been dissatisfied with the finalist pool and had asked to see more manuscripts. So the book was plucked out of the proverbial slush pile. I was hyper-ventilating when I got her call—I could hardly breathe. It was exhilarating and overwhelming. It was also heartening to know that such a thing could happen for someone with no connections and no sponsors, purely on the basis of the work.

3. Now that you’ve had five books published, Orpheus in the Bronx carries the feeling of a major poet looking back on his work, and seeing how it merges with the world. Did you envision the book that way before you started? In the way that your poetry so wonderfully embodies process, becoming rather than being, was the book self-transformative at all?

I’m very flattered at your description of me and of my book of essays. I certainly didn’t envision the book as any such retrospective monument. Especially given that it underwent many revisions and reworkings over the years, I’m not sure how I envisioned it. Mostly I was guided by a sense that I wanted to leave behind some evidence of my intelligence, that I was capable of communicating in other ways than in poems, that I could talk the talk as well as walk the walk. The process of writing prose at all, let alone a whole book of prose, was transformative for me. For many years, I was one of those poets who feared prose as an intimidatingly alien realm. This was quite a problem for me in college, where writing papers was nearly traumatic; I don’t think that I ever turned in a paper on time. So when I first thought of assembling a collection of essays, the surprise was that I had enough prose to do so at all. Like Molière’s M. Jourdain realizing that he had been speaking prose all along, I realized that I had been writing prose all along, almost despite myself, and usually at another’s request or invitation. It was a reassuring realization, and helped alleviate my fears about writing prose, with which I’m now quite taken. Prose of all kinds now gives me an arena to write and say things that don’t go into poems, at least not into the poems that I write, and to engage in a different kind of discourse and a different kind of thinking, about poetry and all manner of other things.

It’s very important for poets to articulate what they are doing and why, what matters to them about poetry. That kind of discussion enriches and illuminates one’s own work, and creates a sense of dialogue in what is often a very lonely vocation. I’ve now started a web log, at http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com, on which I discuss poetry and poetics. The process of writing for it (unlike many bloggers, I post not journal entries or passing thoughts but carefully worked over essays, many of them quite substantial) and of receiving serious and overwhelmingly positive responses (which have often helped hone my thinking and my formulations), has made me a much more productive prose writer. I now have the makings of another essay collection, primarily comprised of pieces from my blog. The sense of audience and response that the blog has provided has been very heartening. I’ve found another home as a writer in prose, and I’m quite happy about that.

4. Your essays on other poets point to where your work, and theirs, converge. In that way, they manage to be both personal and critical, which is a rare combination. They inspire questions about how you view aspects of your own writing. Your writing on Jorie Graham, for example, shows how deftly Erosion uses beauty. Your work shows us how indispensable it is, and how constantly called into question. Have you felt a changing relationship with beauty over the course of your writing career? How do your different works engage it differently? Your writing about Gregg shows the depth and brilliance in her use of myth. How do you see your own use of it?

I appreciate your characterization of my essays on other poets, which is what I aim for. In general, I only write about poets whose work is important to me (though, given that most of my critical prose has been solicited work on particular topics, there are many poets whose work I value on whom I’ve not yet written). My critical investments are also personal investments: I write about these poets because I care about their work, and it’s that which leads me to investigate it more closely.

With regard to beauty, I feel ambivalent toward it, and yet I am deeply committed to it. As I write in “Notes Toward Beauty” in the collection, there is a current suspicion of beauty which I don’t share, which to my mind is linked to a general suspicion of emotion in contemporary American culture, except in its most reified and commodified forms. Beauty is often seen as a lie, while intense emotion is seen as unseemly and gauche, an embarrassment. There’s a pervasive valorization of a blank and, to my mind, evasive irony with which I take issue. Beauty, of course, often leads to and is the source of intense emotion. Your first question mentioned my commitment to passion, and I do think that without passion there is not point to the creation or consumption of art. These days, the critical impulse often seems to overtake the creative impulse in art. But I still believe in the possibilities that beauty offers of a life other than that which we now live, of a world of just proportion that is in some ways an image of justice and freedom, of what Kant called the kingdom of ends, in which things exist for their own sake. Part of the pain beauty can cause is the realization that such a kingdom is not ours: somewhere is such a kingdom, but not here, not now. But beauty reminds us of its possibility, and of the necessity to strive for it.

I have felt a changing relationship to beauty over the course of my development as a writer. A professor of mine once told me that I wrote about things that everyone agreed were beautiful, and over time I came to see the limitations to such an acceptable and apprehensible notion of beauty. My notions of beauty are more complex and more contradictory now; they incorporate brokenness and even failure, the beauty of ruin and the ruin of beauty. I’ve become distrustful of the purely consoling, soothing aspects of beauty; I’m more interested in its piercing, challenging aspects. In the dialogue between beauty and justice, I’m less willing always to let beauty have the last word. But I still remain convinced that the two need not be antagonists, and that at the core they are one. But that core is less easily reached than I once thought, and I’ve become more willing and even determined to play out that struggle in my work.

As for myth, it has been a central part of my consciousness since I was a child. Part of the appeal of myth for me has always been that things make sense in myths, even if a kind of mad sense, in a way that they rarely did or do in my life. Ordinary, meaningless suffering is transformed in myth, made sublime, made beautiful, made meaningful. The pain is not excluded, but it is (dare I say it?) ennobled.

The sense in Linda Gregg’s poems of myth as lived experience, and of its interpenetration with our daily lives, has been very important to me. I’ve been very interested in juxtaposing myth’s world of meaning and form, of power and grace, with the contemporary quotidian world, in seeing what kind of sparks are generated when different worlds are forced to confront one another, when mythic history meets mundane history. For example, in “A Man Named Troy,” from my second book, Angel, Interrupted, I juxtapose the Trojan War with the First Gulf War, Apollo with a man reading in a Chicago café, the Olympian gods treading just above the earth with an elevated train line. These things all coexist in my consciousness and in my world, and I like to see what happens when they’re brought together in poems, which should be at least as complex as life.

5. After reading Orpheus in the Bronx, I’m struck by how the title seems to point to the Orphic action of the book—you’re going into the underworld of childhood, to bring back, not Eurydice, but memory and lyric, which may be the shape she takes, after all. How do you hope that the reader will see the memories that you offer there? What does it say about the notion of identity as a whole?

You’ve pointed out something in the book’s title that I hadn’t consciously thought of in this connection, though the ideas you bring up are constants for me. In a way, I see all my poetry as a kind of Orphic quest, to rescue my mother, my own Eurydice, whose death stung me into poetry. Reading T.S. Eliot in the ninth grade made me want to be a poet; my mother’s death soon afterward made me need to be a poet. Memory and lyric are indeed the shape my mother, my Eurydice, my muse, takes now, the only form she has anymore, since there is no rescue for the dead. I hope that a reader will see the various memories assembled in the book—personal, literary, social, historical—these fragments I have shored up against my ruin, against our ruin—as evidence of the complex, contradictory, overdetermined nature of identity. There is no singular, unitary “whole” called “identity,” not for me, not for anyone. The idea of identity has become so simplified and reified that it reduces rather than enhances possibility. People cling to their chosen or assigned identities like armor, to protect themselves against all those they see as other, to protect themselves against themselves. This impoverishes experience, impoverishes art, impoverishes the potentials of identity itself. Memory is at the core of identity, that sense that I am now what I was, that I will be what I am. But in my experience, I was many things, and they have made me many things today, some congruent, some contradictory. Memory is plural, as is identity, and both are moving targets, things striven for and never really achieved.

