One of the things that you don’t know about me (will this make us closer or drive us further apart?) is my love of Dante in translation. But only in translation. I can’t read Italian, so I can’t say that I love Dante, any more than Dante could claim to love Place (we are inert to each other). But I read the translations like a glutton at a buffet—there’s one for each part of the palate: Singleton’s for a narrative stroll, Carson’s coarser Celtic turns for a jeu de maux, the Hollanders for rigor and statelier play, and creaky Ciardi for when I wonder why I was so dour at thirteen. One of the ancillary pleasures of reading translations is the translator’s introduction, in which the translator invariably defends translation as a matter of translation. Translation, in other words, being the hopeless and hopelessly optimistic effort to communicate the thing that may not be communicated. Leaving aside the easy case—there is, for example, no word in English for the sound of the separation of skin from flesh, such as, I am told, there is in Japanese–there is the harder nut, where words seem to mean the same thing, betraying in their seductive and false fungibility, the infra-thin difference between inhabiting the bon and mal mot. (The latter would be a joke in Swedish.) And so, translators are a uniformly fretful bunch, caught in the content-impossibility of their task. Though, like contented sado-masochists, they have perfected the single gesture of expatiation and inculpation. And like lucky voyeurs, we may be witness to this: in the London Review of Books, Julian Barnes recently used Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary, and her associated public slaggings on prior translations, to perambulate the well-ploughed grounds of translation itself. Oh, it’s a very good read, indeed.

That is to say, full of gossipy pleasures plus the kind of armchair participatory satisfaction usually felt (one imagines) by followers of televised sports. And while my reading French allows me the luxury of whistling and booing the above game, Sawkao Nakayasu-Chika Sagawa’s book both opens and forecloses such flabby participation. For Nakayasu, a poet of our time, has collaborated with Sagawa who has been dead for some time, but was a poet of the modernist period, a time possibly closer to our own than the more recent post-modern past. For although it cannot be said with mathematical precision, it is true as a rule that everybody loves their grandmother. The moderns reveled in the possibly libratory freedoms of free-ranging authority the postmoderns found so disappointing/embarrassing, which we find simply acts as matters of fact. (There is great relief in stasis.) Mouth: Eats Color is a book of poems about a book of poems, its translations and translations of translations turn and detourn and are intercut with new and rehashed information to no end save another stanzic ending. Though I don’t know as I agree with the “anti-” qualifier in the title, as it seems that the concept of a kind of translation which is against-translation, like that expression which is against-expression (see Dworkin & Goldsmith), is very much for translation as such. For, strictly logically speaking, the negation of something is also proof positive of its predicate existence. (For a brilliant poem on/not on/about/not about translation, see Caroline Bergvall’s “Via,” composed of all the first lines from all the translations of Dante’s Inferno in the British Library, by date of publication.) In other words, Nakayasu and Sagawa work here in French, English, and Japanese, revisiting certain pieces with a particular kind of fidelity, spinning off on others with another kind of faithfulness. I say Nakayasu and Sagawa both because that is how the title goes, and as the process used by Nakayasu to establish collaboration is as conceptual as it goes: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/mouth-eats-color-an-interview-with-thomas-fink/

Now that you are back, one of the things that is very interesting about Nakayasu and Sagawa’s book is how it confounds history: not only relative to the multi-lingual stance taken based on the time Sagawa originally wrote, a time in which Japanese modernists were, like their European counterparts, very hot on the polysemous (this involved signification via various Japanese scripts as well as other languages, an affective register lost to the mealier-mouthed among us), but to the time of this writing, as noted above. So Nakayasu used Google language tools to compose some of the “Promenades” pieces which wend their way through the book, torquing the French and Chinese by feeding them through the internet machine, and deployed what she calls (by way of an email to me) a “keyboard hiccup,” typing while thinking in English on a keyboard set to Japanese, then translating the results into English. (I’ve done the same using symbol fonts, such as Wingnuts, but these results are more transubstantiation than hiccough. This is the third register of medieval materiality, where a thing is transformed—i.e., rendered legible in its other instantiation—only by way of the grace of the Geist.) The techno-melts fold in nicely with the modernist mash, oddly leavening the whole. (Japanese modernists liked to incorporate French, while l’ecriture chinoise was favored by a number of French modernists, such as Claudel, who used it allegorically, in addition to Pound’s ideograms, which worked in the collage as a kind of second space, given that the characters often functioned in a kind of constellatory description versus a strict immediate transcription.) (For Japanese modernism in the 1920’s, see William O. Gardener’s Advertising Tower; for the ideogram, see Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “Refiguring the Poundian Ideogram: From Blanco/Branco to the Galáxias.”
) (I’m not sure why I say oddly, though it opens up another discussion as to the pains and pleasures of reading in translation, wherein happiness is found at that point at which the text is both familiar and foreign enough. Both are matters of cognition and recognition: the translated text should be understandable as a text and understandable as a text that is not entirely at home. In other words, I want something “Italian” left hanging about my Dante.) And it is this sense of leavening which also underscores the possibility of smoothing the lines on translation’s lovely brow. For in this, our conceptualist age, translation is not a matter of difference and repetition, but of simultaneity. The poems in Mouth: Eats Color are all faithful unto themselves. You have doubtless noted that this review has not quoted a single one of the poems in the book. To quote any one of the poems in the book would be to select one as more something something than another, like picking my Dante du jour and forcing it on you. Or to identify the pieces as versions or inversions of some phantom originary work. Alternatively, I could have cited a series of single lines or pieces to illustrate how each moves and mutates through the book, but this would be a show of showing rather than telling. For the larger point is that these are all poems. Not translations. Not variations on a thing or theme. In other words, each work is its own piece in which the fact of translation, however defined, however infidel or true-blue to whatever Platonic notion of communication (there is this thing X which is conceived in language #1 as A and may be rendered in language #2 as B, which is to say, a kind of equivalency, such that x = a = b, where we all kind of know that metaphors, like all language shifts, are matters of addition and subtraction) is not a matter of mutation but metamorphosis. There is this poem. There is another poem. There are similarities between them, arguably no more or less than may be found in any other linked collection. The piling-on here works as a matter of simultaneity, not difference, not repetition. (Where was it said recently that all poetry is a matter of equivalencies? It was a wrongheaded statement, of course, but interesting as betraying a fundamental belief in fungibility, or the numbing aggregate effect of snowflakes.) (Just as my parentheticals in this are not parenthetical, but paratextual asides.) Like a jealous spouse or second-rate deity, translation loves to examine its partners for signs of cheating. Once we embrace the faith of the faithless, however, we are left with the even more optimistic hope of an open communion.

Like any good conceptual work, the description of Panda (KFP) by Chris Alexander can be taken at its website-word:

Two and a half years in the making, this book-length poem assembles thousands of fan responses, brief summaries and descriptions of the title character from DreamWorks Animation’s 2008 movie “Kung Fu Panda,” an exhaustive catalog of product tie-ins and derivative works in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, and technical specs for the AMD Opteron, the microprocessor that powered the animation firm’s computers during the movie’s production.

Multilingual text with appropriated images.

(The sequel, available here ($8.00 for book, download for free), is “The Denovelization of Kung Fu Panda,” in which the DreamWorks/HarperCollins novelization of Kung Fu Panda is textually inverted and a glut of images from KFP1 inserted.)

