Experimental Asian American Writers at Northwestern

This weekend's Asian American Studies conference at Northwestern University (located, as the university's website likes to say, in "Evanston/Chicago, IL"), which marks the 10th anniversary of the hunger strike that established Northwestern's Asian American Studies program, will feature a pretty cool reading: poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tan Lin, and Brian Kim Stefans, and novelist Max Yeh. It's Saturday, April 16, 3:45-5:15 p.m., in Harris Hall, Room 108, at 1881 Sheridan Road on Northwestern's Evanston campus.

My Vocabulary

New to the blogroll: My Vocabulary, home of the weekly Matt and James Poetry Show.

Formatting help

I have a poem I want to post that has lines that are indented--i.e. one line will end and I want the next to begin just below the end of the previous line. I don't see any obvious way to do this through the Blogger interface, and I don't know enough about HTML to figure out how to do it manually. Any suggestions?

(Honestly, this problem has frustrated me ever since I started blogging; I've just never bothered to figure out a solution.)

Bellows

Now that Saul Bellow has died, an unseemly battle has broken out between Chicago and New York to claim him. The Chicago Tribune's Wednesday cover story declares him "Chicago's Novelist." Today the New York Times has a clever riposte: "New York was Saul Bellow's Second City."

Chicago would seem to have an edge in this one; he grew up in Chicago and worked, lived, and taught there for much of his career. On quality of coverage, though, the Times has the Trib beat hands down; the Times's appreciations sound a bit more like real criticism, comparing Bellow to other 20th-century authors and even using words like "postmodernism"--which, of course, as a Great Writer, Bellow was said to loathe. (The Trib's synonym for postmodernism seems to be "cynicism.")

The Trib, in contrast, is hamstrung, as it usually is in its arts coverage, by having no idea what audience it's talking to--Chicago or the world? the city or the suburbs? the intellectual or the "man on the street"? We're treated to a list of Chicago writers who praise Bellow as Mr. Chicago; to a comparison of Bellow to "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner" (whose only resemblance to Bellow seems to be that two of them also won Nobel Prizes); to the insight that "he was the antithesis of everything blase"; and to a catalog of Bellow's thoughts on Chicago that make him sound like the thinking man's Mike Royko. The important thing, in the end, is that Bellow "out-and-out loved Chicago."

That kind of crass civic boosterism makes it easier for the Times's writers to conceal their own provincialism (I mean, come on--Bellow loved New York's "complicated women" and "the onion rolls from Zabar's"?) behind a veneer of sophistication, even drafting Ian McEwan to explain why Brits love Bellow.

I am starting to wonder about Michiko Kakutani, though. I gave her a free pass last time, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that she would wax eloquent about a hero of realism who rejected "mainstream" literature, "aestheticism" and "postmodern pyrotechnics" (McEwan even claims that Bellow "freed" the novel from the iron grip of modernism--take that, Virginia Woolf!). But what's with describing Melville as a "brawny, red-blooded American"? Robin says: "I think the word I would use would be 'anemic.'"

Cassie's New Blog

can be found here.

Hey Mr. DJ

You can hear me reading "Whatever You Want Is What You Want" tomorrow night on the inaugural edition of Matthew Shindell and James Meetze's poetry radio show on KSDT in San Diego. Tune in between 4-6 p.m. (PT) at http://scw.ucsd.edu/.

The real reason to listen, though, is that Matthew and James will be starting off with a tribute to Robert Creeley, including recordings of Creeley reading and elegies contributed by other poets.

A list of our own? (II)

As both Pam Lu and Roger Pao have (very gently) reminded me, I've sort of dropped the ball on the whole Asian American poetics list thing. Besides general busyness, I can offer two pleas: format anxiety and technical ignorance.

There's been some debate, both here and on Roger's blog, about whether a listserv is the best way to generate the kind of discussion and community I'm interested in. One commenter chez Roger ("Nick," who I'm assuming is Nick Carbo), suggested that the era of listservs is over and "blogs are where it's at." I'm sympathetic to that, obviously. But I still wonder if a listserv might be good at reaching the broad community of Asian American writers and readers I'm hoping to engage--a community that would not only include younger poets but critics and scholars who have an interest in the field (and who, in my experience, are relatively clueless about the world of blogs).

The group blog and the discussion board have also been suggested as models. I'm nominally a part of several group blogs, and I think they can be fantastic for a few people who are pursuing a group project; I'm less convinced that they are great forums for discussion amongst a fairly large, diffuse group. I've never really been happy with any of the few discussion boards I've stumbled across; they seem to encourage anonymity and sniping more often than community, but perhaps I'm wrong. If people have models in either of these realms that they think would be promising, I'm all ears.

I think listservs, old-fashioned as they are, can work well for groups of moderate size that already have some sense of community--a sense of shared interests and relations that keeps discussion civil and focused. Not necessarily "among friends," but perhaps among colleagues. My fantasy is that there exists such a group around Asian American poetry and a listserv would just need to activate it. I will confess, though, that I have no idea if this is true. My friend Dorothy Wang and I often lament that we seem to be the only people around in academia who care about Asian American poetry; I'd hope that the list would prove us wrong.

I don't see why we couldn't try several things at once; a group blog, a discussion board, and a listserv aren't mutually exclusive and might even reinforce each other.

Finally, to technical issues. My only experience in creating lists is on academic networks; nearly all of them still use antiquated LISTSERV software, offering limited features. I have been looking into the idea of hosting the list through the University of Toronto's system, but they do not even seem to offer archiving, much less any kind of web interface. I've been on several Yahoo groups, and I see Google groups as well; can anyone tell me if these seem like better ways to manage a list, or if there are other options that I should consider?

for Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Conversation Poem (unathorized)
Robert Creeley—Chicago, December 29, 1999

Hey, let me
tell you

this: he
as the ultimate

good person, as
the art of lying,

by the throat and
throttle it.

The sawyer of
the mind seated

in the rocking chair,
so the neighbors might

see. Variously
culminating literature

of tacit
horror: the willing

suspension of
culpability.

Taking the XXX Cantos
to war: just read

this and add
water, for which no

academies exist.
Sit with a book

and sound it, quote
get it right unquote.

You couldn’t
break it. It’s not

a product, much as
music is, the

activity of forgetting
the apparatus.

Meaning begins to,
as the ascent

beckons: the materials,
the house I was born.

To, to get to,
much, much too

particular: I rock
on the porch. There

isn’t room. A
mirror of someone

seeing themselves, where
lyric begins: Look Ma,

I’m dancing! At
85, what the

hell? When the whole shift
is so simple: Socrates

asking what you mean.
If you haven’t been

hit by a club, how
can you know? Translating

into standard English: why
one must be the

subject of a sentence.
Works on paper,

painters, especially
what’s seen.

It’s a vocab-
ulary, a place,

place of seeing the
world, a different

pattern, a friend of
a few years.

Apart from other physical
human persons: like

cluttering, like chickens.
The salt pond,

so heavily
salted you can walk

on it. I never
realized how I smell.