The second interview:

1. In Some Are Drowning, “Brotherhood” carries a great sense of identity, of otherness, and how each melt in the sea through which the speaker walks. It made me think of Iowa, and Bob Archambeau’s discussion of its Eliotic traits [in his article in Pleiades] also took me back to the great picture of you, copying Eliot’s work in high school.

“Brotherhood” is one of the older poems in Some Are Drowning. I wrote it in 1986 or 1987 (although it underwent subsequent revision, as all my poems do), soon after returning to college to finish my BA after three years of doing menial labor in Boston. It’s about my life as a poet manqué during that period, when there was a total disjunction between my material life (which consisted of days working at demeaning, poorly paid jobs and nights of being snubbed by handsome men in gay clubs while trying to forget that I had to go to work the next day) and my sense of myself as an artist, an identity or aspiration that had no connection to anything else in my life, which existed in opposition to that life. I would read and try to write on the subway on the way to and from work, and set aside time in the evenings to do what I considered my real work, to remind myself of who I thought I was despite the utter lack of recognition of that self in my real world. When I went back to school, I felt that I had finally gotten back on the path I’d fallen from (I had been a prodigy, but had become a mere prodigal).

“Brotherhood” is about someone who is still trapped in that space between what the world permits him and what he dreams of being, about someone who will never become more than an aspiring artist: the person that for years I feared that I would become, and still feel lucky not to have. His ambitions are as ephemeral as the waves on the shore, are constantly interrupted by the routine of his daily life, the stops and starts of the subway that takes him nowhere.

2. In Angel, Interrupted, “‘Orpheus and Eros,’ by George Platt Lynes” shows a kind of otherhood between the two figures, and the stone of each brilliantly represents that sense of immutability that comes with feelings of grief and desire. It made me think of the Chicago Art Institute, too, and I wondered if you’d seen it there.

I wrote this poem while I was a student at Iowa, after seeing a reproduction of the piece in the book The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe by Allen Ellenzweig. The photograph is of two nude, slim but well-developed young men, both of whom have their backs to the camera; the figure in the background has a sort of diaphanous curtain draped over him, while the figure in the foreground holds his hand as if to pull him toward him and into the light. Given the black and white sheen of the photograph, I superimposed my idea of the figures, particularly the shrouded background figure, whom I identified as Apollo (on the idea that gods can’t be clearly seen), as stone statues, marble or alabaster, on the photograph’s human forms. This led to an exploration of whiteness as beauty, and of Orpheus as emblematic of an implicitly white western culture that excludes or ignores me as a black man, though my desire as a gay man is inscribed in the photograph. This returns to the ambivalence about beauty that we discussed in an earlier question. I’ve never felt that beauty could be mine, that I could be part of beauty.

3. In Wrong, “Telemachus On the Waterfront” reminded me of Navy Pier, and how the Telemachus I know from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” would fit there with the wind and clouds. I wondered if its great sense of landscape rose from looking at parts of Chicago, and how its easy movements through the giant landscape of myth reflect life in an urban space.

Though I lived in Chicago for six years, and wrote “Telemachus on the Waterfront” there (around 1997, I think), I’m not sure that I ever went to Navy Pier. (Often when one lives in a place, one doesn’t do or go to the things that are famous to those who don’t live there.) In titling the poem I was thinking of the song “I Cover the Waterfront,” especially as sung by Billie Holiday. The line “Will the one I love be coming home to me?” felt particularly apt in relation to Telemachus waiting twenty years for a man he doesn’t even know, since Odysseus left Ithaca when Telemachus was an infant. The poem is about Telemachus’s ambivalence about the return of this man called “father” who is a total stranger, and who will displace him as the man of the house, whose return will overturn his life. I do like your phrase "the giant landscape of myth." Lake Michigan was an overwhelming presence in my life in Chicago (I even lived in a neighborhood called Lakeview—the hip gay neighborhood). I spent lots of time at the lake, and no doubt the lakefront influenced my creation of the waterfront Telemachus wanders.

4. Otherhood offers “Apollo Steps in Daphne’s Footprint,” and the spontaneity of the title act, along with the easy music that follows, makes both figures seem so real. There’s a sense of the god following in the tracks of the goddess that seems familial, too, as if the speaker is following a family member. Is this poem, for you, tied in at all to the Orphic quest to recover lost loved ones?

I have written many poems from the perspective of the victims of the gods, the ones spoken of in the myths who don’t get themselves to speak. I became interested in trying to write from the perspective of the god, to find out what it felt like to exercise power rather than just be its object. My project was to write several poems from Apollo’s viewpoint, but it petered out after two poems, this one and “Apollo on What the Boy Gave,” about Apollo and Hyacinth. Perhaps because I’ve never been able to identify with power, what I found is that the god’s power renders him powerless, that the god doesn’t get what he wants: everything he tries to touch is destroyed or transformed into something different from what he was seeking. Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne and to escape him she’s transformed into a laurel tree, which he makes sacred to himself and which becomes the emblem of poetry. He seeks physical fulfillment, love even (whatever love means to a god), and ends up with just representation, a poem instead of the object of his desire. That does tie into what you call the Orphic quest to recover lost loved ones. Much of my poetry has been an attempt to rescue my dead mother, but it can’t be done: the dead can’t be saved. All I have are the words I’ve turned her into: “a crumpled poem in place of love,” as the last line of my poem “How People Disappear” (in Fata Morgana) puts it.

5. In Fata Morgana, there’s such a rich mix of grit and myth, and it would be great to hear about how that came for you from “Orpheus Plays the Bronx,” especially after the Chicago-oriented poems of the earlier books. Did you write it while working on a particular part of Orpheus in the Bronx?

I like your notion of the mix of grit and myth: I've always wanted both to ballast the myth with the ground of fact and experience and to raise up the immediate and the personal to a higher, more resonant level. My mother and her death have been among the motives for my work since the time I began writing, but I’ve rarely directly addressed or engaged that material. A few poems in my first book did so, but for years she was a kind of absent center about which my poems revolved. In more recent years I’ve returned to more openly dealing with the fact of her death and the loss it represented to me, the hole it still makes in me. This has also involved writing more autobiographically than I usually do. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote “Orpheus Plays the Bronx” the poem, or the circumstances of its writing (though I know I wrote it in Chicago), but it was years before I even conceived of Orpheus in the Bronx the essay collection. I wanted to take my personal experience of my mother’s suicide attempt when I was very young (an attempt she later denied, though I remember it vividly), many years before her death of an asthma-induced heart attack, and place it in the context of a cultural story, or more than one such story, if we count the soul singers Al Green and Barry White as contemporary Orpheus figures, singing our modern myths. Like Orpheus singing the songs of his mourning for Eurydice, my mother’s death stung me into poetry. There is a way in which her death was my escape, from the Bronx, from the ghetto, from a intimacy so suffocating it was a trap. There was a sense, as the poem says, that I couldn’t live if she did, that only her death set me free, though into what I’m still not sure.