In the 4th Council of Constantinople (869), it was announced that hereinafter the Image should be venerated equally with the Word, and that the Images of saints and the Blessed Mother were also the proper subject of veneration. This was the birth of allegory. And the aesthetic and ethical antecedent to KFP, which is a chronicle of veneration, a pilgrim’s progress from the account of the Birth to the accounts of the faithful (laity and clerk) to an accounting of relics (properly subdivided by type), culminating in an account of the mysteries of der Heilige Geist (in the machine). Too, the Word as such is represented: “The entire script for Kung Fu Panda online.” (49) Moreover, like the Gospels, the descriptions of KFP serve as Venn diagrams, overlapping, but with differing details—up to the believer, really, to determine what is salient and what is not. Are the father’s noodles a key to the kingdom (le nom du père), or another false prohibition (le non du père)? The believer believes yes and no, represented by various degrees of facebook devotion/identification:

Amanda Tedeschi Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda. Panda., oh yea!
November 19 at 11:05 am • Report

Tunahan Sefa Aydin I love you panda and I am panda : ) : ) : )
October 22 at 10:21 am • Report

Lauren McNabb cest le j’m apple panda…aurjordui mecredi hehe
June 17 at 5:36 pm • Report

Lidwina Amanda Wong O love Kungfu, I love Panda, I love it all, so cute, so touching story!!!
June 5 at 9:34 am• Report
Jonathan Bourque likes this (40-42)

Among the catalogue arias are the three varieties of relics: bodily, those items which were once part of KFP, such as the Kung Fu Panda Po’s Dream Early Concept 2 Limited Edition Giclee Print (104); contact, those items which have come into contact with KFP, such as Kung Fu Panda and “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” by Deepak Chopra (100); and transubstantive, those items which share in the body of KFP by virtue of being infused with the Spirit of KFP, such as McDonald’s Happy Meal Kung Fu Panda Figures Set of Four by Kung Fu Panda (102). Note the presence of the signatory in the last—”by Kung Fu Panda”—invoking that apparatus by which the Law casts the Source into being. (This authority is also how I become an author, for I am nothing without my apparatus.) Too, KFP demonstrates the medieval notion of the scala naturae or great chain of being, where culture (“A panda who promotes obesity and eating too much”) is revealed to be the better part of nature (“A panda who is pretty damn cute”), nature culture’s support (“The fact that it’s about a Panda Bear, should have told you this is not a Serious Kung Fu movie” (21)), the divine plan being one of harmony and self-preservation via brand promotion and product-placement:

McDonald’s Kung Fu Panda Feast of Fury. McD’s will also continue to not only try to get kids more active via its Happy Meal promotions, but also make them mini-activists. As part of its Kung Fu Panda promotion, it will partner with Conservation International. (178)

The aforementioned animus behind the animation is revealed to be the many-in-one of the Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron Processor, “the Preferred Processor Provider for DreamWorks Animation.” (206) There are pages of text in Chinese, unreadable to this reader, some of which seemed to be screen credits. There was a dispute among medieval theologians about whether the Holy Word should be accessible to the laity—some thought yes, as the keys to salvation should be hung low. Some thought no, as the divine was, by its nature, not meant to be understood by the common man. KFP trucks with the latter notion, one which popped up later in Mallarmé, for the hermetic text is, like a frozen shipwreck, something that can only be cracked on its own turf. Contrarily and simultaneously, KFP also panders to the former theory, providing pages of images to be venerated as such, as well as the image of the image, an accounting of the offshot videos, games, school supplies, animate and inert plush figures and plastic figurines, and a walk through of the PSP, which cages its coaching in the second-person, present and absent: “Stumble. When you land, immediately start to fight off the bad guys…After you fight them off, you’ll have your first boss encounter, A Worthy Foe.” (141) It is the language of the crusade to the crusader, that damp whisper in the ear that indicates a fight for the right. As such, KFP is the very model of an epic poem, a lengthy work “concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture of the time.” (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.)

Put still another way, if we can draw parallels between the gesture of the contemporary erasing (Rauschenberg : de Kooning; Bervin : Shakespeare) or defacing (Duchamp: da Vinci; Place : de Beauvoir) his predecessor, Alexander may be seen as inverting Damien Hirst. Hirst’s famous diamond skull work is mistakenly identified as a 2007 piece consisting of a diamond-encrusted platinum skull, titled “For the Love of God.” But this is not Hirst’s art work, for the work of art here lies in its working, its production and multiplication, the bread and loves trick that Hirst has subsequently performed and continues to perpetuate. The skull itself is virtually unmarketable, and so Hirst has, in the sly manner of many pilgrims, bought and sold the skull himself to himself (as part of an anonymous consortium), for what it’s worth (the sale is likely false). Some thought this was the real art, a media art performance of the sale and subsequent Sotheby’s exhibition/auction of Hirst’s work, prices suitably jacked up. But this seems too small, too postmodern-ironic, missing the real deal. For the real art lies in the art of the real, the distribution of the sensible, so to speak, in the Diamond Skull cufflinks ($9995); keyrings (₤7.70); brooches (₤5.80); miniatures ($24.95); prints (₤10,500); signed prints (₤8,400) posters (₤31), signed posters (₤205-310); t-shirts ($125 ebay—buy instantly); books (“For The Love of God: The Making of the Diamond Skull” by Damian Hirst, $200 hardcover); viewings (€10 adult at the Palazzo Vecchio in 2010)—the relics of the corpus sanctus that continue to be circulated and gazed upon, whose production is not reproduction, but production itself. After all, there were no originary Diamond Skull Christmas ornaments, but why not? The material is thus proved immaterial in equal measure, and all parts of the sacred image (consecration being a matter of some cost, though, as they say, price is no object—not materially) being equally sanctified.

Are these callow comparisons? It rather depends on whether one believes in content or containers. Structural containers, that is, for this is the very scaffold of belief, set in bas-relief. Is it funny? No more so than any fundamentalism. The postmodernist believed that there was no master narrative as imagined by modernism (emancipation oder idealism), just petit histoires from which other grand narratives could be spun (global capitalism), the conceptualist believes that narrativity is as poetry is, that is to say, as such. Here’s the stuff, do what you will. It will change, as will you, for it is your will that will make it whatever it happens to be—to you. Put another way, as Nietzsche noted, science is no more beholden to truth than God. Perhaps less so, as science can turn on a dime, and believes only in itself, whereas God is stubbornly resistant to change and believes in us, as demonstrated by the fact that we hear God. Or we don’t hear God, which is no proof of God’s non-existence, given the order of things and the nature of divinity. In other words, in conceptualism, the interpellation is reversed: it is not the hailing that calls me into being (pace Althusser), but I who cause the hailing that calls the police officer into being as law enforcement as sich. That is to say, truth is for those who can’t handle uncertainty. For the rest of us, there is the catalogue and the story of Kung Fu Panda—”a important message about believing in oneself the power that comes from within.” (amazon.com) Put another way:

Panda was great.

I feel for this panda. (47)

Click HERE for a PDF review of P.O.T.I.C.H.E.

There is great and there is graceful. One does not always lead to or implicate the other, and there is the danger of de trop in both. For that matter, a poet should not be great, for greatness, or, for that matter, grace, can only lie in poetry. To borrow from Swift, Celia shits. As did Swift. And for that matter, poetry is also excretory, i.e., the given and the made. Still, there are those deeply happy times when all is in good measure, and the sweet spot is hit, or kissed, as you wish. And when the making becomes its own argument for the perpetration of something as essentially excessive as poetry. So it is with Money Shot. The book is not, save temporally, a follow-up to Versed (2009), which had the authority of autobiography, an authority to which many aspire, and more simply sign on for. Rather Money Shot is its own bank shot, all balls going right in the side (or breast) pocket. Note the measure of brutality in the breaking metaphor, for actual grace, like real life, is brutal, eviscerate.

They’re sexy
because they’re needy
which degrades them.

They’re sexy because
they don’t need you.

They’re sexy because they pretend
not to need you,

but they’re lying,
which degrades them.

They’re beneath you
and it’s hot.

They’re across the boarder,
rhymes with dancer—

they don’t need
to understand.