A kind of civilization
vs. barbarism, this

adversarial relation, the
possibility of class,

again back to that
time in the 40s: then there were those

that were not. Why this
person of that place, the

phony energy? I felt
a great and social

father, mine dead when
I was 4, 8 miles from

Concord—Jude the
Obscure, an eye

for a college.
In this country

I heard a woman
talking about, about

government, a super-
market, a sense of

completion and production.
What else are they

going to do?
I wanted a poetry

like the soapbox derby:
go to your own

dictionary. All American
poetry is homemade.

What’s, what’s, what’s
to happen? The Cantos

had sold a modest
number of copies.

She writes poetry
for every occasion.

She has a
situation. The nearest

thing would be
a dilemma.

I began by reading
the door, the measure

of four. Quoting
some other poet

gets you started.

This poem originally appeared in Mirage #4/Period(ical) #99.

Sort of Muffled and Far Away

It's not that I'm such a Jonathan Safran Foer fan, but I did feel a little bad for the guy after reading the NYT review of his new book. Think poetry critics are conservative and intolerant? They've got nothing on your average fiction reviewer, who still holds up Psychological Realism as the holy grail of all writing.

And it's not that I have anything against Michiko Kakutani in particular--she usually seems reasonably intelligent--it's more that she's representative. That pining for someone who would write in an "earnest, straightforward manner" (code words for realism that turn into moral qualities) ought to show how remote that ideal is from anything like what writing looks like now--or has looked like for the past century.

In my extremely brief (about a year long) career as a fiction writer, I found myself more or less by accident as a member of what I was told was a very prestigious writing workshop, held at the home of a prominent editor. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that I wrote fiction like a poet: a lot more interested in linguistic riffs and the endless mining of specific moments of experience than in such niceties as plot and character. But that said, I produced what I thought were some reasonably accomplished passages from a third-person pseudo-autobiographical piece featuring a character whose chronological age must have been about six but whose brain occasionally played host to certain non-six-year-old thoughts and ideas. Or rather: it hardly seemed as if I could render the complexity of a six-year-old's experience if I were limited to a six-year-old's vocabulary.

As soon as I got the piece to workshop, though, I was reamed on precisely those grounds (and precisely the ones Kakutani faults Foer on): the story was not realistic; it contained thoughts a six-year-old couldn't possibly have; that wasn't really what elementary school was like; it was, God forbid, "contrived." (The distinguished editor, talking to me in the kitchen during a break, used the word "arch.") I wanted to ask if anyone had ever read Proust or Joyce or Faulkner, or, really, anyone but Updike and Cheever. That's the funny thing about realist nostalgia: it's nostalgia not for, say, 1750 or 1850 (do Dickens's children "sound" like children?) but for 1950, more or less as it happened in lower New England and the upper Mid-Atlantic.

So that's why I feel a pang of sympathy when I see even a writer as modestly "experimental" as Foer (oh! heavens! he's using magical realism!) get taken to the woodshed for being "contrived." I've been there. Though I don't sell as many books.

Whistle while you work

Ever since I was in high school I've found that there's certain music I can have on in the background while I'm working, and certain music that, no matter how much I love it normally, completely shuts my brain down to any kind of rational thought.

I'm thinking about this in the upstairs room in my Toronto apartment, in part because the CDs are still in stacks on the floor--it's a media fortress, actually, with stacks of books that have to be stepped over on the other side of the desk.

So what can I work to? Mostly, it seems, music I formed some kind of attachment to before I started college. The Smiths, for some reason, not only seem to allow me to work but somehow allow me to work faster. R.E.M.: yes, but only up through Fables of the Reconstruction. Bach: yes, pretty much anything, although the Glenn Gould recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier seems to work much better than the cling-clangy Brandenburgs. Beethoven: symphonies yes, string quartets no. No Doubt: definitely not.

I'm not sure that I can write poetry, incidentally, to any background noise other than the screeching of an elevated train.

"I am following silence"

Hello again, Cassie: from blog to manuscript.

A list of our own?

A comment on a previous post got me to thinking:

What if someone created a listserv for Asian American poetry and poetics? Would anyone join such a list? What would be its function? Would it help nuture a community, or would it be isolating and exclusive? Is there already such a thing and I don't know about it?

Even a cursory trip through blogland shows that there's a lot of Asian American poets out there blogging; and I'm sure for every blogger there's a dozen more poets.

Here's the thing, of course: the Poetics list, at least ostensibly, operates under an aesthetic principle (that of "experimental" or "avant-garde" writing). Would an Asian American poetry list have any such principle, or would it invite in all readers regardless of aesthetic? If so, would they have anything to talk about?

Listless (II)

Okay, I'll confess: I've been following some of the responses on the Poetics list to my sign-off. Yes, I did unsubscribe; but since a few folks have been cc-ing me with their posts to the list, my curiosity's gotten the better of me.

Actually, I find looking at the list via the web archive much less unpleasant than having things land in my inbox. Perhaps that's why the rhetoric on the list is so upsetting; it's easier to distance oneself from something that's on a website than something that lands in one's own personal mailbox. It goes from mere language to an attack.

I find it interesting that two of the people who spoke up most generously in my defense, Nick Piombino and Stephen Vincent, are both folks who have a major blog presence as well; there were also interesting responses from CAConrad and Richard Newman. I was rather (pleasantly) surprised to find what sounded like a regretful note from Andrew Loewen, whose poetry I had previously cited as an example of the list's anti-Asian rhetoric.

There were, of course, the predictable responses from the peanut gallery. (I think of these men as something like the two old guys on The Muppet Show who hurl abuse down from the balcony.) I was variously labeled "too sensitive," "melodramatic," and "up-to-no-good" (this last from a guy who thinks that no one should ever talk about race), not to mention taunted with refrains of "chinaman."

Listless

My first days in exile from the Poetics list. Are those the pangs of the outcast that I feel? Maybe I just skipped breakfast. But my inbox is thanking me.

I've received quite a few cheering, supportive backchannels and comments. Stephen Vincent was kind enough to cc me a message he sent to the list, noting Zukofsky's openness to a range of cultural influences and lamenting the opposite, "insular" state. OKIR and fait accompli pointed my way. And Roger Pao has a response up at his Asian American Poetry blog.

SHAMPOO 23

SHAMPOO issue 23 is eagerly awaiting your lovely locks.
Please conspicuously catwalk over to:

www.ShampooPoetry.com

and lather up with poetry by Tim Yu, Muesser Yeniay, J. Marcus Weekley, Alli Warren, Mike Topp, Shannon Tharp, Andrew Slattery, Barry Schwabsky, Cassandra Schiemann, C. Allen Rearick, Stephen Ratcliffe, James Penha, Ronald Palmer, Wanda O'Connor, William Moot, rob mclennan, Eric Low, Jon Leon, David Koehn, Stephen Kirbach, Raud Kennedy, Christine Neacole Kanownik, Malia Jackson, Yuri Hospodar, August Highland, Jeff Harrison, Nada Gordon, Ethan Fugate, Monica Fauble, Olivia Cronk, Bruce Covey, Amy M. Conger, Todd Colby, Brandon Brown, Jason Bredle, Taylor Brady, Kelly Bartolotta, Glenn Bach, Jane Adam; plus do enjoy glamtastic ShampooArt by Nico Wijaya.