Why Tony Barnstone Rules

2007-09-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

I first met Tony at the West Chester poetry conference, and was struck by what a friendly and knowledgeable guy he was. Reading Sad Jazz, I was struck all the more by how those qualities come together in his sonnets, and bring a host of challenging topics along with them, into a constant, loose-fitting music. When I called him to ask all kinds of questions about his writing process, he talked with me for a good hour. After giving me a lot of great advice about sonnets' rhetoric and history, he showed the amazing kindness of including one of my Batman sonnets in his Cortland Review essay.

Then, the other day, he e-mailed with the possibility of an AWP panel on comic books in poetry, and, within the day, we had assembled the awesome superhero lit team of Bryan Dietrich, Sarah Weinman, and Steve Burt to complete the panel. All of that is to say that his generosity of heart and knowledge is a real inspiration, and I was struck by that while looking again at Sad Jazz a day or three ago.

Aliki has been a huge help, too, offering a lot of great advice about translation, which I definitely need. Translation, like sonnet composition, is the best kind of challenge so far, and incredible fun. I hope that both of those qualities describe your day.

The Last Week's Amazing News

2007-09-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

The first cool news came today, when I got INK from The New Yorker. It was amazing; first, I opened up the envelope to take out the normal rejection slip. When I saw the writing on the other side, I think the hair on my arms might have actually stood up.

The most interesting poetry development may be that my sequence, "Weston's Unsent Letters to Modotti," is now on the online portion of the Italian photo magazine, Private. I found an issue of theirs at Borders one day, and realized how great of a place it might be for poems from the sequence, if they were put together with the photos that Shannon is doing as part of our collaboration. Now, I'm realizing that such a collaboration would be a great fit for Aperture, and hope to find ways of making that happen.

My Fulbright application is going amazingly--my e-mail to Stephen Greenblatt got a warm and helpful response, that has led, in turn, to great places. He recommended talking to Tom Conley, in Harvard's French department, and Tom responded with the same warmth and generosity, saying that Jean Parmentier, whose work I'm translating, could use more exposure. He's also a friend of Frank Lestringant, the Sorbonne professor who has done such amazing work in linking Renaissance travel narratives to geography with the rhizomatic approach that Deleuze and Guattari articulated so brilliantly. It looks like my dream, of Frank mentoring me during the Fulbright, may come true.

It's amazing to have this project also act as a searchlight into my family's past. Any historical research into Jean ends up being genealogical research as well, and lets me see the amazing line of my family stretching back into time--Antoine Auguste, who introduced the potato to the French diet by setting up soup kitchens in Paris, all the way down to my grandfather, Alan, whose skill with a Flying Fortress in WWII helped to keep him and his crew alive. What an awesome blessing to have theory and poetry converge in the figures of these amazing men, and to be descended from them.

More Amazing News

2007-08-25T11:10:00.001-07:00

A couple of days ago, my contributor's copies of Best American Poetry 2007 came, and (I can tell you this without feeling self-conscious, since we're not in the same place) I cried because of how absolutely cool it was. Heather McHugh picked some amazing poems, and it's incredibly humbling to have mine included with them. Copies of it aren't on bookstore shelves yet, but I recommend it, more for the selections by Kazim Ali, Robert Hass, Ben Lerner, and many more, than mine.

More to amaze: it looks like Jonathan Caouette, the director of "Tarnation," might be coming to the Ragtag Theater in Columbia, MO, for a showing of his film, along with his being available for discussion. Jonathan is an incredibly friendly guy, who immediately said yes to the possibility, and Paul at the Ragtag was great about promising to fit him in for April, 2008.

The most amazing thing to happen lately: my mom, a wonderful, 60-year-old woman with a great sense of Presbyterian values, and enough of a sturdy grounding in tradition to have raised me and my three brothers to all fly right, love God, and eat nutritiously, got her nose pierced. I'm still in shock :). Rock on, Mom. And you. Have a great day.

After a Long Hiatus

2007-08-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

It's been forever since I've blogged last, and you, who are reading this, have definitely been missed. Things have been wonderfully busy, and look like they'll keep on being that way, except even more wonderfully, in this year of the Mizzou Ph.D. program.

The journal of radical formalism will possibly be edited by Steve Schroeder, instead of myself, which will work wonderfully, since Steve has the expertise, the prowess as poet/editor, and the time. I'll be assistant director of Mizzou's Center for Literary Arts, a really cool job which will lead to yet greater opportunities, I'm sure.

Another exciting development (of many) is that I've successfully lobbied the wonderful Shannon Petrello to do visual responses to poems of my Edward Weston sequence. It's a rare opportunity for me, since she's a really talented photographer, who has done wonderful things with collage.

Yet another is that Tom Mandrake, the amazing illustrator whose work includes some of the most current issues of Detective, is considering working with my Batman sonnet novella. He's a very busy guy, but has graciously offered to take a look at them.

The symposia on Elliptical poetry, too, are coming wonderfully ahead, thanks to Joan Houlihan and many other, very helpful people. Colorado Review and Laurel Review will definitely be running a couple of them, and APR and jubilat are tentatively on board. The truly wonderful list of participants will be a real honor to work with.

Finally, writing is going wonderfully, thanks to reading (Keats and Walcott, with a nice sprinkling of Jessica Fisher's beautiful book) and a very good life. Hope yours is, too.

Wonderful Projects

2007-05-23T14:04:00.001-07:00

After ages going by without my posting, I have almost too many amazing things to start at any one place. First, there's the fact of summer break, bringing sun and a cumulus wonderland to the sky outside. Then, there are the following:

1) Form: In Atlanta, at AWP, Annie Finch, the poet most known for her formal work, as well as The Exultation of Forms, a book on form, approached me and asked if I wanted to edit a journal. The journal would (and, now, will) embody the poetics of radical formalism, which Annie codified in an essay, and elsewhere. In the last several months, it's begun to take shape, in wonderful, exciting ways. Marilyn Hacker, the master of form, translation, and more, has agreed to be on the advisory board. Paul Hoover, the master of formal and experimental uses of beautifully lyrical language, has agreed to the same. The board of contributing editors will include Steve Schroeder, Chad Davidson, Josh Kryah, and more wonderful people.

More awesome news: Jacket, the superb online journal, will run a feature on us, probably in the fall. We're tentatively planning to call the journal FORM--elemental, nominative, imperative, and true to what we're doing. Next steps: web design, nonprofit research, grant research, and much reading of radically formal poems.

2) The Symposium on Ellipticism: Several months ago, I realized that Elliptical poetry has had an interesting trajectory since 1999. That's when American Letters & Commentary published the article by Stephen Burt, announcing its criteria and the poets he saw as some of its primary practitioners. In that same issue, essays by Cole Swensen and others added dimensions to the discussion, that seemed, to some, to put the issue to rest.