They’re content to be
(not mean),

which degrades them
and is sweet.

They want to be
the thing-in-itself

and the thing-for-you—

Miss Thing—

but can’t.

They want to be you,
but can’t,

which is so hot.

(“Soft Money”)

To be on point is to be terribly accurate, to be à point, to be bloody on the inside. The topological torques and warm red insides displayed in “Soft Money” are formally and thematically constant in this collection, as the typically short-line pieces plate-spin themes of fiscal emergency (circa early 21st c), imminent (and protracted) demise, sex (homespun and on demand), and the various procedures and apparatuses (material and linguistic) that dictate our everyday lives. While the poems seem to have been written while the US was in the fresher throes of its most recent collapse, what Armantrout duly and astringently underscores is that it’s not the crisis that’s new, just our endless surprise at the news (“What makes us human / is our tendency to point.” (“Working Models”)). Similarly, the aforementioned processes and apparatuses prove to be not only the stuff of what passes for eternity—eternity having, like everything else, a general shelf life—but the raw material of the Symbolic order.

Someone “just like me”
Is born
In the future
And I don’t feel a thing?

Like only goes so far.

(“Outage”)

The Symbolic Order being just so much sausage-casing, in any case. (“I write things down / to show others / later / or to show myself / that I am not alone with / my experience.” (“With”)) Though it must be noted in the register of materiality that the formal matter of language also includes its permutational properties and the practice that generates. Such that “Bubble Wrap” (“Want to turn on CNN, / see if there’ve been any/ disasters?”), for example, proves to be that with which you pack and in which we exist, like the housing bubble, primed to burst, like the boy in the bubble, pervious to all manner of ordinary pollution, like the bubble-clouds of our es-emplastic inter-net and inter-personal fancies. I’m conflating Imagination and Fancy here, pace Coleridge: Coleridge cast the Imagination as the es-emplastic active cognitive force, that which unifies the phenomenological stuff through pure will, regardless of the fixtures of memory or experience; the Fancy is passive, a receptacle of what’s cast in it, incapable of synthesis or the great thematic. But I think Armantrout might agree there’s not much between them these days, not with the way the screen-mirror works to make us in our own image: our imagined self is tethered to the stuff of us, stuff gathered and gleaned for public consumption, and yet is not bound to anything but its own self-reflective, self-generated view of what that stuff might make. The perceived self being in this sense the only real (or at least provable) deal, because that is the self that the world then mirrors back, an act of mutual regard that is not unlike the way capital works to make and unmake itself, rising and falling with the regularity of all empires. And so I see on facebook that I am a person to whom daily deals in Los Angeles might appeal (true) and who may be interested in GPS cat-tracking (false—though there is a bit of a pussy-theme), and who appears to be more or less popular, judging by the well-wishers on what may or may not be my birthday (true and false, for there’s no fact of me that’s pure facticity); I see on facebook that I am writing this on Rae Armantrout’s birthday (maybe true—who knows?). (“Custom content feed. // Let me tell you something personal. / As a child, I worried about quicksand. / I don’t know why I mention this.” (“Ground”)) “I” am because my facebook friends know “me.”

Put another way, Freud observed that the power of the phallus lies in its being hidden; Lacan pointed out that the phallus cannot help but be hidden, because it does not exist, save symbolically. The “money shot” in pornography is at once the proof that porn is “real” (men apparently can’t fake an orgasm, just as women can’t fake a raise) and that the penis is not the phallus. The penis thus stopped via the money shot is “Real” in the Lacanian sense of being simply meat that responds, like other meat, to both friction and fictions. The “money shot” in our economy similarly betrays the Real kernaled in our financial fantasies (also frictional), and for those of you who have forgotten, Lacan’s formula for fantasy is $ <> a, that is to say, the barred subject (the subject that is incomplete in itself) creates and is created by the <> the lozenge, the punched-out point, that lies between the $, and the objet petit a, that desire which is only the desire for (and of) desire that the $ insists could lead to fulfillment, but which is only insofar as it cannot be fulfilled because it does not exist save in its inexistence. In other words: “in the fantasy-scene the desire is not fulfilled, ‘satisfied’, but constituted (given its objects, and so on)— through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire’.” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Desire. (London: Verso, 1989), p. 118.) Note that desire in Lacan, as in Armantrout, is considered an “economy.” Economies are to be husbanded, kept from and for the wife. Note how through this act of citation, I betray both my access to, and lack of, real authority (just as husband : wife). Note how Armantrout refers to all the authors around her as indiscriminately conspiratorial and constitutive: “outside / a child yells “Mom-my!” / again and again.” (“Human”); “In the departure gate, / the bag atop her bag spells / “Paradise”…” (“Cancellation”); “You are here” (from “Paragraph”). The child as author to the adult—the adult overhearing the child, who becomes an adult by way of comparison; the adult who is interlocuted as “Mommy” by virtue of the child’s call; the adult who remembers having been a child and yelling “Mom-my,” in the two-syllables of genuine need. The departure gate as ironic author—”Paradise” is a bag, not lost, not Edenic. The quotidian observation that I am where I am—that which acts as author of all authority, reminding me of my inability to escape the a priori—for whatever else I am, whatever category, I am, first, here. Note how the problem with all this authorship, this surfeit of authority, these various demands on us to make something of them becomes, for reader of signifiers, what to pay attention to (“You confuse / the image of a fungus // with the image of a dick / in my poem // (understandably)” (“The Gift”))—and where does this spendthrift attention end:

For I so loved the world

that I set up
my only son

to be arrested.

(“Answer”)

I.e., God, like other kinds of capital (and castration), is the fantasy that stops, the kind that says put your hands up and nobody move. And what Goethe knows and Armantrout shows is that this sort of stop is always the stop of a stopper, that is to say, something that acts as a plug—temporary, but with the tang of real Time. After all, what is Christ but eternity’s stop-gap? For his part, Faust went straight to hell once he said “stop,” i.e., tried to get a stay, just as the market will go skyward if it has its obliterating way (“can make a heaven of hell,” etc). Or, as Armantrout pouts: “Immediacy is retro / says Lytle.” (“Paragraph”) But remember: You are here.  There’s nothing saved by way of memory, for everything around you has already been, as you will be, spent. It is fate that will dilate.

As is obligatory to note, Armantrout is master/mistress of the short line. She’s best in this, however, with the short line that reads like a long line because it is less short than it is accordioned, i.e., sharper when compressed and rounder as expanded in the breath. Throughout the book, lines seem to be tossed exactly and easily, like someone juggling chainsaws, which, in principle, is no different from juggling soft squishy balls. Though one must be careful, or at least intentional, when putting balls adjacent to chainsaws. The best bad review of Versed (to be fair, there were only 2) on amazon was: “I read Versed in a bookstore, and I can’t figure out for the life of me why anyone would want to pay money for it.” Money Shot counters that money is, as it turns out, no object. It’s not money what needs to be paid to Armantrout (though she would doubtless object), but a pound of the softer, fleshier stuff, the sweetmeat of all our careful frightened attentions. Where else would you be?

Daniel Tiffany’s Privado (Action Books, 2010)
Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009)
Brian Teare’s Sight Map (Univ. of California Press, 2009)
Roberto Tejada’s Exposition Park (Wesleyan University Press, 2010)

It is a set of Russian nesting-dolls, which means something if you are not Russian, and something else if you are. And something still further if you like dolls, and something else if you do not. For everything means something in terms of its not. And here’s where the book comes in, on little doll’s feet: this is the yearned-for (by those in the ought-to know) collection by Caroline Bergvall, representing ten years of her writing and thinking on the lay of language. Meddle English contains Bergvall’s recent Chaucer interventions, a portion of her previously published Goan Atom (Doll), and her trilingual étudies on the articulated corps that is us, as well as various essays that set forth, in semi-serial fashion, her poetics. A poetics on all fours, as they say, with today. Meaning that it is a matter of language qua language, which is to say, that sound that we make make sense.