Thank you for looking so good!

Next up: 5 Year SHAMPOO Anniversary Extravaganza (stay tuned)!

Why I (Finally) Quit the Poetics List

I was stunned last week to find an apparently serious discussion going on over the Poetics list over whether the term "Jap" should be used in polite company--a discussion that has been accompanied by all of the ignorance, "eye-rolling," juvenile humor, and outright racism that I have come to expect when such topics appear on the Poetics list.

"Jap" is, of course, a term of racist abuse. The idea that it is harmless because it is merely a "shortening" of "Japanese" is a canard: terms become racist not because of anything inherent in them but because of the history of their use. It is racist precisely because of its indiscriminate use as a label that dehumanizes anyone perceived (correctly or incorrectly) to be a member of a particular racial group; witness the Korean American families (described in Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore) greeted in California during WWII with signs that read "Japs go home." And yes, it is still in wide use today.

But I really have no interest in dignifying this "debate"--one whose relevance to poetics I simply cannot grasp--with any other contributions. Instead, I want to explain why it is the last of a series of factors that have led me to conclude that I can no longer remain a member of this mailing list.

As an Asian American, I often have the (dubious) privilege of being able to "pass" in everday life, with my race unremarked upon on the street or in my workplace. There are moments, however, when this is not possible--when I become aware (often uncomfortably) that I am a racial minority. I am saddened, and more than a bit shocked, to realize that over the past few years, it is on the Poetics list itself that I have most frequently experienced this awareness of my own race--of being, as it were, the only Asian American in the room. Frankly, the Poetics list is still dominated by the voices of white men; other voices are rarely heard, and when they are, they tend to be ignored or shouted down.

The crude discussions of race that have characterized the list of late are, to my mind, the final symptoms of the death of the Poetics list's ideal: that of a truly inclusive forum for the entire community of those committed to avant-garde poetry and poetics. I use the term community quite purposefully here. For me, as, I imagine, for many others, one of the major reasons for remaining a list member, year after year, was that sense of remaining in touch with others deeply engaged with poetry--in particular, with kinds of poetry that might receive little attention in the classroom or major publishing venues. Locally, one might glimpse that poetics community at a lone reading series or bookstore; academically, one might see it only at a sparsely attended conference panel; but the Poetics list was, in theory at least, a place where a much larger, national, and even international community could exist.

Clearly that vision of the Poetics list is no longer viable. That's in part due to some of the factors cited back in January, when Bruce Andrews suggested a restructuring of the list's digest form. Far from a forum for active discussion, the list has now largely become a bulletin board, dominated by announcements, as well as a medium for several members to post daily installments of ongoing projects. Those are perfectly valid functions, but they are largely static and unidirectional, and would probably be better served by a website or a weekly newsletter. mIEKAL aND made something like this point at the end of January, when he wondered whether "a listserv as a tool for organizing community has become somewhat outdated, especially when such large numbers are involved." In a way, the Poetics list has become a victim of its own success: its membership (and the community it serves) has grown so large that reasoned conversation is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information traveling over the listserv.

It's no surprise, then, that large segments of the community no longer actively participate in the list. Many of the founding members have moved on to other forums, and many younger poets pay no attention to the list at all. But the list membership remains quite large. The result is the worst of both worlds: a forum that feels impersonal and anonymous, yet with an increasingly narrow spectrum of active participants.

Members of this list have been sharply divided about the value of newer forums for discussion, such as poetry blogs; the number of posts ridiculing or dismissing blogs is probably marginally outnumbered by those by members promoting their own blogs. I am, occasionally, the author of a blog myself. While blogs have many of their own drawbacks--most notably, in this context, a sense of decentralization that can make it difficult for many people to participate in a single conversation--I have observed that discussions on poetry blogs are far more civil and inclusive (and, I think, productive) than anything I have seen on the Poetics list in recent years. Poetry bloggers seem a far more diverse group, not just in their interests and aesthetics but along lines of race and gender. While I almost never see Asian Americans posting to the Poetics list (even when they are the subjects of racist attack), I know many, many Asian American poets who post to blogs quite regularly and eloquently. This enrichment of the ranks of experimental poets--more women, more young writers, more writers of color--is a development to which the Poetics list has been utterly deaf, and even, it would seem, actively hostile.

I have to say a few words about the particular ways in which Asians get talked about on this list, which I would argue has everything to do with the peculiar, at times even pathological, relationship American poetry has with Asian culture. For the past hundred years (and longer), Asian cultural influences have played a role in some of the most significant breakthroughs in American poetry, from Pound and Moore to Rexroth, Ginsberg and Snyder. But for some American writers, this fascination has become a kind of appropriation--a claim to insider knowledge of Asian culture that turns the West into the privileged interpreter of the meanings of the East. The insidious implications of this dynamic are evident from discussions on this list, where members defend stereotyped and even racist images of Asians by pointing to their own personal experiences in Asia. It's a gesture that's particularly frustrating for Asian Americans, who often find themselves being treated as merely attenuated examples of "real" Asians (as opposed to an ethnic group with a particular history in the U.S.) and lectured on the true meaning of Asian culture by white men who have traveled to Asia. (It's not the resident of China or Japan who is most likely to be affected by an ethnic slur, but the person of Asian ancestry in the U.S.) As more and more young Asian American writers appear on the scene, the American avant-garde is going to have to reevaluate the terms of its romance with Asia.

In last week's discussions, one list member noted that he was operating on the discussion that no one on this list is a racist. After the many, many incidents of anti-Asian rhetoric I have seen here, I fear that I can no longer be so confident about that sentiment. For me, the costs of remaining a member of the Poetics list have come to outweigh the benefits.

Road Movie II

It appears that TJ Desc has returned.

O SHAMPOO!

You are just too jockey and sudsy and full of bliss!

Forecast

Full-length-down-coat cold. And snowing.

Dr. Mao

Oh, so that's why my advisers called my dissertation a "great leap forward" in scholarship.

C/F

I still haven't figured out this stupid Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion thing, except maybe to berate myself for the backwardness of my benighted, unmetricized homeland. Not that it matters much, since the only relevant weather calculation is: Is it overcoat-and-scarf cold or full-length-down-coat cold?

In pulling up the blog again, I discovered that I had a draft of a post that I never finished from July 30. I figured I could either leave it hanging forever, sadly, in cyberspace; delete it (a tempting prospect, based on the painful content); or just put it out there as a nostalgia trip. Remember those days of midsummer 2004, when anything seemed possible?

Pleasantly surprised by John Kerry's acceptance speech last night. For me watching Kerry speak is something like watching a middle-aged relative rise to make a toast at a wedding: it's rambling and awkward and kind of boring and yet you feel tremendously embarrassed for the guy because he is obviously trying and you would like to like what he is saying, you really would. (During the primaries the only candidate I heard speak in person was Dennis Kucinich, whose cringe factor for me was even higher, especially since I agreed with most of his positions; and I ended up in the Howard Dean camp largely because he was the only one I didn't want to leave the room to avoid hearing.) Given those low expectations, Kerry was pretty impressive...