For many others, though, Elliptical poetics have persisted in some form. When Charles Wright came here (to Mizzou), he mentioned that one of his undergraduate students had turned in a poem, and Wright said, "What's that? I've never seen anything like it." The student said, "It's elliptical." Wright read Burt's essay, and found it compelling. Other poets are very familiar with it--Wayne Miller's essay in American Book Review calls it the new Modernism. Many others draw on the practices of the poets called Elliptical--Lucie Brock-Broido, Cole, and others have influenced a wide range of poets.

This diverse discourse seemed to me to be wonderful fodder for a symposium, so I approached Wayne and Stephen about it, and it's taken off wonderfully since then. Now, what was planned as symposium will be symposia, appearing in more than one journal in 2009. Colorado Review and The Laurel Review have been wonderful enough to volunteer page space, and Joan Houlihan has graciously offered to post all symposia on Boston Comment. Among the participants are Joan, Wayne, Steve, Michael Dumanis, Mark Bibbins, Alex Lemon, and some of the poets mentioned in the original essay--Liam Rector, Mary Jo Bang, Forrest Gander, and more. It should be a first of its kind, in several ways, which is terrifically exciting.

More wonderful things have been happening, but, for now, there is sunshine to be absorbed, and weight machines to be exercised.

Batmannequin

2007-02-17T21:42:00.000-08:00

I'm obsessed with Batman. And a couple of other things, but Batman has been the obsession I've been nurturing purposefully in the last couple of years, to try to embody the book of Batman poems I'm working on. That hit home even more to me tonight when my parents invited me to the symphony with them, and, honestly, my first thought, to myself, was, "Wow, that will help me emotionally ground myself in the part of the Batman myth where Bruce Wayne's parents are killed," followed by the thought, "the fact that we won't be killed will help me ground the book in an autobiographical place of honest optimism." Walking to Powell Symphony Hall, I found myself thinking, "Man, I hope we don't get killed; what kind of cruel world would it be if I brought some real-life version of the Batman story down on us?"

Now, blogging, I'm still relieved and weirdly surprised at how little my life resembles Bruce Wayne's. My Batman obsession doesn't feel like anything in need of a support group, but it's funny how you can inundate yourself in such a project and end up wearing it as an internal mask, or filter, that sorts what can go into the text and what can go into the nebulous space outside the text marked "reality." If you want to write a book about a single topic, immersion is definitely one way to go.

The symphony really pulled me in, more than I can remember it doing before. The symphony hall itself wears red velvet on its railings and gold trim on its ceiling vaults, where white plaster faces smile down, and the crowd holds this rich mix of St. Louis's elders, with their white hair and fur coats and wonderful air of courtesy, and twenty-ish couples and the kids with the symphony in their bones, who craned toward the musicians whose seats they maybe dream of filling one day. Staying awake turned out to be wonderfully easy--the music would crescendo me out of any approaching sleep--but it isn't right now. Good night.

The slippery shape of a whip in mid-air

2007-01-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about whips today, well, mostly just now, and how they seem to signify something different from a knife or a gun in the hand of the action hero (Indiana Jones) or feline villainess (Catwoman, as opposed to all of the other feline villainesses). It connotes dominance, in more of an old world style, or just plain more badassitude, saying "the person carrying me doesn't need a weapon that would inflict a death wound, since he/she has enough mojo to do what needs to be done." Indiana Jones also used guns, I guess (maybe only on Nazis), but the whip is his signature weapon.

"Whipped," I'm also realizing today, has defined me and the ladiez in years past; I've tended to be either not emotionally engaged in my relationships, or totally ready to hand over whatever of myself can be given, which feels very romantic and also constricting and neatly unconducive to having my own, say, direction in life. I actually have one now, which is wonderful and weird, and it's funny how getting something like that gives you a purposeful stare, which, in turn, lets flower for you all of the stares of attraction that have been pointed at you all along.

Today, Columbia has this milky shimmer of a sky, and that kind of white, the kind connoting approaching snow, brings the white tints out of all the buildings, and makes the snow that fits in drifts into the cracks and corners of town look like pieces of that same sky waiting to be reclaimed by the next, really radiant day. The library computer lab holds the sneezes and keystrokes of students behind their computer table dividers, and for some reason that reminds me of the two squirrels I saw just outside of this building a couple of days ago, each sitting in a patch of dirt-plastered grass that it had dug through the snow, so it looked like a little spring melt radiated from each one, and their little coats the color of something between rust and the Flash's uniform were exuding that heat.

The students here definitely aren't squirrelly. Maybe it's that even the squirrels here carry that radiant bearing of studiousness. Have a radiant, unwhipped day.

Sunrize

2007-01-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have something to confess to you. Please do NOT tell anyone. I got my krump on last night. I don't know if that's even the right grammatical context; I'm new to all things krump. But, after watching "Rize," this documentary of krump and clown dancing, with its amazing dancers turning into blurs of pistoning hips and swarming arms and the beat like a spine running from them, from the screen, to me, I looked at myself in the mirror, and tried it. And felt very white, but very good. But, really, please keep this between us.

This morning, when I woke up, that krump feeling remained, and it's one of starting to let go of whatever frost has been under my skin for a few years now, that's kept me numb even while zooming through fascinating adventures, with wonderful people, and seeming externally to connect with them. Even though the sun hasn't krumped over Columbia for a few days, sealed behind this solid layer of white, like a clown's face paint, there was a warmth in walking to campus, in the neon tubes of ice rinding the limbs of the spidery trees along the way, and the pull of the poesy I'm at this here computer to work on.

I'm realizing, as I hammer away at this long poem I've been working on for four years, started in the workshop of the formidably talented Judy Jordan, that I don't know how a long poem goes. So I've looked at a few of the more famous ones, Waste Land and Angel of History, mostly, and realized that long poems (well, all two that I've looked at so far) start short, small, not trumpeting or announcing themselves as such. They may start with long lines, but do so establishing context, to put you there in the scene.

Happy MLK day to you. And, if you don't tell anyone about me krumping, I won't tell anyone about yours.

Snail

2007-01-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

That's my name for what fell on Columbia last night, this pattery snow that nipped at my scalp as I hiked over its crust, frozen to foamboard, through the neighborhoods to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the glowing company of marvellous Mizzou poets. It ticked and whispered onto its own surface, and made a mystery in its merging there, since it wasn't feathery snow, but was too soft to ricochet off of the pavement like hail. Hence, snail. Maybe, in the course of this degree, I'll learn more beautiful ways to describe weather, and be able to apply for poet laureate at the Weather Channel. The fact that they don't have a position like that might be a problem, but they wouldn't have to pay me much. If they could make it sunny out, that would be payment enough. That's what the weather channel does, right? Or is that God?

This hint of winter has been sweet, though. This morning, the white of the snow and the sky seemed to make this mutual reflection, like each magnified the other's gleaming, and in between the pedestrians looked stark and bright like mobile trees, and the trees themselves, encased in ice, glistened like an inner light had finally found its way out. There's one tree a couple of streets from me, with dark berries, the color of the inside of a mouth, and the ice freezes in drops at the bottom of each, making them tiny, globular lanterns whose ultimate shining will be falling to grow into new trees.