Like any orchestration, there are major and minor movements in the book, which can be profitably categorized via the technologies involved. Technologies meaning techniques, but techniques with a twist. Typically in the way that function becomes form, for that is one thing about the current state of things poetic—we are now at the point in our art where, like all other arts, our forms must self-reflect. Not in the common way of a sonnet signifying something amorous, or not, yet in the not, still referencing the earlier significance, but in the more a priori mode of lyric meaning one order of aesthetic and ethical business, conceptualism another. Where all oxen are equally (and finally) gored. Whereas L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E admirably articulated its doublemint agenda, other poetries have been content to sit where they stand as if put there by nature. Bergvall’s technologies, by comparison, are only natural as nature is mostly human nature. So there are eliminations and emendations, interventions and interpellations. The latter are often collages in the classic modernist fashion, the writer’s hand wielding the clippers. These range from the simply shapely:

That for dronken was al pale

saugh that he was dronke of ale,

Ful pale he was for dronken

O Januarie, dronken in plesaunce

I wol drynke licour of the vyne,

I am wont to preche, for to wynne.

So dronke he was,

O dronke man,

Ye fare as folk that dronken wer of ale.

And for despit he drank ful muchel moore,

Lo, how that dronken Looth, unkyndely

For dronkeness is

And dronkenesse is eek a foul record

(from “The Host Tale”) ⁱ

To the baroque:

A new ideology of yvele evell evyl evil meanaces society
and it includes gay weddyng jolly marriage
abortion abomination and stem cell studie research
wrote the papel he hey in his bestselling scriptures book,
Memory and Identity.
The Pope’s noisy mouth had a mutt
and a deceptively brooding chin.
Ones once both saufly safely shut ad eternam
papal knights guards were quickly positioned.
There will be no collective revelrye,
gaiety merrymaking, drynke drinking,
duance dancing on tabules tables
or shaking one’s booty aboute around
or laying the shrewed cursed poisoned
yifte gift of one’s maladye
this sickness our need at the feet of the lifeless pontiff.

(from “The Franker Tale (Deus Hic, 2)”) ⁱⁱ

And lines that break with a snap or sharp snip:

g

GA

g

ging

is

g

orging

b
loo*
p
uke
s
uck
ack
ock
s
OG
ex
Crème
ental
eaT
ing sp
Am
mon
Am
mon
sp
you
d out

(from “Fats,” from Goan Atom)

Which puts one in mind of topiary, and rightly so, for there is a great deal of bush in this weld. (“One could also clear one’s throat and realize that one has spat out French slang, une chatte, a pussy.” “Cat in the Throat.”) And, to pursue this particular metaphor, there are many lips, majora and minora, in this, for it is a book of uncommon macaronic pleasures.

Some arise in some or many of us
noen reiser seg i noen eller mange av oss
se lèvent en nombre de nous

Some that arise in some of us arise in many of us
noen som reiser seg i nonen av oss reiser seg i mange av oss
que se levant en nous se relèvent en nombre de nous

Some that arise in some of us arrive in each of us
noen som reiser seg i noen av oss kommer frem i hver av oss
que se levant en nous se relèvent de chacun de nous

(from “Cropper”)

And by major/minor, I refer of course to musicality, to the key of something, not its primacy. Bergvall famously splits her tongues, and though this is manifestly a work in English, and therefore a work about English, there is always the splitering of English into its various offal and bits, reminding one of the philosophic conundrum—if Argo is repaired during the course of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, and if it is repaired board by board so that all the boards are replaced by the end of the voyage, then what is Argo? And this is perhaps one of the conceptual points: Argo is the site of Argo, no more. English, then, is simply a site of English, just as poetry is simply a site of poetry. Maybe less.

Along these lines, though Bergvall is well-known for her gallery work, the page-as-site is contemplated sparingly in Meddling English. Those pieces, such as in Goan Atom, which do move towards the visual, move in the fashion of concrete poetry rather than image per se. Again, there is always a curatorial feeling in the work, meaning that the ademption is also at work, for in any cutting and pasting or sculpting or inclusion, within any omission from any exhibition, there is a cutting away, and the cutting away is part of what’s present. In other words, Bergvall’s book is an argument. Not an argument for conceptual poetry, for there is no mention of conceptual poetry in the book. While Bergvall is roundly considered a leading figure in conceptualism, she does not speak of conceptualism. She speaks of language. The collection works as an argument for language as such—not for the incommunicability of language, but rather its hypostatic features. In other words (and we are lousy with words), its fundamentally fundamental nature, its capacity for scaffolding, its ability to wear a mask that masks nothing. For, as the formidable Mary Kelly has observed, “Well, language is culture, right?”

Which means that Meddling English is hermeneutics, if I can say this without blinking. I was in a club recently, talking with my friend Michael, and the sound was very loud. It cut out for a second, however, just as I was shouting “Foucault was right!” about something. Just like Foucault was right, though sometimes in the wrong way. By which I mean to say that there is a Kantian problem here of contemplation from within, a problem that every language-looker faces, for language is also a mirror, no matter how many facets or reflections it casts, there is the same brown-eyed soul staring back. In other words, there’s no language that is nothing but language, for there is always the unconscious. I should disclose that I count Caroline Bergvall among my actual friends, and am a flat-footed admirer of her work. The position of admirer is a prickly one, for to admire means to think long and hard on something, which oftentimes opens that something in ways that may be quite unfair to the thing at hand, but suitable to the point of admiration. This is the point of anamorphosis, as emblematized by Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors” (1533), a painting of two French ambassadors. The remarkable part of the painting is that there is a large foregrounded skull which cannot be seen straight on, but only from the side, at the expense of seeing the rest of the painting, as Lacan put it, “awry.” ⁱⁱⁱ

Knots, according to Lacan, symbolize the Imaginary: its structure cannot be represented except in writing, or, “the unconscious can only be expressed in knots of language.” Bergvall is a knot-maker as she is a knot-undoer—each of her knotted constructions cede to their constituent parts, and each of her unthreaded strands tangle and torque into something else. Though not necessarily that tied down by the knot or suggested by its embroidered similarity to a rose. Thus, the Shorter Chaucer Tales are terrific constructions, but they are constructions where the struts show and in this showing, show how utilitarian art can be conceived. Material Compounds, a piece about pieces of paper, turns these heaps of leaves into heaps of leaves. There’s no mutatis, to my mind, because there cannot be a change of mind about language because language is what makes one’s mind. Bergvall opens the book with a nod to Smithson: “A heap of language.” Heap is a good Anglo-Saxon word, meaning a lot. Lots are what are drawn in terms of chance, just as conclusions are drawn in terms of proof. Bergvall proves Bergvall, by which I mean to say that there is a way that the forest can sometimes hide the trees: does the multilingual prove or disprove language? Is there a latent essentialism in the fact of a book, that is to say, in the act of some communication. As I say it, it shall be done. From the many, is there always just the one. Insofar as the unconscious is structured like a language, language is the structured unconscious. Dura lex sed lex, as they say. Just as although Meddle English is a concerted performance of polyvocality, the only voice heard is Bergvall’s. Bergvall is the only point of entry and departure for the book; there is no foreword, no afterword, no blurb. But unlike some conceptual poetry books that refuse such interpretory apparatuses, there is Bergvall, acting as interlocutor and writer and performer. This trinity is very interesting, especially in the Shorter Chaucer Tales series, as the collages there are entirely metonymic. Thus, we are thrown back into the lap of the one who writes. As in tongue. As in mouth, as in mind. Is this a problem. In other words, this is the problem.

___

ⁱ Listing the food and drink references in The Canterbury Tales (per Bergvall’s “Notes”).