Well. At least I'm safely in Canada.

Top 3 Theories of What Happened to Tim

1. Swallowed by the academic beast.

2. Wandering the frozen Great Lakes.

3. Bound and gagged in front of his computer monitor.

The truth, though, is far less exotic. As some of you probably know, Robin has been struggling with a serious, chronic illness, and went through a particularly rough patch starting in July. I had to postpone going to Toronto to start my job there. Things have gradually, though slowly, gotten better, enough so that I've gone up to Toronto to start teaching; for the moment I'm commuting back to Chicago every weekend. (Air Canada still feeds you in flight, for anyone who's keeping track of such things.)

So the blog, which had already been staggering a bit, totally fell by the wayside; which wasn't helped by the fact that once I decided I was going to Toronto in January I had to rush to finish and file my dissertation by the end of December. Which, I am pleased to report, was successfully done, so you can call me Dr. Blog.

Starting the new job has been terrifying, exhausting, and exhilarating. I'm teaching two courses--one called Reading Poetry, a "gateway" course for the English department that is more or less a survey of poetry and how to read it; and another on Asian North American (i.e. Asian American and Asian Canadian) literature. I really socked it to myself in the latter course by teaching three Canadian writers right off the bat (Joy Kogawa, SKY Lee, and Bharati Mukherjee--well, an ex-Canadian writer, in the third case), but it turned out to be an excellent way to plunge right in to the eerily-familiar-yet-just-different-enough-to-be-interesting world of Asian Canadian politics and culture.

The teaching itself has been great fun, even if on a weird schedule: I'm teaching two nights a week in three-hour blocks, and even as much as I like to talk it's hard to stay upright and coherent for that long. And thus far I've really been enjoying Toronto, weather and all; traveling between there and Chicago basically just means varying the heights of the piles of snow.

This blog first started when I had an office of my own and long stretches of time sitting in it. Well, I'm doing the same again; we'll see what happens.

And now I have forgiven the Poetics list for all of its previous transgressions because it has brought us Kevin Killian's wonderful reports from Orono, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

From the mailbag: the new special issue of MELUS on Filipino American literature, masterfully edited by Rocio Davis and including an essay of mine on Jose Garcia Villa and modernist orientalism (a companion piece to my essay in PinoyPoetics). The issue is impressively door-stop thick, a testament not just to the wealth of Filipino American writing but to the need for forums in which it can be discussed.

Highlights include a biographical piece by poet Vince Gotera; an essay by Zhou Xiaojing on Catalina Cariaga's Cultural Evidence; an email conversation between Nick Carbo and M. Evelina Galang; two full-color comics by Lynda Barry; and revealing musings on the poetic process by our own Eileen Tabios.

One of the Poetics listers who dismissed my discussion of racism is now crying "racism" himself because someone called him "limey."

Howdy folks. Long time no blog.

Those of you unfortunate enough to still subscribe to the Poetics list have seen me involved in a little dust-up over there recently. I've been meaning to post a little reflection on that argument here, but keep not doing so for the same reason I eventually stopped participating in the thread on the list: I found the whole exchange too exhausting, too dispiriting, and while at times interesting things were being said, I came away from each round of discussion feeling angrier than ever.

The spark was a new post by Andrew Loewen, of "Filipino crack whore" fame; in this case, a poem/diatribe titled "WHY DO THE TIAWANESE," which prompted an exasperated "here we go again" response from me. What followed felt depressingly like a replay of our previous exchange: some self-justifying posts in which Andrew defended his poem as not racist but "the Real of cultural interface" and again questioned my "short-sighted" reading abilities; to which I fired back that Andrew was relying on a vulgar poststructuralism to evade responsibility for his work, and neglecting the profound asymmetry of racism.

I was heartened by the eloquent responses of Richard Newman, who drew on his own experiences working and living in Asia, as well as by supportive remarks from kari edwards, Stephen Vincent, and Maria Damon. But I spent most of the thread engaged in debate with Lucas Klein, whose defense of Andrew's poem began with the unpromising suggestion that my response was merely "paranoia" (a charge, to be fair, that he later backed off of).

The discussion, I think, largely ceased being about Andrew's poem per se and became more about the legitimacy of my critique: why an Asian American would want to criticize a white person's perceptions of Asia; whether I was dismissing any Westerner who wrote about Asia (cf. Ezra Pound) as "imperialist"; whether "racism" and "imperialism" themselves were such toxic charges that they shouldn't even be made. It's probably the best I can do to point to Lucas's original posts (here, here, here, and here) and my responses (here, here, here).

Ultimately, though, what's left a sour taste in my mouth isn't my exchange with Lucas, which did at least feel like a real discussion, but some of the asides and remarks by others casting doubts on my motives and on the legitimacy of any discussion of racism. Worst of all were posts by folks who apparently though the whole thing was a big joke--including the guy who sent in a post referring to Asian members of his own family as "oriental" and "gook" and a slew of poems by another poster adorned with schoolyard mock-Asian talk (e.g. "chinese good / ping pong" and "ah so").

I received a few sympathetic backchannels, including a couple from fellow Asian American poets, one of whom very kindly wondered why I was bothering. I'm not sure I know. It seemed pretty clear to me that there was very little baseline sympathy for what I was saying on the list; I suppose it should not be surprising that there is little presence by minority writers on the Poetics list, and at this rate I suspect the atmosphere there is only worsening. I guess I was kind of hoping my tirades might bring a few people out of the woodwork, but I realize most people gave up on that forum a long time ago and have moved on. I suppose I will have to get used to the fact that the Poetics list is a place where Asian American perspectives, when presented as such, are essentially not welcome.

I'd like to think that this discussion would have happened very differently here in blogland; I'm thinking back to my exchange last year with David Hess and Gary Sullivan about the traits of Chinese poetry, which certainly touched on some similar issues but somehow got talked about in a friendly and open way, without resorting to the politics of destruction on either side. During the discussion I kept wanting to quit the on-list discussion and do what I thought of as "retreating" to my blog, which is, I guess, exactly why I didn't do it--"retreating" because it felt like a way of shielding myself from what seemed like increasingly personal attacks. (If someone attacks me on their blog, I guess, I can choose not to read it.) Having the discussion on the list changed my rhetoric in ways I became increasingly uncomfortable with--combative and angry and ratcheting up the stakes with each post. And finally the development of a dominant tone of rejection that pushed me out of the discussion.

Hm. I guess that's all to say: it feels a lot better to be blogging again.

PinoyPoetics, which includes an essay of mine on Jose Garcia Villa, is now set for a fall release. Well done, Eileen and Nick! Details below...

PinoyPoetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics
Editor Nick Carbo
No. of Pages: 416
Price: $28.00
ISBN: 0970917937
Publisher: Meritage Press (St. Helena and San Francisco)

Meritage Press is pleased to announce the release of Pinoy Poetics, edited by Nick Carbo. This collection of poetics essays (with sample poems) is the line drawn in the sand by poets of Filipino heritage who have been historically ignored and made invisible by the United States of America and its literary, cultural, and academic institutions. Philippine poets represented in this volume range from distinguished professors of English from the University of the Philippines, Manila Book Critics Circle National Book Award winners, and journalists that were detained and tortured during the Marcos dictatorship. The Filipino American poets range from a former San Francisco City sanitation worker, an activist high school teacher, to poets who have won fellowships in poetry from the N. E. A. 