In my snaildom, late at night, curled into my thoughts, I think of Buffy, how her lipstick never smears in the snapkicking of vampires, and how we viewers live out the love stories never quite reached by them on the screen, and sleep comes in, seems to come with the kicking on of the giant gas heater next to my futon, with its little window you can see the blue flame through, and it brings weird dreams these days--Jason Koo (cool poet and homey) giving me instructions on the keeping of a pet tiger; my dad (awesome guy and former flier of fighter planes) taking me up in a Harrier, the kind of plane that can hover, telling me not to be afraid; tons of other friends and loved ones in surreal montages. Maybe it's that last midnight snack that does it.

Rodney Jones has a great poem in Salvation Blues, his new and selected, about dreams in which he's playing basketball, among other things. I may be getting my poems confused, but I think it's "Common Law Cundalini," that starts with the sublime line "A sudden loving settles into your own weight." Since I generally try to live out the poems of Rodney Jones, I've been feeling that love lately, of being here. Since I try to live out his dreams, I was overjoyed to hit the court with some of the other doctoral students (or just "studs", for short), and hope to again soon.

This has been my long way of saying Happy New Year to you.

This Must be the Place

2006-12-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

That's the title of the Talking Heads song bouncing out of the computer speakers right now, with David Byrne's voice that always sounded to me like Silly Putty if it were a chord, but I've come to see more in my own art punk daze as a reckoning with suburbia, and a way of finding the animal and romantic in that, and when he says "love me 'till my heart stops/love me 'till I'm dead," it's like the chirpy keyboards and burbly xylophone--catapulting past irony to a post-ironic innocence, a place where the knowledge and malaise of the culture are not ignored but transformed, like in "Nothing But Flowers" where the restaurants and malls are all covered with flowers. Also, no one else that I know of has worn a gigantically oversized two-piece suit and looked as cool as David Byrne.

It's a bright, warm Christmas Eve, and Forest Park was studded with sleek joggers and feeding geese today, and it was cool to see the same sky inverted and rippling in the ponds that I've been jogging past on and off for about fifteen years now, and to get a homey feeling from it. The Talking Heads song is about home, and carries this sense of having reached a promised land, and I got that feeling in Colorado, where the mountains looked like gigantic spikes of some heart monitor reading, filled in with stone and snow, but neat how it followed me here. Hope it's finding you, too.

Tripping the Trypto-phantastic

2006-12-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

After a heap of turkey at a table crowded with my awesome fam, the opening of great presents for my pad, and watching my nephews put together theirs, Jacob, my nephew, winding the painted orange hands of a wooden clock, Isaac, another one, who has now flopped down on the mattress by this computer with as much of one hand as he can fit in his mouth and the other clutching his Spiderman blanket (I think the technical term is "binky"), I'm moving from computer to tv to nephews to try to stay awake. It's a good regimen, that's been working so far, and I only have another hour to go before heading to see more friends, and then to church at midnight.

This trying to stay awake for church is a new thing for me, that started last year, in Colorado. There, part of my job was to go to churches and talk about the homeless shelter where I was an Americorps volunteer. The people were wonderfully friendly. They would come and shake my hand after the service, and my hand feels like a map of many others because of it, and there's something about shaking hands that leaves a firm warmth in the palm, that balms the psyche.

Church started to do something similar for me, at that time, except it was more like being shaken gently by a gigantic hand. Whether it belongs to Yahweh, a projection of my father, my Buddha nature, a projection based on enough obsessing about Batman to produce some sense of a divine fiction, or all of the above I'm not really sure. But there's something there, and it doesn't seem to need to be defined. Last night, I felt that sort of burst of peace, walking into my old bedroom, that's now a guest room, and something about the deep blue shimmer of sky mingling with the darker burn of shingles, and the streetlights radiating these spiky coronae like giant Christmas lights, that made sliding into sleep feel like being carried. Esta bueno. Hope your holidays are bringing you peace, too. If they aren't yet, my dosage of turkey was probably about a quarter pound. Add three awesome nephews, and one fading neurosis. I can wrap mine up for you, if you need me to.

I've been trying to come up with haiku about Batman battling different popular figures, and wondering what Batman vs. Santa would be like.

Santa gives gifts, but
Batman takes out bad guys.

Maybe you can finish it for me. Christmas IS coming up.

Rose

2006-12-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wonder if every poet has to deal with the rose as an archetype, at some point, if it will bloom from his/her fingers if not written out deliberately, or just cast a rosey aura over whatever's being written.

But I wonder a lot of things that clearly have no basis in fact.

One thing like that, that I've been wondering ever since I started spotting women who were dazzlingly gorgeous, in 6th grade or so, was "Why does she so clearly think I'm unattractive?" The "she" tends to be whatever beautiful lady is closest by, and there's always that assumption, automatically. Not, "hm, she's probably thinking about whatever she's reading on her laptop," but this sort of inverted-narcissistic "man, her looking away from me is a clear indication of her lack of interest."

This afternoon, sitting at the Artisan, this coffee shop in downtown Columbia with really tasty paninis and good atmosphere, I started getting a clear vision of a Batman poem that united a couple of chunks of narrative that have been orbiting and studding different poems for months now, and so wrote what I could think of on the flyleaf and the inside cover of Carl Phillips' new book, Riding Westward, partly because his absolute sense of certainty about the nuance of emotion and relationship helped me inject a little of the same into the fragmented camp narrative, but also because I didn't have any paper.

There was a girl sitting at the table facing me, with the kind of blond hair and white Mac that imply a clear, clean inner light, and the purse in her lips of a kiss, and I had decided that she thought I was weird because I was scribbling, hunched over the table, probably not breathing and maybe even unconsciously humming the Batman theme, and so I did the absolutely terrifying thing that's corollary to Carl Phillips' speaker merging the classical narrative with the one of modern desire, or, on a Batmanic level, Batman walking into a mad scientist's lair that he knows holds a relic owned by his father, one that was used to power a monster, and I asked, "Hey, can I have a piece of paper?" She said, with a slight nostril flare, and the laptop shining its iconizing light on her face, "Is notebook paper okay?" I said yes, and borrowed it, and have had a wonderful day ever since.

All of which is to say that I feel, at twenty-nine, like I'm getting a little objectivity. Thanks for helping me with that, you, person who may know me only as an extended, middle-school-ey ramble about girls. Have a marvellous holiday. I love you.

The Man and the Gecko

2006-12-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in the computer lab in the Mizzou library, waiting until my brain kicks into student-paper-grading mode, which it always does. I always get something fun, and informative, and cool out of grading student papers once I start in, but there's that momentary pause beforehand, that natural urge to put them off, that can last for weeks. Today is a good time for that pause to thaw away, though, with the sun out and the snow melting under its gold breath and turning the sidewalks to melt-mirrors where the blue sky runs in a luminous analogue. Downtown Columbia is studded with the after-church crowd, looking stark and clean and happy in deep blue suits, and each computer holds a student rapt with its little kind of holiness, and there's a kind of prayer in the kneel before the screen and the rattle of the keys.