ⁱⁱ Includes “an excerpt from ‘Letter to Women For Beijing Conference’ by Pope John Paul II, dated June 29 and released July 10, 1995 by the Vatican; Presence of Francis Bacon in his studio; The Franklin Tale; John Ashbery’s Variations, Calypso and Fuge” (op cit).

ⁱ This is a cheat of course. Lacan never said any such thing. Lacan said “à traverse.”

The first part of this book, “Sway-Backed Powerlines (2004-2008),” is breathtakingly smart, and for all the right reasons. Despite the abovementioned two-step nature of the book, and the date bracket of this section, the book as a whole does not feel like a collection or even a constellation. Or, for that matter, a refraction. Rather there is full composition at work here, like Stein’s How to Write, if it had been How to Have Written. For Waldrop proves in several different ways and all over again that what writing does best is write. Words are words, or words are words once having been written.ⁱⁱ That is to say, they signify like signifyin’ should: playing slant and playing the fool, but always having the last and best word.ⁱⁱⁱ Demonstratio, the twenty-four sections of “Music Is An Oversimplification Of The Situation We Are In”^iv sport a runner of alphabetic associations that are as randomly strung as hedgerows.^v And in these footer pieces, somewhat more abstract than their prose poem headers, works the collapse of proximity into harmony, a neighborly gesture masterfully embedded in the paragraph that floats up top. For throughout “Sway-Backed Powerlines (2004-2008),” Waldrop works a kind of leisurely yet drum-tight chiasmus, neatly flipping the rhetorical switch with a few sentences sandwiched between, creating the effect of both foreshadowed reversal and call and response, i.e., the futur anterior by way of response and call—in “The Silence of Great Noise,” for e.g., “Hair standing on end to harmony” is the answer to the terminal question, posed four lines later, “should I brush off chromatic proximity?” Note, furthermore that exact “hair…brush” which metaphorically parts and grooms the metonymy. Similarly, yet similarly different, the words “sound” and “sounds” sound four times in eight lines, so here we go, echo-laliaing all the way home while David Tudor shows us what scores are for.^vi There’s really no escape from a piece like this, and who would want one?

Too, Waldrop is a superior sentential poet, putting forth alluring propositions and observations that dangle syntax from a many-hooked line, tempting the reader to take the bait, to read into the structure, which is true, but also which is not true, or rather has the truth of all structures, that is to say, the point where mimesis is simply the way of assonance.^vii There is a kind of Pound here, Pound with a sense of real humor, and real despair. After all, we’ve got plenty of nothing, and nothing is too good for you. There are grand puns in this book that spin like planets in this same way, that is, held in place by their own sense of reflexivity, to wit: “But could a man muster all his powers of intellect and mate with a woman by force of utterance? As if she were a hypothesis?”^viii Whereby man and muster and utter mates to make Mutter, la langue, the mother-lap of us all.

Like most of us, Waldrop has a harder go of it with the unwieldy Real. Turning to the current unpleasantness,^ix she frontally addresses the literal failure of parole: “4,000 to 6,000 civilians have been killed in Fallujah.// It is impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to this sentence without simply repeating the sentence.// A cat chases a yellow butterfly. My father sneezes.// Unlike the id, the ego, through which alone pleasure becomes real, is subject to time. (“By the Waters of Babylon”) While it is right and true that there are things for which well-crafted description is not only unnecessary but may well be obscene, there is also a worry in casting chaos as an equal part of the epistemological mix. Butterflies and sneezes are surely as matters of fact as cascades of corpses, but putting them in the same rhetorical tureen can seem overly superflat for someone as deft as Waldrop. She’s too sure-footed—Astaire never stumbles without the stumble becoming a step.

I like the Astaire analogy, for Astaire is always Rogers and Astaire, as American as American is so often, meaning two great things that grow great together. There’s Lewis and Clark, Tom and Jerry, North Tower and South Tower, apple pie with a slice of sharp cheddar. For in this way, Driven to Abstraction is an absolutely American volume—it is the pas de deus/x of everything and nothing, of falling and dancing naturally and nonsensically up the wall, over the river, and the long way into the terminus of individual collective history. In his monograph on Proust, Beckett considered the way Proust expanded time expanded to the point of popping, where so much air was let into any one moment that time could not contain itself and lay bloated on the beach, exhausted and infused with infinity. Beckett, of course, like Rogers, did the same trick only backwards, draining time of content so it worked anorexically, as the pencil-point between the tick and the tock. Waldrop knows the opposite of concentration is dilation, and so she creates dilation camps in which we can safely sit. Surrounded by air, surrounded by the that which is and is not there.^x It is the perfect place to make Americans.^xi

—

ⁱ By which I mean both that it is the currency (not the current—you see how easy this is) that keeps the thing up and going generally forward. “It’s no dream that when I now present a dollar bill to the U.S. Treasury I’m handed back a copy of the note and pulled up short and sharp by such tautology. Or a page of my writing to the court of experience? Flying money never lands.” (“Paper Money”) Though it might also be noted that flying tigers have a world-weary history of both landing and taking off.

ⁱⁱ Here I distinguish between words and language, which is another matter altogether, as every schoolgirl knows.

ⁱⁱⁱ “Every day is a beautiful day. Every beautiful day is like every beautiful day. Sunrise. A child is born. A piece of music. Perspective becomes orderly, radiating from the needs of the child. This is a lecture on composition. Structure, method, form. Why do we rush along the road like magnetic tape on fire? Form without spontaneity brings about the death of all pigeons and magpies in the skies. In the coexistence of dissimilars, pitch leans away from purpose, and urgency is implied. Inward, to a point in a dream. Outward, to the tips of the fingers and toes. Let’s retire to an open window instead of the woods, including tables and chairs. Is every tone virgin? If repeated? Masterpieces are the most frightening monsters. Whereas night gets dark by itself.” (“Incumbent Middle”) Going from day to night, birth to the pre-conception, repetition to the endless difference.

^iv “in memory of John Cage” says the dedication to this long poem, though Waldrop is never as violent as Cage, who pinched signifiers aperspectively between his fingers like in those funny photos where one goddishly pinches the heads of others between one’s fingers.

^v “a abolish about absence acceleration accordingly action admit against all almost ambient ambiguous American among anechoic animal another anxiety any art at atmosphere atonal attention audience” (“The Silence of this Great Noise”) Hedgerows, as every schoolboy knows, are good for shooting from.

^vi Counting. I would like to emphasize that this sequence in particular is chock-full of pleasures: noting the combination rim-shot and swish of the last footer word (“unnecessary”) off the final sentence directly above (“Conclusions can be drawn.”) (“‘Transcription for an Audience of One’”)

^vii “Men are men and moss is moss, but percussion is hitting tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes. Hitting, rubbing, smashing. And breathes accordingly.” (“‘Vexations’”) Accordingly, as in a polka band.

^viii “Interlude: The Pencil I Chew”

^ix Compared to “the recent unpleasantness,” which was how my older kin referenced The War Between The States.

^x “But writing is a tool of the negative. (Though which meaning comes to us?) Effortlessly it burns all substance off the blue shapes to the east. To a density less than thinnest cloud, the word ‘hills.’ Without body. Though with form. Therefore not like God. A nothing that foams on the inkplate.” (“Interlude: Thought Provoking Matter”) Sum ergo cogito.