The poetics contained in this important book show once and for all what is unique to Filipino poetics. Among the important issues raised in these essays are responses to American imperialism, the postcolonial and diasporic Filipino experience, questions about historical narrative, and the uses and abuses of language imposed by colonizers. Public and academic libraries, as well as personal collections with interests in Poetry, Creative Writing, Asian American Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Identity Poetics, Filipino American Literature, and Philippine Literature will find this book indispensable.

Guggenheim Awardee and scholar Vicente L. Rafael (University of Washington) notes about this historic project:

“Pinoy Poetics is an ambitious project for it is no less than an archeology of the invisible. As editor Nick Carbo points out, the task of excavating the shards of Filipino poetry in English in the vast graveyard of U.S. memory is never ending. Along with Eileen R. Tabios, he has compiled an antitode to this imperial amnesia in the form of essays by Filipino and Filipino American poets reflecting on the techniques and trajectories of their work. These essays respond to the question of Pinoy invisibility by bringing forth the history and energy of their presence, but one which, to paraphrase another poet, locates the 'imperfect' as 'our paradise,' where 'delight...lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.' The soundings of Pinoy Poetics are the ghostly keenings that have haunted American poetry, and Philippine, too. Perhaps one day they will begin to take on more flesh and blood. This collection certainly offers that hope."

As of Fall 2004, Pinoy Poetics will be available through selected bookstores across the United States, Amazon.com, as well as its distributor Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). More information about Pinoy Poetics is available at the Publisher's web site at:
http://www.meritagepress.com/pinoypoetics.htm

Waitress, Bookclerk, Bagger
for Alli Warren

So then the jar ships with the bees inside and there is something like a forest of berries, taught how to buzz by a reversion. Swill bucktooth. Imagine music without holy and dirty. There’s a tongue stuck through with a finger. It’s a wish for blame, a house party moon hanging just over the weathered bow.

Four head. You can’t whup what’s not there. The bottom is damp, then sagging, then ideas are spilling all over the place and the dog is lapping them up without moving its teeth. An overcoat of shag. Inside is a stalk of celery and forty-eight million kilts.

Run your finger over each spine until nothing happens. The fingertip vanishes and is replaced by a paper clip or deadbolt. Pulled seam. If there is a Tennessee it will be here behind the cardboard curtain.

This just in from Summi Kaipa:

Howdy folks! Just wanted to let you know that I have organized an event that explores book arts and features work by local and national practitioners of this nebulous (but satisfying) artform.

In the gallery, we will have work for sale by over forty artists, including:
Jo Jackson, Jen Bervin, Will Yackulic, Nikki Thompson, Marcia Weisbrot, Pang Hui Lim, Hannah Cox, Amanda Davidson, Marisa Jahn, Kirthi Nath, Jody Alexander, Patricia Wakida & Garret Izumi, Darrin Klein, Mary Burger, David Larsen, Jennie Hincliff, Tauba Auerbach, Sara Jaffe, Liz Worthy, Micah Ballard, Keith Shein, Emily Abendroth, Kristin Palm, Eileen Tabios, John Yau & Archie Rand, Tinfish Press, Angry Dog Midget Press, Tim Yu & Cassie Lewis, Rachel Daley, and Etherdome Press.

There will also be performances by local literary legends:
Amanda Davidson, Mary Burger, and David Larsen

Musical performances by
Sara Jaffe and Sort of Invisible

Tuesday, June 29, 8pm
New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom St
San Francisco
5-10 sliding scale

Poked Hambone
for Alli Warren

Deliver van quip toodle oo. Heart above foot. Nose neck strung hale like sugar high. Eggcrate popper fork over cover. Stop stop no really stop. More like one week plus count zero. Ends built means.

Lapped up pin. Right left right left. Kind of culled then whupped by delving recess understood. Transmit curve past shaft of sunlight rock dome hard. Thick irregular.

Crank filling crank terrace crank every one. Rent cowpoke lest whim villain out. Lipstick reversion wigs big but calls procedure flesh. Cannon father empty oiled.

Hello again, California. Having been chased from Chicago by a violent storm, it's strange to recall what it was like to live in this land of relentlessly changeless weather.

Also in a landscape of varying height.

Drove up to Berkeley and hit a huge traffic jam on 880, which was almost fun until we passed the half-dozen ambulances and fire trucks just past the Coliseum.

A poetry-swap convening tomorrow morning; Del says bring nine copies of my poem. Yikes! Sounds like a tough room.

I could not help but be moved last night that as a contribution to our national mourning, TBS aired that great tribute to the Reagan era, Pretty in Pink.

EARNEST YOUNG WHITE MAN WITH CLIPBOARD AND "NADER 2004" BASEBALL CAP AND BUTTON AND OTHER PARAPHENALIA: Would you like to sign a petition to put Ralph Nader on the presidental ballot in Illinois?

ME: No, thank you.

E.Y.W.M. [as I am passing out of earshot]: But this is just to get his name on the ballot. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with him or support him or vote for him--

ME: Yeah, I understand. No.

Sun Raise Bulb
for Alli Warren

All day four in the morning window concluding. Oblivion stories. Flick off bacon outbound and then head stand cover. Lap top sleep around.

Twelve-tenths law. Paper box two pounds paper one pound. Hurry deaf double stack and cunning stunt. Keen pray kidney ears. Thick doom impedance after which pleased to have goring. O comp blows mirror equipment out traverse sheep.

Due payment play. Knock down heart. Paul south and sissy rows. Hot dog half pocket and side savage. Bar space rises scratched on sugar. Foster walls.

Insures of bevel. Count look each phrase then fall seizure what jest glares homeward. Junior miss. Reverse date help and sever creamy stretched beyond oeuvre. Autochthonic beverage like blunt spoon lever then shut down heart wise long.

Jonathan Mayhew on the Pound question:

If the question were about Frank O'Hara and someone said, "I don't care about about Frank O'Hara" I wouldn't have a heart attack, even though I think someone ignoring Frank O'Hara is unlikely to write poetry I'm interested in. Even this reaction is premature: Someone ignoring Frank O'Hara might come up with something wonderful and fresh, simply because she or he has traveled a different route to get there.

Barbara Jane gives us two good reasons to read Pound.

I honestly don't get what the big deal is if Jim Behrle or anybody else says that they don't read Ezra Pound. I read a lot of Pound. I have the big new Library of America volume and the new Pisan Cantos book sitting on my desk. Good for me. But my telling you that isn't going to make my poems any better, or Jim's any worse.

It's kind of funny, actually, that this level of piety to a Great Writer should characterize the "post-avant," whose spirit you would think would be more like "fuck your heroes" than revere them. The discussion on Tony Tost's blog has a dispiriting element of "these kids today don't know their Pound," with hushed references to craft and The Tradition, that makes me want to scream. (Pound would have been the last poet who demanded to be read purely on the basis of his reputation and stature.)