I was reading Yeats' poem "The Man and the Echo" a minute ago, and the three words at the end of each stanza spoken by the man are repeated as the voice of the echo, so he's lamenting "And all work done/dismisses all/And sinks at last into the night," (sorry, I'm butchering it in short term memory), and the echo repeats "into the night," and that echo itself makes echoic meanings. First, it redoubles the stony sense of mortality about the poem, but then, the more I think about it, the more it seems to parody the man's reflexivity, showing the lament as an incantation for its own sake, and I think Yeats is making fun of how a poet echoes woe. But I could just be projecting, because I like the brotha.

Echo: like the brotha.

There's such an effortless sense of ecstasy in his music, and it feels inherently joyful, like the harmony seen in hills that flatten together in mist, but still are distinct, just more like arcs of a rainbow, and I think partly it comes from the iambic tetrameter, and how he just lets the language do its thing, and the act of producing the poem is the act, like Flannery O'Connor said, of getting out of the way of the writing. My scholarly conclusion, then, is that Yeats travelled in a time machine to where Flannery O'Connor was saying that, then vanished back into the emeraldine shadows of his Celtic twilight and wrote "The Man and the Echo."

Hope you're having a wonderful Sunday, whoever you are. I've been trying to think of a larger phrase in which to fit the phrase "the magic of plastic," and, if you can send me one, I'll send you some love.

Twilit Pirates

2006-11-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

This is the last iteration of the "pyrite twilight" combination that I can think of, but as always I can feel more combinations surging as close as my serotonin, and, like it, dammed back by my own numbness, but waiting there, staying as easy and close as words rhyming with each other. The completely def Marc McKee, the other night, mentioned a quote by Ben Harper, who said something like, "If you like the song on the album, you should have heard the one in my head," and that's kind of how my poetic obsession works--it's this charging toward the perfect combination of words that part of me believes really exists, on a horizon separated from me by the various razor wires conjured up by fear. But the poetry, like anything with love in its wiring, works better with the sense of effortlessness and infinite possibility that come with summer evenings.

That's the breed of evening outside right now, all weighted with the lightness of the wind itself, that doesn't carry any fragrance of crushed, fermenting leaves, but holds this spice like a pirate might raid a merchant ship for. It's a sweet night, and sweeter since I just discovered just how many versions of "Cheek to Cheek" are on ITunes. That's the song that was on the "English Patient" soundtrack, and I think at the end of "The Purple Rose of Cairo," that Woody Allen movie where Jeff Daniels plays a guy who comes down off of a movie screen to rescue Mia Farrow. The other song that the night brings to my memory is the one Johnny Depp sings at the end of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean," with his gold tooth winking and the steering wheel like the wooden corona of some antique star in his hands. I can't quite remember how it goes, but just thinking of the scene gives me that pirate kind of feeling. It's a good feeling to have, in the confines of one's own home, where there's no temptation to pillage or plunder.

A Tiny Crisis On a Finite Earth

2006-11-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, DC had this story arc called "Crisis On Infinite Earths," and the name has stuck in my head ever since then for its very intense drama. It's not just a crisis on Earth, no. That would be nothing. It's like the gorgeously hyperbolic drama that is the superhero narrative, most of the time. The world is always ending. A villain has always kidnapped, not just anyone, but the president or whoever else in the story stands for the messiah. The superhero's life is always threatened, even though it's been proven, with Superman (and the aforementioned messiah) that death, while catastrophic, is only temporary.

So it's that kind of a crisis that I'm coming to you with now. Since I've been working on a book of poems about Batman for the last four years, and my handy-dandy neurosis has kept the obsession about the poems ratcheted into an infinitely high gear, I was excited to take the Which Superhero Are You? quiz at thesuperheroquiz.com. Even though I knew which questions would lead to me being called Batman, I was struck by how many questions led me away from him. Yes, I do like redheads. Yes, I like to fly. Who doesn't? Yes, I have inner darkness, but I don't generally hurt people without realizing it. And I turned out to be Superman. This is only a problem because, in the metaphorical schema that runs the poems, my next oldest brother, Ryan, is clearly Superman--hard-working, good-hearted, father of three, lost the coke-bottle glasses of his youth to become a buff, heroic computer programmer for Atlas Van Lines. Do I need to scrap the whole book?

No! You could have told me that, whoever you are. We're post-confessional, and, even in the confessional era, the poets didn't necessarily tell their life stories factually. The sense of authentic connection to the reader was used to channel a heightened emotion, which in turn fuelled the mixture of structure and abandon that lyrical architecture springs from. It was definitely important, but the mask was equally important--the sense that the poet was playing a part. Of course, even that can be an intimacy.

T.S. Eliot, in "Little Gidding," meets a ghost on the road, and they walk, and his
ghost, who has been generally identified as Yeats with other figures intermingled, gives him an authentic take on how old men view the world. It's one of the most straightforward passages in Eliot, in my teeny (or, sorry, Super) opinion, and it corresponds to a passage in a talk he gave about Yeats, where he's discussing the revelation of Yeats's age in a poem as a personal victory. That autobiography, that revelation that the poet is human, does something wonderful, but Eliot has to come to that point by a very different path from Yeats. But they end up being similar people, just as Batman, after lots of counselling, would probably take off his mask and discover that he was always Superman after all, and that to be human was to be superhuman.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving, superfriend. Whoever you be.

The pyritic twilitic

2006-11-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

The great Melanie Dusseau suggested "pyritic twilight," and it rules, like she does. From her, I learned to look at pop culture with new reverence, and she's written beautifully about it in her poetry and elsewhere. It seems strange now to divide it from literary and high culture, and one of the sweet aspects of postmodernism's project was the attempt to fuse the two again. So much of art since the end of church patronage seemed to flounder around the question of what to depict instead of the holy family, and what's come since then has shown us another kind of holiness.

The one who popularized the word holy again in our lifetimes was Burt Ward, who played Robin on the Batman tv series. Holy worked as an adjective for him over and over again, and I think it helped keep me spiritual. It certainly helped keep me batmanic, as did the story I read on an ABC news site today, about scientists who have trained dolphins to whistle the Batman theme.

But now I'm talking about Batman again. It's weird how often it pops up in my conversation, or maybe not weird, since I've been working on poems about Batman for the last four years, on and off, and have been following Kevin Young's advice, that the key to writing a book of poems about one topic was to get obsessed. It worked. I think I knew it was working when it seemed perfectly natural to me to draw a Batman logo on my chest, not to show anyone, but just to try to channel the language. Fortunately, they can medicate stuff like this, now. Woo hoo.

The pyrite twilight

2006-11-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to use that in a poem somewhere, because it's repetition of "i" sounds to the point of being glam, but have been having trouble justifying it, for the same reason. So it's safer to put here, since I'm safely unlinked to anyone else's blog and thus in my own little peninsula (or isthmus?) of tha blogosphere. And it's weird how animate that little phrase feels, like it's wanted to be put in some kind of poem somewhere, and been getting a little peeved at me for not including it. But therapy has helped me to see that poems are not people, even though they are very sexy and companionable, many of them.