^xi “It’s then I think therefore I am beside the point.” (“Point”)

“Je m’em vais chercher un grand peut-etre; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée”— Rabelais

Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (GIJKH) is an idea that is a concept that is a blog that is a book that is an object. The idea, as explained by Kenneth Goldsmith in his Introduction (“Retyping on the Road: A Case for Appropriation”), was that instead of doing what the barely-unnamed Joyce Carol Oatesⁱ had her creative writing students do (bring in an original story “in the style of” a famous author), why not do what the kids in the museums do and copy the author directly? Surely this faithful retracing would be more conducive to genuine study and attendant comprehension than serving up a fresh faux slice à la mode? And in the name of this greater fidelity, Simon Morris stepped up and created his 2008-2009 blog, “Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head,” wherein he retyped On the Road, one page a day, that is to say, a time, from beginning to end, and in the end, this blog has become a book of the same name, which replicates Morris’s blog from beginning to end, one page at a time. Which is to say that the book is the Book backwards, a mirror of a book: the first page of Morris starts with the top of the last page of Kerouac, and so on, the Copy concluding with the first words, of the Original, respooling the road saga from finish to start and narrating each day from dark to dawn, from to Revelation to Genesis. Which was, as it might be noted, just how ancient hemispherical sundials measured time. Dark to light, ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it, to final understanding.

This explains the why of the project, but not the wherefore of the book.ⁱⁱ It serves preliminarily to note that Information as Material is an art project and production machine in itself (run by Morris and Nick Thurston) which primarily publishes re-representations of extant text as books which are art objects.ⁱⁱⁱ Not that they are art in the imaginary musèe sense, but they are art in the real museum-work sense. For the old school-piece sense, Rembrandt’s students would work their own versions of Rembrandt’s work and the very best ones would look the very most like Rembrandt, to the extent that the triumph of the student was the mirroring of the master so exactly that he would be taken for the Master himself, and strung up in his stead. And while Willem Drost may or may not hang in the Frick Collection as a genuine Rembrandt, Rembrandt himself certainly Warholed some of his collectors with factory-work. And what of it? For art—even in the museum—is a signatory’s game, and all we know of art is what makes it—in the museum.

Goldsmith’s Introduction to GIJKH is a general endorsement of the practice of appropriation on two competing theoretical grounds: first, that this kind of absolute mimesis and reproduction (contra disjunction and deconstruction pace L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) leads to greater/deeper textual understanding (the “better readership” argument); and second, that appropriation can generate new texts both in the manner of their reworking and in the mode of their recontemplation (the “also creative” or “more better creativity” argument). Underpinning each plus is a technological teleos in which each is now possible, and, because possible, possibly mandatory. Goldsmith, and Morris, via Goldsmith, concentrate on the production of GIJKH, versus its product. And while I do not disagree with Goldsmith or Morris via Goldsmith, there is more to be said about the product of this well-kernelled production. And the plus that is the minus of this textual abundance.

One of the standard complaints about conceptual writing is that it is nothing new. Leaving aside my predicate argument (made elsewhere and often) that it is a bourgeois habit to automatically append the words “and improved” to “the new,” or that the charge of been-done is the first refuge of the last garde, the larger point here is that it is precisely in the redoing that there is a possibility of another instantiation. In other words, to echo is not to repeat but to modify the question. Let us take as a working hypothesis that there is a gap between the final artistic product and all the production/process leading up to that product. One sees it in sketches, in drafts, in the final handwritten stanza of “Daddy”—an obvious afterthought and yet the busted nut of the whole thing. Let us, for purposes of argument, call this gap the trauma of representation: the final event (the poem or book) is ontologically connected to while separated from some sort of originary event (the initial idea or fancy) which is then only understood in light of the final event, which is in turn seen through the scrim of its origin. Here, of course, I am freely poaching from Lacan’s concept of trauma, while bogarting a bit of the originary as metaphor, or the metaphor of the origin story. We all have such a one (story or trauma or story of a trauma or trauma of a story) which is brought out by us to explain the fact of us, whatever “us” is at hand, just as Goldsmith explains the story of how the blog GIJKH began, in order to negotiate the trauma of its final book representation. What interested me on this point was Goldsmith’s interest in technology as metaphor, as he both compares Morris’s apparently deficient typing skills^iv to the painstaking copying advocated by Benjamin (“Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it.”) and the cut & paste computer function that makes reproduction so “functionless and asetheticized, it can only be a work of art.” Again, while these are competing and somewhat contradictory pluses, the further point is their positive negation: for what intrigues me is not technology as metaphor but the technology of metaphor. Metaphor being a process of representational equivalencies, the technology of metaphor would be the process of aesthetic/ethical equivalencies plus (±)(n), as metaphor adds that certain positive/negative something to the equation without which we are less rich.^v So that the process of reproducing On the Road in reverse spatial-temporal order becomes less emblematic of art in an age of digital production and more a metaphor for the way we live now, where our poetry is après angel of history, for we do not look backwards in melancholic nostalgia for the imaginary castle conjured by the ruin, nor forward in some flight of stupid optimism in which reading or writing has meaning beyond the pointlessness of its production (a pointlessness to be absolutely reified, as the only true transcendents are inutility and evil) and the puniness of its faceless product (a puniness to be fully champion in the face of those reams of snowflake-special poems that celebrate the snowflake-specialness of their production), but rather we do not look at at all. We simply regurgitate, like mother birds, into the maws of our companions. (Though we also happily swallow.) In other words, how does appropriation, as exemplified in GIJKH, serve as the fan finally flinging itself into the shit?

Harriet (a blog from the Poetry Foundation), recently posted a note comparing GIJKH to my ongoing Gone With the Wind Twitter project.^vi Harriet characterizes both works as moves in conceptualism from “reframing to rebuilding,” the rebuilding allowing for consideration of “the microstructure” of the original texts in question. This, like Goldsmith’s intro to GIJKH, is correct and good, but Harriet here also misses a bit of the metaphor involved in each instantiation by focusing on production as production over production as product. Whereas GIJKH, as noted by its handle, is an originary quest, both in terms of its overt aim to better understand the Master and to better read and reproduce the work, finding out along the way that Kerouac loved the rush and roadstripe of the hyphen and the free-wheeling force of repetition, my GWTW Twitter project is a project of purposeful erosion. Because I find GWTW a problematic text, I have engaged in a series of textual obliterations and aggravations: composing a prose piece of all of the sections of GWTW in which “nigger” features prominently (hoping to be sued for their return);^vii reproducing the “I don’t know nothing bout bringing babies” speech by Prissy (the unserving servant) in Miltonic sonnet form; an erasure performance (a white-out) of the last part of the last chapter, and Twittering the entire text—literally casting it to the interweb winds. For just as Lacan noted that the question is always constituted by the structure, the process of production always creates a product. And products always reproduce the situation of their production in the largest sense—as I have stated elsewhere, reiteration is part of the discourse of the slave: the repetition of the order of things so that the thing being ordered is undone by its rearticulation. I have stolen the slaves of GWTW, just as Morris has upended the peripatetic masculinity of Kerouac by sitting monogamously at his computer station, gladly taking dictation. For as anyone who has ever had a sibling knows, there is nothing more destructive of the gesture of communication than pure repetition, and what could be a more faithful reproduction of the Master’s impotency than the deadpan of:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the the prairie, which is just before the coming of of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.^viii

Or, in other words:

Katherine Mansfield, a beautiful woman and immensely talented writer, died tragically at the age of thirty-four, just as she had finally achieved mastery of her art.^ix

___

ⁱ To be fair, Goldsmith notes that this is a creative writing trope, hardly original to JCO. To be unfair, this is part of the problem: JCO is a relatively easy target as one who gives the endless grind of originality a bad name, most specifically her own.

ⁱⁱJoan Didion has said that she used to copy Hemingway in order to learn to write. She did not, however, publish this work as “The Sun Also Rises by Joan Didion.” Though Robert Fitterman has.

ⁱⁱⁱ http://informationasmaterial.com/iam/

^ivTo wit, the old school “hunt-and-peck,” a description that itself was a description used by men of the post-war time and canny women to describe their typing unskills—not a decent secretary among them.