Maybe this is all beside the point, anyway. The question of "influence" is, as I think Jim suggested, more a game for critics than poets. There's more than one way to put this, but since Eliot came up let's put it Eliotically: the "tradition" is not a question of having read all the right books in English 10 but of having the tradition "in your bones"--in other words, of having absorbed it in an almost organic fashion. And it may be that the most interesting moments in a contemporary poem are, as Eliot puts it, those where "the dead poets...assert their immortality most vigorously." But this doesn't demand that contemporary poets consciously display their knowledge of Dead Poet X or Y; a poem larded with allusions to Pound and Eliot and Stevens is as likely to be horrible as sublime. The recognition of those dead poets--of influence--is a task not so much for the poet as for us as readers; those readers for whom Pound is central will gravitate toward those poets in whom Pound echoes the loudest--or, conversely, will see the hand of Pound everywhere in poems they love.

And if Pound is really so central to the modernist or post-avant or whatever tradition, then any poet working effectively in that tradition is de facto working under the influence of Pound, even if said poet has never read a word of Pound; otherwise we could not recognize that poet as working that tradition. (That some new formalists take as their axiom "Pound was wrong" should suggest to us that pretty much all non-new formalist American poetry--and that's a lot--is based on the unspoken assumption that Pound was right.) If Pound is so central, then everyone writes under his sign whether they know it or not.

In short, when I read a new poem I don't know, or care, whether the author has or hasn't read Pound or O'Hara or Shakespeare or whatever. I'll make a judgment about that poem, and my liking or disliking it may have something to do with how I can fit it in with other poems that I have read and liked--which may add up to a "tradition," which may mean that contemporary poems I think are good have something in common with poems by Pound I think are good.

Is it really possible to write poetry while gleefully ignoring Ezra Pound, or relegating him to cartoon?

Well, there's no way to know until we try.

Finally, the question of Pound's politics that opened this whole discussion. Do I think Pound wrote great poetry? Yes. Was he a crank, a racist, anti-Semite, and fascist? Yes. These things can't be separated; for Pound maybe more than any other modern writer, form is politics, and Pound's drive for historical totality and coherence in the Cantos is part and parcel of his attraction to the self-mythologizing Mussolini. The irony is that Pound may have become useable to us only insofar as he failed--insofar as the Cantos becomes a collection of fragments, a vast field of culture as opposed to a single and total vision.

I Am Now Civilized
for Alli Warren

It is no longer possible for anything to happen. Wall jump. On the scoreboard each bulb is lit in succession until they are indistinguishable from crying, a stain spreading from my pocket. Each boss has a weakness. Turn the corner and poppies bloom, newsprint scattered everywhere.

Then it’s time for sharing with those who are with us. Vowels are shiny and so is the right side of the space bar. We can help with that. Despite our best intentions we have become housewares, piled up like a shrine in the corner. Now turn to face the wall.

My hands spread open and does a dove come out, or do I tear a dollar bill in pieces and then extract it whole from my mouth? Hairy or furry. Would you agree that pornography is a victimless crime? Come and lie down, agog. Flash flood. This is a whole row of nothing but meaning.

The Pursuit of the Scientific Life
for Alli Warren

Without a medium through which to propagate. Cream sodas. She married into a grateful man, carrying cardboard boxes down to the train station. We are willing to stipulate bones. Fingers for probing clogged drains.

What to say about fire and water, each theory bent back on itself like skin. Reverse lookup. This is a sentence about belief not perception.

At each ten-second interval you will feel a small shock delivered through the soles of the feet. Would you describe this as a) burning b) tingling c) aching d) stabbing? This sentence has no truth value. See loop detail.

My old lady’s expecting me so I turn the knob all the way to the right. Steady state. I am the smallest possible unit of meaning. If you have reached this message I am likely already surrounded, overstocked with ash.

This week's New Yorker has a Talk of the Town piece on bloggers with book contracts, a periodic source of fascination/jealousy/hysteria online and off. I guess it's because that's the primary way the print media's been able to understand the blogging phenomenon--as raw material, apprenticeship for novel- or memoir-writing (for autobiographical or gossip blogs) or for columned punditry (for political bloggers). It's hard for me to imagine a poetry/poetics blog having that kind of relationship to print, perhaps simply because there isn't any incentive for poetry publisher to go trolling for talent in that way, or perhaps because poetry blogs seem more ends in themselves rather than straining to emerge as something else.

Well, the piece isn't really particularly interesting except for this last comment by the agent scouting bloggers:

"Anyway, I've started working wiht a couple of graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It's very exciting. They're interesting witers--with training, and degrees to show for it."

Take that, you untrained bloggers.

There's also an awestruck profile of Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama that should strike terror into the hearts of the right; this guy is good. At one point, an Illinois congresswoman goes into a meeting with George W. Bush sporting a campaign button:

On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her "OBAMA" button. "He jumped back, almost literally...And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a 'b'. And I explained who he was. The President said, 'Well, I don't know him.' So I just said, 'You will.'"

I'd like to think that the major TV networks' declining to carry President Bush's "major" speech on Iraq on Monday was some kind of turning point, a gradual and groggy waking-up from a previously abject fealty to the Bush agenda. An outraged Trib column this morning reminded me how shocking this really ought to be: that a prime-time address by a president (especially one who almost never speaks to the media) during a time of war on the conduct of that war would not be deemed worthy of live broadcast.

Maybe the networks were just realizing what a growing majority of Americans already know: Bush has nothing new to say on Iraq. No ideas, no answers, no apologies, no solutions. His much-vaunted "plan" was simply a rehashing of things that we're either already supposed to be doing (the June 30th "transfer" of sovereignty to a powerless Iraqi government) or should have done already (the rebuilding of basic infrastructure).

Some pundits note that it's the end of sweeps season and the networks didn't want to disrupt their big-ticket programming. But maybe even more telling is the fact that the White House didn't even bother to ask for the time, which the networks probably would have felt obligated to provide. I think this is a sign that even the administration realizes that Bush's rhetoric--once held up as an exemplar of force and moral clarity--is become a liability, as it's becoming clear that the administration has no idea how to handle the complexities of rebuilidng Iraq, or even of managing its own forces there. Better to make a lot of noise about Bush making a "major" policy address--no shallow thinker, he!--and then make sure that no one actually sees it.

Robin's students were agog at the American Idol T-shirt she was wearing under her blazer in class today. None of them would admit to watching it, of course (I'm guessing U of C undergrads are above television), but they did ask her whether she had gotten the shirt by auditioning. She was polite enough not to point out that we're far beyond the show's permissible age range.

Okay, looks like I'll be back in the Bay Area in about two weeks--June 10-14--in order to don a big goofy red-and-black gown with huge down-to-my-knees sleeves and a hexagonal hat with a gold tassel on top so I can sit in a football stadium for two hours to listen to Sandra Day O'Connor and then maybe they will hand me an envelope that probably has nothing in it and maybe then they will even give me a sandwich. You're all invited.