But sexy and companionable would also describe Eliot's "Four Quartets," I'm discovering, as I've seen that my comments on his project, persona, and stance come a little from disagreement with his spiritual principles, but more because I've got an inner T.S. Eliot who's absolutely floored by his project, and absolutely buys it, and I've been repressing him for years. But, man, when he takes me through the whole of human history, into his own poetry-weary ruminations and out to where the thorns are bleeding roses and the wire is singing in the blood, how can I not follow him to "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time"? I've found myself like a kid unwrapping that quote like a Christmas gift from an archangel, saying "can it really be true?"

Amazing stuff. And I have a feeling he'd see "pyrite twilight" and sniff at it British-ly, and then offer back some variation on it with the wisdom of ages blowing a dusty sonata through its crystal syllables. Aw yee-uh.

Tha Fire and tha Rose

2006-11-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

The other day, I used "tha" on a handout for my composition students, then realized that most of them had matured into a hip-hop too far past NWA for that to instantly mean both "the" and "the speller of this word with an 'a' must be at least a little bit gangsta." So, it's possible that they might not see me as gangsta. That's probably for the best.

While T.S. Eliot probably wouldn't have described himself as "gangsta," Frances Dickey, the marvellous Mizzou lit professor, was telling our class the other day that he tended to think of himself as a jazz poet, and not the high priest of obscurity that much of the world saw. Such phat rhymes as "Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing" were, to him, maybe more verbal music than a gnash of teeth.

I spent a couple of hours this morning huddled over his "Four Quartets," with my attention first totally focused, then blurring into the empty space between the studious Chad and the Chad totally fed by the nectarous autumn sunlight out the window, and the bright flashes of glance through the front window by people trotting down the sidewalk, and realized that that space is where at least some of the poetry is set, that he's trying to find a place outside of time to just plunk down and stare at the world from, and that's exactly what I've been doing in my foggy recent years. He's investigating the electric connection between us and the industrial world, feeling "the wire in the blood," the surreal, popular connection between some of us and the Christian god, and all of the other connections he can think of, analyzing how each affects him and time, and, through it all, trying to get out of the self that's addicted to high society, toward the self that's pointed toward transcendence. The idea is that the high-society self has to be completely undone in order to pave the way for something greater, the God that comes as a darkness, as a "hollow rumble of wings."

His voice, in these poems, shifts based on his situation, and that fluidity of identity, that sense of self as something that can always dissolve and be remade, is something that bugs me, because it's something that I've had ever since I was a kid, and I stumbled on the thought that I had no way of independently confirming that anything was real. Some people have no problem just being themselves, and seeing all changes that happen to them as being situated within a stable identity. That makes sense to me; I've been pantomiming that approach for a few years now, and reading Eliot will show me a little more of a road map, I think. Although his approach did lead to wearing green face paint to night clubs, and I don't know if that's my style.

The most interesting part of sitting in the coffee shop, as always, was listening to the conversations around me, and looking up furtively at the beautiful people who walked by, and sat down, and talked--the man with the walrus mustache and the voice like a low chord on an organ who told the young, blond reporter about moving public benches to discourage the homeless from congregating in certain parts of town and scaring the public; the girl at the counter who speaks Spanish in a slow, honeyed tone; the dozens of other people who sat in there, or walked by outside, all caught in the same gorgeous quality of sunlight today, like they were absolute, and so was the light that hit them.

"Four Quartets" ends with "and the fire and the rose are one," and I've internalized that line in the last couple of weeks, as a way of talking about the merging of the internal, incandescent energy we all carry and the lush energy born out of love. But I don't know. If you see me wearing green face paint, you'll know my rose and fire are still separate from each other. Have a great day.

Reality

2006-10-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

It's noon and I'm in a caffeinated tributary of the stupor that's colored most of my last four years, but I've been thinking about reality, and wanted you to know. Part of the awesomeness of this first semester in the Ph.D. program has been reading criticism that surrounds both the poetics from a large span of Western history and the theoretical underpinnings of the art that helps to undermine old notions of identity. I've been trying to combine both of them to figure out my approach to poetry (that is close to my view of being) as it stands, and to see if I want to tweak it in any of the infinity of directions offered by Modernist and Postmodernist aesthetics. I've already been working out of a framework constructed by both, in the last couple of years, but haven't really known what I was doing until now.

Backing up, though, I've had two opposing epiphanies about the criticism that I've been reading, especially the writing of Charles Altieri on the Modernist poets. He's talking about how they use fragmentation and other techniques to show that the work of art we're seeing is a simulation, and not a transparent representation of an empirical reality. This, he goes on to say, helps us to interact with the writing in revolutionary new ways that basically help train our minds to revolutionary ways of thinking. When Williams tells us that the sea twists on a long stem, like a flower, he doesn't want us to see a metaphor of an emotional state, or an image of the sea, but to reflect on our act of seeing. Ditto for Eliot saying that roses "have the look of flowers that are looked at." Ditto basically all of postmodern aesthetics. Liberation from all of the old ways of reading and envisioning will help us to move on to new, post-patriarchal value systems that don't thrive on oppression. They don't build on the idea that we need one system of representation to mediate our reality, the way Christ mediates between Christians and Yahweh. They point toward the naked here-and-now like Zen does.

I'm reducing a lot of different movements into one ramble, but it seems like a lot of them come back to the idea that we can use fragmentation of language, and old ideas of it, as a kind of shattered mask, through whose cracks we can see, if not objectively, at least with a greater consciousness of the artifices and stories that create our realities. It's one epiphany to realize, "Oh, yeah, that's what all of this obscure poetry is trying to do," and another to realize, "If that poetry isn't liberating me into a new perspective, maybe it isn't doing what the authors intended, innovative as they are."

The problem being that, when Williams shows us the red wheelbarrow, starting with "So much depends/upon," we, or I, see these gestures as dramatic versions of a basically conventional voice. That's how they work for me, emotionally. If I look at Stein's portrait of Picasso as a speaker so undone by the chaos in the world around her and the dawn of machinery that she can only see this artist in a stuttering, broken incantation of how he distantly appears to a distant public, then it becomes powerful. If I see it as an explosion of post-referential language whose contemplation will catapult me into new ways of thinking, then it doesn't quite fly.

Anyway, I was immersed in all of this, last night, in a coffee shop in Columbia, MO, and suddenly the conversation of everyone around me turned from background static to something with its own music, a dense texture of interlocking speeches that mixed the personalities of the tan housewives at one table, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists sitting next to me, the blond undergrad girls in front of me, the dishwasher who talks to them and all of the other girls who come in, who like him because he's friendly, and represents himself as the nice guy that he is. And that was my third epiphany.