^vThough in this sense the more metaphor the poorer, as the system could conceivably be overextended to the point of absolute equality at which contracted point there is no point to the dilating system of near-equivalency.

^viI am tweeting the beloved American classic from beginning to end in 140 character units, ten tweets a day. As of this writing, I have 2,821 tweets and am in the beginning of the ballroom scene in which the freshly-widowed Scarlett will first shock Atlanta by daring to dance with the dashing Capt. Butler. A Finnish journalist/writer has calculated it will take me until 2017 to complete the project, making it something of a durational piece.

^vii“Gone With the Wind” by Vanessa Place

^viiiThe end of the first page/poem of GIJKH.

^ixTaken from Introduction by Jeffery Meyers, Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Vintage Classics, 1991.

Wherein the reader complaints about what is and what isn’t, in equal measure and to no real effect.

I get many books in the mail. Mostly shiny, mostly fine. Fine as in that which is levied against those who have committed an infraction. Or a felony. It must be something more than a misdemeanor that I am being held for, because otherwise there is no telling why I receive these fine volumes. Some are truly heart-breaking, Lulu-sized tombstones, if tombstones were inverted so that the inscriptions were what was interred, and the bodies, thankfully, lie outside. Tombstones as in that which provokes, shamelessly, sentiment teared sure as a thumb in the eye. I am not sentimental by nature, including human, but there is something somewhat touching about the diligence with which poetry is produced en masse. By the multitudes, that is. In blocks, that is. Suitable for framing. Touching as in also touched, framing as in set up to take the fall. My lament at this surfeit of feeling—always feeling, ever feeling—the mailbox fairly palps with perception—is matched by my sadness at the ones not yet. Those fetal samples that one wishes would hurry hurry hurry into adulthood, sometimes involving a difference only in size. By which I most decidedly do not mean that chapbooks are partial-objects, or even shorter versions of books they may or may not become, but that they are caught in a paradox, for the form is yet unformulated. There are a fistful of chapbook prizes, and some rightly see chaps (like short stories) as the difficult dive made more difficult as coming off the low platform. To me, there is something in the institutional form of the chapbook that is anti-product in that market way. Not many of any particular one will be made, most will be given away, and they are frequently unconsidered in the consideration of the poet résumé, or the odd inclusion of a minor credit in the short-form bio. Given that I have now established my sentimental bona fides, here are some of the latter,* a brief list of chaps and less than chaps—poetical non-products which will make us all happier, just a little, and more determined to do better, if only by way of the well-placed wolf-whistle and non-idiotic flatters of applause.

Amanda Ackerman, The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse 2010, chapbook) A series of seasonal poems, aseasonally written (“Spring Poem Written in Autumn,” “Summer Poem Written in Winter,” “again, an Ignored Equinox (Spring into Summer)”, etc.) Everything one might want in a year’s worth of poems, cyclically put, plus buckets of fun. I.e., great lines: “Is that my face on someone else?” (“Winter Poem Written in Autumn”); great sequences: “And you hate filing. / And this had no mystery. / And you are greedy because you drew attention to yourself in public.” (“Winter Poem Written in Summer”); and good, clean epistemology: “I am so scared of the winter—or I used to be, when there was nothing to” (“Winter Poem Written in Autumn”). Amanda is somewhat quiet by nature, though not, as it turns roundly out, by Nature. More should be known of the work of Amanda Ackerman by more others and their others.

Divya Victor, Sutures (LRL e-editions 2009, chapbook) What scales do best is tip; the series here includes plenty of tipping, from “Doe, a deer / now when you pull up you will see pattern that is created. our goal now is to duplicate the pattern all the way down the wound…,” to “…one can learn to carry a forequarter easily by holding below the shank so that the full weight of the quarter is on because it finds herein the guidelines and thus this solves the problem identified in the figure blooming below / Tea, a drink with jam and bread.” As in life, no one gets out alive, though many will make much of the riff-raff, ruffle and raffle along the way (“it was said: please assume the brace position”). Victor’s work, of which I am a fan in the sense of adding mostly tippets of wind and tendrils of gasoline, is uniformly brutal and not without beauty. Actuarial, that is to say, in the best sense.

Carol Watts, This is Red (Torque Press May 2009, chapbook) A sequence of eight poems about surveillance and subsequent retinal saturation, circulating around a single CCTV that other things, like us, circulate around. I first met this collection at the Women’s Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Work Festival (University of Greenwich, July 2010), where the text was presented with a video piece taken from a/the CCTV. The particulars, such as people faces and plate faces were pixilated for privacy, which had the visual equivalent of putting the universal in the particular. The poems themselves have a similar pixilated sense, popping between the individual, often distinguished by what one cannot know or see from the public perspective (“You do not see the gold filling in his molar, or that her roots need retouching now she is grey.”), and the indiscriminate, often noteworthy by its similarly grasping attempts to make sense (“They are white and impossible to trace a favourite combination of letters & numbers.”). Collapsing most (un)naturally into the clutch of too-much sensation (“Where they cross there is shimmer, glitched emotion, as if you own it all. You do, don’t you.”).

Joseph Mosconi, But On Geometric (Insert Press June 2010, chapbook) Calligrammes meets Geometry I, with all the pleasures and forehead-slapping suggested thereby. The best pieces are slights of hand and mind, where the geometric diagrams are considered and refigured replete with puns and bleating signification. All are nice to look at, all sport lil’ Nina-like insider highlights. Mosconi also has a new book that turns Creeley to Word Search (OMG!, July 2010), proving he is a poet in play. But On Geometric is part of Insert Press’s very fine Parrot series, which includes a raft of interesting Southern California writers. There are thus far six Parrots, all proud and pretty birds, happy to perpetuate the tradition of chapbook as art object.

Ariel Goldberg, The Questions (leaflet by Ariel Goldberg September 2010) A crude Kinko’d booklet handed to me on the Sunday of the Bay Area Labor Day 2010. In the true spirit of show, don’t tell, Goldberg gleaned the texts from anonymous questions posed to members of PFLAG (Parents and Family for Lesbians and Gays) by international students at a corporate language school. The 34 questions are often linguistically and culturally awkward (“Does your friends know? Where do you like your partner?”), splaying too much of not knowing enough and the punctum-point of wanting to know (“How do you understand their mind?”), and no more (“When someone looked them how they feeling? Good or Bad? Why? (If feel bad.)”). And, as these things tend to do, the collapse (again—oh, there is a theme, or at least an Ariadne-type thread) of the human exception (“Do they mind peculiar judgment?”) into the rule (“How do you find your lover? How to proclamation to the person who you love?”). Apparently the work was rejected as a chapbook by a queer-themed chapbook series, which goes to show how some people can’t see the wood for the trees. (Nb: Would also make an excellent series of postcards to indisputably arrive at their destinations.)

Mairéad Byrne, performance of Har Sawlya. (Heard at Greenwich festival July 2010, series of sound recordings with projected text) Taken from a work-in-progress, a growing set of Byrne’s homophonic/sound translations of Irish poems by Máirtín Ó Díreáin (1910-1988), with English reading directions put to the side: “querrida wirra [sigh] // on ole ditcha wirra ̴ [exasperated] / caw rock imm leena ↑ / egg ear-a faskeah leh duh lanav nayofa—”). Ó Direáin’s poetry celebrates traditional life on the Aran islands (Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer) on Ireland’s west coast; Byrne’s project is to keep the celebration going via animation. Byrne’s performance was lush and gravely, production purely by way of presentation, not object. At least not yet.* Though I sorely ache for there to be, for these were unabashed things of unabashed beauty. From sound to the sense of sound to the wry asides which lent the air of the sense of sense itself, it was a glorious moment for Greenwich and Galway and all tongues who would lay it on.