There's no way I'll top Robin's commencement performance last year, though. When she arrived to line up for the procession she was one of the first ones there and it turned out the flag-bearer for the School of Humanities and Sciences hadn't shown. So when the grad students come out there's Robin leading the way into the stadium with an enormous flag in a holster strapped around her waist. Not to mention which the bizarrely designed Stanford Ph.D. gowns are open in the front, showing off the fact that Robin was wearing a quite short Stanford-red satin dress with matching and very tall stacked-heel sandals, marching right across the dewy grass.

It's my first time back since December and I'm a little nervous; don't know what to do with all those clear skies and sun and traffic. (I actually had a brief moment of nostalgia--seriously--about driving down 280 the other day. Has anyone ever seen that sign claiming it's the "world's most beautiful highway"? I saw it like once but could never find it again.) I'll assume everything still in order. Oh, wait, didn't y'all fall into the ocean or something? No, sorry, that was a movie. (If anyone's been under the threat of natural disaster it's us--daily tornado watches and severe thunderstorm warnings and floods and what have you, crazy temperature swings from the high 80s to the mid-40s.)

Strangest of all is that I'm coming back to officially sever the last of my ties to the Bay Area--surrender the keys to the English department and my library carrel. I think this year-long goodbye's been easier in a lot of ways--a gradual attenuation that hasn't been as painful as I'd feared, in part because Chicago's proved to be more than absorbing, in part because other matters have left little time for nostalgia. Cassie's departure, too, proving there's life after San Francisco.

But hey: it's five days. Crazy poetry weekend, anyone?

We Spit Into Each Other
for Alli Warren

Your service is unimpressive. Bone fragments, a layer of ash. He is cradling his son in his arms as I rearrange the houseplants in the shape of intestines. You’ll feel a stick, then hopefully nothing.

Imagine that it is Wednesday, unless you are imagining that it is Thursday, in which case please check this box.

Today, thanks to surgery, I am a wide-eyed redhead. But when we spit into each other it’s like Christmas with sand between our toes. No, I’ll unzip you, please. Places don’t have names but they feel like pink.

Around my throat is an enormous bowtie, breathing and loosening. It makes me want to hug everyone to a new chest. Something like cough. This opportunity is smeared with chocolate. As the acrobat falls to her death the clowns leap into the ring ,showing their underpants.

Here's your Sunday Right-Wing Chicago Trib Watch:

--A gleeful front-page prediction that Kerry's strategy of playing up his Vietnam service will backfire; an opinion piece obviously commissioned to support this idea goes so far as to call Kerry's service "unimpressive". (I also note that the Trib has swallowed the right's line about the emergence of a voting bloc of "NASCAR dads," a category obviously made up by Republican strategists because they can't get any soccer moms to vote for them anymore.)

--The latest paean to white Africa by correspondent Laurie Goering, whose recent gems include a piece blaming South Africa's social ills on affirmative action; today's article laments the advent of land reform in Namibia, a lament sounded almost entirely from the perspective of Namibia's white farmers, who currently own over 80% of agricultural land. The only farmer quoted in the article is a white rancher, who's portrayed as a victim of reforms that are "wrecking the future of this country," while Namibia's president is slammed for his "fiery rhetoric" against "neocolonialism and underdevelopment." The article is headlined "Namibians fret about land reform," but the article's own evidence suggests that it's only whites who are doing the fretting.

--An article on gay weddings in Provincetown that describes a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Marriage is a human right, not a heterosexual privilege" as "strident."

--A front-page Perspective piece (by a Chicago-area Muslim doctor) that dismisses the thousands of photos of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by declaring, "To judge every American by these is patently unfair and unjust." Yes, I''m sure all of Iraq weeps for us. The piece makes the truly bizarre argument that judging the U.S. occupation of Iraq by these photos is akin to post-9/11 racism against American Muslims, because "the generalization of anyone is wrong." Except that as far as I can tell the 9/11 attackers didn't wear a nation's military uniforms and act under the direction of that nation's elected leaders.

Oh, and this just in: New AP video shows footage of the wedding celebration at which some 40 Iraqis were later killed by U.S. bombs. The U.S military's response? "Bad people have celebrations too."

My Supple Spot
for Alli Warren

Kind of like incisors, clenched through meat. Strappy sandals. Our friends become successful and then we’re running deep under them, rattling their hardwood floors. Gabby, as in idiot, or decline to state. Dear Daddy, I am moving upward through my pink-toothed dress and then it is like being chewed by something when I am very thick and sticky.

Before my first book I was a dialect. Words drifted two letters to the right or left, like a sieve. The leavings formed a glossary, soon published to general acclaim.

When you touch my supple spot it feels worse than it looks. Ping-sized hail. You could spread tired with a trowel. Press here to enunciate.

I raise questions but my fingers have been removed at the joint. It’s a perfect binding, wrapped around both wrists and cupping the genitals. The books are packed so tightly that pulling one out leaves no space at all. Your assent would be helpful but is not required.

Ron Silliman on the Free Radicals anthology, observing, among other things, that "a 150-page collection by Del Ray Cross would be a Major Event indeed." Hear hear!

I haven't seen the anthology, but I admit to having been a little weirded out by the subtitle, "American Poets Before Their First Books." The title suggests a catch-them-while-you-can, next-big-thing tone to the project, a tone Ron generally adopts himself. But--as came up in Ron's comment boxes--does this make too much of the holy grail that is the First Book?

A number of the poets in the anthology--Jim and Del, and I'm sure most of the others--certainly do have books, and sometimes more than one. I have some of them. But however good they are, I guess these are only chapbooks and not Books.

So what does the latter mean? Perfect binding? More than 50 pages? Publication by a prestigious press with access to major distributors?

What makes the First Book, perhaps, is its role as the first major milestone in the Career, its announcement of arrival. I wonder, though, whether this model still makes sense--or, more modestly, whether it makes sense for everyone. In a poetry world that's mostly networked and localized (as opposed to public and national) does everyone have to have "ambition" in the old-fashioned sense, or does ambition always have to find expression in high-profile book publication? Might not all these insignificant web publications and chapbooks and blogs be not just stepping stones but other ways of getting something done? Are people going to be disappointed with the folks in Free Radicals if they don't come out with a book from Knopf or Graywolf or Fence in the next two years?

I don't presume to speak for the actual intentions or ambitions of any of the poets in an anthology I haven't read. But I do wonder if the way the anthology's framed imposes an arc of the Career that might be stifiling to what some of them might be trying to do.

Picked up David St. John's The Face and Marjorie Perloff's new memoir, The Vienna Paradox, at the Co-op this morning. I'm already halfway through Marjorie's book and it's a delight: as much cultural criticism as autobiography, a careful reconstruction of the culture and intellectual life of the Vienna of her childhood, before her family fled the Nazis in 1938.

The "paradox" is, in part, that of assimilated Austrian Jews who claimed Viennese high culture as their own ("German by the grace of Goethe," as one chapter heading puts it) even as that culture turned against them; Marjorie cites the example of her own grandfather, a high official in the Austrian government who remained after the Anschluss, believing he would be protected and expecting to secure his pension, finally able to escape to Italy only because of his diplomatic acquaintance with Mussolini.