Archaeology of Cold

2006-10-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Where I'm sitting, in the second floor of Mizzou's library, I can see the giant, vaulted ceiling of the study room that looks like a ballroom with carpeting (and tables, and people studying). Plaster roses curl in squares sunken into the ceiling, and the waves that surround them take the shapes of dolphin tails in illuminated manuscripts, and the slowly declining daylight outside is bringing the sky out there to match it a little bit more. Like the rest of this campus, it looks simultaneously ready to host a flock of monks and a . . . what kind of pack would jocks travel in? Not a fleet, not a herd . . . maybe a 12-pack. I could see the monks coming in to douse the lights with ancient slingshots so they could light torches that would gutter the color of ash up. But that could be because I've been reading "Four Quartets," which has this masterfully monastic restraint. T.S. Eliot's kind of cold draws me close, like the opposite of a fire, something I mosey up to to freeze my hands, but there's a deeper endearance to it, too, and a yearning for closeness that matches mine when I'm walking in a . . . smorgasboard of beautiful people here on campus, and feeling this distance that seems like an obligatory part of being in grad school, but is more just good, old-fashioned fear.

I've been reading Yeats, too, and getting completely blown away all over again. In the MFA, at SIU, the poets we read the most, talked about, and studied were contemporary, narrative poets, a whole, vibrant pantheon we could step into the tiers of at AWP, with Larry Levis as the grizzled messiah, old school by our terms. In undergrad, and, so far, in the Ph.D., I've been thinking about modernists the most--Eliot, with his masks (mostly in his poems, but he was known to wear a greenish face paint to parties), Pound with his clown hair and Roman ambition, and Stein with her extended jumbles of iterated sentences that seem like cave painting fed through a grammar book. But Yeats was the Modernist who never shied away from dripping honey, and his mask was "burning gold with emerald eyes," and that's the one I would most like to wear to a party.

Also, his amazing way of constructing lines that dazzle but seem as elemental as a pulse, "I went out to the hazel wood/Because a fire was in my head," conjures up the commonalities in all of the places I've most recently lived, and all of the people I've most recently been. Maybe most importantly, a postcard of him stared at me all year in Colorado, from my bedroom wall, his glasses casting half-translucent shadows over his eyes, the caves they made hinting at a glitter of sight the way a real cave implies a center of the earth, his hair raked back like a battered tom cat's, his mouth half-open like he's about to stumble on the most sublime syllable ever uttered, one that Cuchullain stole from the mouth of a god and gave to a bard, who passed it down the genetic line to W. B., whose immersion in the Celtic twilight finally dredged it up.

That was a syllable that followed me through the mountains, and emerges again here, in the shunted, jade husks of walnuts on the sidewalk by my apartment, the storefronts all masked with yellow pawprints for homecoming tomorrow, the student at a conference today picking up a wriggling inchworm to set him free outside, and the gradual softening of the lines in my face like an invisible mask there is being winched away. It's a holy kinda thang. But I'm rambling. That's what a day of conferences, coffee, and Reese's peanut butter cups will do to a blog entry.

Lineation

2006-10-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

Blogger wasn't set up for creative line breaks, which is understandable, so it sent all of the lines in Brian's poem over to the left margin. But imagine the second or third one in each stanza drifted toward the middle, so they approximate snow settling in strata, building up and holding the quiet in ornate shapes. That's what he beautifully captures. So, if some of Tupelo's goons show up here at Mizzou looking for me, I'll tell them that I tried, and they might only leave me with a broken poesis, which isn't as painful as it sounds.

Missouri is starting to feel more right to live in, as the trees around here turn into ornate prisms, with one or two colors frozen in each leaf, and their shading is so frigging sublime that the two or three colors running together make them glow, like they're lit from within, and along the interstate they stretch for miles, each a different explosion of color, holding its own magic.

If you're ever by Fulton, MO, especially in the fall, drive ten miles out of town to Dixie Lake, or maybe it's Lake Dixie, because the trees along the banks there make waves and billows like clouds full of the colors of sunset, and they scatter into splinters in the wake the anglers leave on the water, but reform again, in steady lines on the silver surface. Their line breaks show the depth of the lake, and deepen it by contrast, which ain't so different from poems, maybe.

Snow Over Shavers Fork

2006-10-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

I've been reading many amazing poets since I got to Mizzou, and one of them is definitely Brian Barker, whose first book, "The Animal Gospels," came out from Tupelo not long ago. So, here be the poem from it that made my neurons burn wonderfully a few days ago, in the way Larry Levis's nature metaphors kindle them, too. It's got the same breathtakingly gentle, meditative pacing that Wayne Miller can really nail, where the speaker is this beacon of quiet and depth and the spoken-of receives an even-handed love.

Snow Over Shavers Fork

Rhododendrons droop
under the white weight of winter,
and the highway-blue suspension bridge, a lacquered mesh of ice,
turns to milk-glass
in the slow pan of a pick-up's single headlight.

Tonight, not even the river avoids indifference, as it churns
deep in its groove,
from here to there and back again,
flashing its eggshell palms in the icy wallow.

Duped again by silence,
by the undertow that drags the slate sky down
to the tips of the pines, by the mountain's chalk-blur shifts,
by the snow bogging down, speechless
syllables claiming a void---

I know this of the fleeting world: the falling down,
not the rising up,
the snow persisting in its silence,
and my hands too human to hold it.

Rainbow Volcano

2006-10-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to think of gorgeous things I've seen lately, that will help get my poetry mojo flowing more. Also, it's just nice to think of gorgeous things. I know that sounds crazy, but I've tried it, and really like it. You will, too, I think, if you give it a chance.

And there are many things that I've seen in the last year, dazzling vignettes involving nature or the way light lays across something or more how something lays underneath it, and many great friends and conversations that haven't wanted to come out of my pen, because they're still part of my slowly forming, recently overhauled ego, and more part of the superego, whirling around in its little snow-globular centrifuge, waiting to be absorbed. That might not be a really accurate Freudian representation. But when you have transformative experiences, sometimes they take a little while to kick in. So I'm trying to let the memories of living in southern Colorado shimmer into view, and meld with the heartland scenery and blend with the gorgeousness of being here, in Missouri, among wonderful people.

One of the beautiful things I saw out there, sprouting from the top of Mount Blanca, the giant, hunkering peak that always sits at the skyline and can almost always be seen from town, and follows you and presides over your dreams, was a rainbow. It jutted up from the very top, nipple-round peak that might have still held a colostral trace or two of snow, and showed all of its spectrum, taking the shape of a kite or a fat diamond, radiating neon lime on one side, shading over to the pink on the other side of a cheek in the Colorado cold.

So many of those colors are now exploding in the leaves here in Missoura, and it's like that gorgeous place has filtered in here, as tints and whispers and subtle reminders of never having left. But in a good way, not a creepy stalker way.

You're naked

2006-10-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

I forgot the username and password for my other blog of the same name, so here be the new one. For some reason, this blog carries a stage fright that the laid-back, rupert-murdocked myspace blogspace doesn't, but said stage fright can be erased by me imagining you naked except for black socks. I know that's mostly recommended for public speaking, but even thinking about it is kind of working. Even though I don't know who you are, and have probably never seen you naked, it's working.

Now that my stage fright has gone away a little bit, here's the Dean Young couplet, from a poem I forget the title of from Elegy On Toy Piano, that has been zinging wonderfully in my neurons:

Handprint on the window,
handprint on the sky.