So from large Lulu-square type things with staples in the middle to letterpressed thick cream covers to words tossed from mouth to ear to this kind of mouth-to-mouth invigoration, the non-product proves its non-product productivity. Or, more accurately, its utilitarian inutility. Not that it needs me. I’m just standing here to cheer the market-useless. It is nice to be enthusiastic. We feel much better about ourselves. Or at least you do, and, thereby, me too. And really, what is poetry for if not self-edification, and what is self-edification for if not the soothing of the itch of one’s solitary suffering, and what is solitary suffering for if not to provoke a gentle lapping lineated chorus of “there, there.”

There, then, there.

____

* Ranked by chance and a bit of whimsy.

* She is recording all 30 tracks recorded by Ó Direáin in 1969 for Gael Linn. I.e., there may be a book and CD, just book, just CD, or some multimedia recombinatory.

To synopsize (for what is a paean to minimalism if not an invitation toward reduction and its best friend, hyperbole), Volume One is a collection of “found language;” as described on the back of the book, the poems therein are composed* “solely of direct transcriptions of marginalia from libraries, used bookstores, and various other places.” Various other places is my middle name, and the collection here is as dear to me as the musty relative whose middle name I bear. The poems in Volume One are titled with their source-text, e.g., “Transcription Of Selected Marginalia Found In A 1963 Copy of The Poems of John Milton Published In 1953 The Ronald Press.” A delightful example:

p 35Caligula

(“Complete Transcription Of The Marginalia Found In A 1975 Edition Of How To Do Things With Words By J.L. Austin (Found In a Western Massachusetts Bookstore).”) Proving Eliot correct, the lesser poets cede the greatest derivative rewards:

p 2Nonsense
You know you’re in for human
degradation, perversion through ignorance’s
human perversity

p 4waxes, lyric,
carried away
by his own
logic.

p 5science
likened
learn
gets nervous

p 7arm in arm
pilferers
manner
womb
stomach

p 10again, negative humor

p 11the extra dishes
bring on trouble

p 13lusty?
sexy?
courageous?
proud?

p 15In Chaucer there
is a great animal
chase at this point

p 16No great
lover is ever
jealous

who

p 90dismal
full of care

caused
to fall

p 91sexual desire

p 93in haste
outcast

p 94oh Blasphemy!

p 95like a bully

p 96down
shows off
hope vs. despair
one eyelaughs
one weeps

to comb your golden hair
a sign of idleness

p 97the moon closest
to the earth is the
most fickle of
planets.

(“Transcription of Marginalia Found In A 1963 Copy Of Robert Henryson’s Poems, Published BY Oxford University Press and Formerly Owned By John Collins.”) The negative space, in this case, proving more positive than that occupied by paint. (See, “p 148 lack of/air in painter’s/place,” from “Transcription of Selected Marginalia Found In A Copy of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Translation By Breon Mitchell) Published by Shocken In 1998.”) *

In a reversal of this chatty paradigm, Gary Barwin’s Servants of Dust is a collection of the punctuation of Sonnets 1 through 20, rendered spatially (oh, Mallarmé!), so that Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) becomes:

18
inverted commaquestion mark
colon
comma
inverted commacolon
comma
inverted comma semicolon
colon
inverted commainverted comma semicolon

semicolon
inverted commacomma
colon
comma
period

And in that way, one can see the play of punctuation across the page, fitting like the darling buds of May, or any buds, for that matter, Sonnet 2 being particularly dashing, though full of caught breaths, while Sonnet 20 is more dense, love’s own woolen thicket, pudding-proof of the rush and pause and interpolations that is not only love, but is love that picks its own inversions, its sweet pushmi-pullu.

On the more temporally linear front, Autobiography is apparently a collection (what happy magpies we, sorting out eternity) of words introduced in la langue during each of the relevant years. “Apparently” because I could find no explanation in situ or on line. I imagine these are words that have entered through some entrenchment—OED or somesuch. I could be wrong about this, as I am about so many things. However, assuming I am right, as I am about so many other things, it is a work of great happiness. (And this is true in either case, just as being right or wrong is so often irrelevant to one’s pleasure.)* Haley, editor of UDP’s fine Lost Literature Series is also a librarian in the “Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the Stephan A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library,” and the work—to whom the volume is dedicated—is full of giddy pops and serious punctums:

pooch
poopy
post-feminism
pre-AIDS
prebender
prenup
propeller-head
protoctistan
pseudy
ptaquiloside
pum-pum
quadrathlon
rate-capping
razz
reader-friendly
repost
retroposon
Ruby Murray
SCART
sin-bin
softnomics
spell-check
surtitle
sysadmin
sysop
tech-head
telerobotic
threequel
toppish
trannie
transgendered
transgenderism
trimnasium
ubiquinate
upskill
urgicenter
veganic
voice-over
Waldsterben
WAN
word-wrapping

(excerpt from “1983″) While a worthy way to while away the socio-historical hours (transgendered (+) = trannie, (-) = transgenderism, providing a retrogressed understanding of why we believe an emoticon will suffice, and why it does, in fact, do), and a fine forum for lexi nostalgia (veiled in merciful mist is the year that brought both “big whoop” and “multifractal”) and word-hoarding (must have pum-pum), these poems are yet poems, by which I mean they are encore a manner of witnessing via language, a rhetorical transcription of the then that always serves as now. And vice versa.

The easy observation here is that each of these minimalist poetries acts as rhetorical snapshots—something capturing the movement of language within language itself. How words frame off other words, or in the punctuated spaces that serve as connotation. This seems very Derrida to me, and insufficiently interesting. What is more marvelous is that the play of negative space is felt as negative space itself; I don’t reach for the source-text in either Servants of Dust or Volume One, don’t knit some narrative from Autobiography, don’t, in toto, go beyond the sheer material of the material presented. For while a great deal of jouissance may be had in discursing the Master (and polyvocalizing the University) in each of these texts, this is nothing, and much less, than staying on the surface. (It’s Clement-time, children, if you are children.) The problem with so much of what passes for poetry these days is that it drives itself home to the tune of cowbells and gjallarlhorns, and while I love a good toot as much as the next fellow yelling “What side are you on?” it is also often necessary that there be a good deal less for there to be more. I want the inability to thumb up or down, the lack of “reading,” the actual absence of author and authority rather than a set of backflips and belly-beats that prove one’s modest virtuosity. Singularity all around me, and not a drop to drink. What these books do is make me think. Not about them, but about that speck that is me. You, too. Not in the trans-narcissism of what passes for intersubjectivity, but in the awful gape of what cannot be but merely—comma, comma, inverted comma, quotation mark. That existence is had in the infra-thin chasm between “abductee” and “web site,” that my tombstone may well bear (if I am very lucky) many marginalia. That excrescence is the base of all art, and that what is multiple is the one carried about inside the cranium, the one that needs room to seethe.

____
* Agrani is described as poet/editor, and the slash is apt, for while some of these poems are self-executing (complete marginalia, e.g.), some are more carefully culled (“selected marginalia”). I have no opinion on the preferability of one technique over another, but note that they are wildly different aesthetics performed in the space of a single conceit by a (as far as I know) single author-function. This is admirable in my book, and well-played in his.

* It should be duly noted that this book was the subject of Ray McDaniel’s review this month, in which Mr. McD expresses a fair amount of ambivalence with regard to the poetry or not of this volume. Inasmuch as Mr. McD is addressing “readers,” he is wrestling in the right trunks. Inasmuch as I am uninterested in reading relative to this kind of work, I keep my hands to myself. I would note, however, that Mr. McD’s big-sister analogy with regard to conceptualism is incorrect: conceptualism is more akin to the one who asks you why you’re flinching when you’ve not been hit. Note, too, that I did not write “yet.”

* Later, I would learn that I was right. Again.