But above all, distinguished blurbs from John Ashbery and Guy Davenport report themselves at the mercy of the plucky little girl in pigtails who smiles out from the book's cover, who could already write at age seven of her flight from Vienna in her American school notebook:

On the train, we went to sleep right away. But my cousins, as is typical of them, complained they didn't sleep all night. In Innsbruck, we had to get out and go to the police station where they unpacked all our luggage and my poor Mommy had to repack everything. There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hatbox and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good. And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn't yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book. Well, I hadn't experienced much yet but, just wait, there will be much more!

Haven't cracked open the David St. John book yet; I've only read a few scattered pieces of his in the Boston Review, which I enjoyed. Was also tempted by Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee--perhaps another day.

Woo-hoo! Dodie's in town in August...

MYOPIC POETRY SERIES -- a weekly series of readings and poets' talks

Myopic Books in Chicago -- Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue

Sunday May 23 – April Sheridan and Simon Pettet

Upcoming Events

May 30 - Dana Ward

June 6 - Larry Sawyer and Lina Ramona
June 13 - Jen Besemer
June 20 - Amina Cain and Luba Halicki
June 27 - "aaaaaaaaaaalice" - Jennifer Karmin performing with Kathleen Duffy and Kelly Jackson

July 4 - no reading scheduled
July 11 - Gene Tanta & Ramona Mirela Ciupag
July 18 - P.F. Potvin
July 25 - Crayon #4 Release Reading

August 8 - Dodie Bellamy

Thick as Nickel
for Alli Warren

I have taken a vow of chastity, keeping me from doing anything but holding the camera. Waiting-room watercolor. Unsure what to make of the fact of real estate, the taste of charcoal. When I look into your eyes there is a speaking of underpants.

My grandmother is unrolling her sleeve. Inside there is a wad of cash or a trowel or an orange.

I am flung at nothing in particular. Flared nostrils of the columnists. I am saying, doctor, it’s more than I can bear. He says, bear.

The two-way crackles and then passes through the frame. In the sketches what will be dots are strokes. When we say underpants we mean hair or teeth, worn at a rakish angle.

Softening Up
for Alli Warren

The house is held together by an editorial board. When they pull away the drywall we come walking out on all four legs. It’s like being able to see through a fogged-up window or a double fold. I contain vague. Continuing over the right half of the brain, we observe dark cul-de-sacs of meat ready for extraction. There is a persistent smell of dogwood or urine.

Someone arrives here. After eighteen minutes in the reversibles we are able to write a message on the car door from right to left.

Half a gasp has to be half something else. It might be falling like stairs or falling like eyes. Which is me. You have gotten pretty good at weather. You still crave underpants but we leave that to one side.

When the diagram is projected onto the green screen all notation is lost, so we are left with only the outlines of rooms with no way of knowing their dimensions or functions. I label this den, this parlor, this carry-on. You may disagree but are forced to recognize the usefulness of at least having a start. You blur lines to indicate windows, erase them entirely for doors. Several of your markings resemble ears of pigs or corn. These arrows are passages for inhalation and come to an end in the linen closet.

Ron Silliman on Foetry, Fence, and external validation, which is, I think, along the same lines as my post on Foetry last month.

The jousting that's been going on in Ron's comment boxes--a battle, remarkably enough, that has even drawn in the top editors at Fence itself--really only illustrates the futility of carrying on this debate at the level of poetic friendships or cronyism. While I'm not crazy about the nameless critic who's been "outing" Iowa MFAs (and I'm especially not crazy about anonymous commenting--who are you hiding from, really?), I'm even more bemused/dismayed by the responses from Rebecca Wolff and Max Winter, whose mixture of moral indignation and petty dismissiveness kind of makes you wonder why they got involved in the discussion in the first place. Why should they feel so threatened by such attacks?

Anyway, the larger point is that with any literary institution, critics will always be able to point to a social network that seems to underlie ostensibly aesthetic choices, while the institution can defend itself by pointing to ostensibly objective procedures designed to guarantee fairness. Neither perspective acknowledges the profound link of the social and the aesthetic; styles get attached to institutions and communities in ways that go far beyond arguments over who knows whom.

I do feel--especially given the kind of work they tend to publish--the Fence folks ought to know better on some of these issues than to simply say that Iowa grads have "more ambition" than other poets (Winter) or that the process is just evidence that the Iowa admissions committee knows what it's doing (Wolff). The experimental aesthetic that Fence supports has had a long struggle for recognition over the past few decades, and it's certainly by no means necessarily true that fifteen or twenty years ago Iowa or other well-known literary institutions could have supported the kind of work that now appears in Fence and elsewhere. In fact, such work was generally suppressed by appeals to the same standards that Wolff and Winter now use to defend their own publication--those of quality, objective judgment, and institutional ratification.

That Wolff and Winter can now make such appeals certainly shows how much the landscape has shifted; Fence itself is now viewed as a site of power, in which external judges have to be brought in to ensure the fair distribution of its resources. Perhaps the best evidence for this is that neither editor feels able to make the most obvious and unapologetic response to cries of favoritism: "Yes; that's right; I pick whatever the hell I please because I like it." That's pretty much the standard prinicple of any small-press endeavor, because what other justification could there be for investing all that effort with no prospect of return? That Wolff and Winter can't appeal to this principle demonstrates the extent to which Fence has departed from this model to become an old-fashioned literary institution, with editorial boards and external referees and procedures to distribute what is now seen as a valuable resource: publication by Fence.

There's plenty of reason to greet this with great enthusiasm. Fence has, by and large, produced good work and brought it to an increasingly wide audience. Good for them. But the persistence of the signifier "Iowa" as a symbol of literary power--and as a target for resentment--suggests that something like Fence represents less a revolution in American poetry than a continuation of roughly the same structures of power with a different face, something that its editors could be a bit more circumspect about.

Just Like Us, But Thicker
for Alli Warren

The photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge has been retouched so that a football crowd rises out of the fog. Each foam hand grips a McDonald’s Adult Happy Meal. The crawl says MEAT PEOPLE. I turn the page and there she is, the old one in the yellow polyester coat, grinning and pointing. Pornographic reveal. We can’t pretend anymore that the air isn’t full of little vortices turning with locked-in teeth: as if it could have been empty? Preserves lined up in tiny jars extend to the horizon. The sign has nothing to do with anything else and thus is allowed to refer to reality.

I was embarrassed to have been caught reading poetry over your shoulder, when in fact I was reading your shoulder.

Jail is a future heirloom. There’s nothing left to steal so we had to make something up and post a copy on every door. It’s inevitable that someone would come along and try to make sense of what we’d written, while we watched from a remote location. Fried egg eyes, chicken nose, bacon smile.

This would be the ideal place for a bumper sticker. Each one has no thickness but if you stack enough of them they will.

Good one, Reen.

Eileen on the dangers of being an Asian American general.

I've heard some Asian Americans argue that the Bush Administration has been good for Asian Americans because it has a few Asian American cabinet officials (Norman Mineta, Elaine Chao). Eileen's post is a good reminder of the cynical calculations behind such appearances: put a few faces of color (Colin Powell, Gen. Shinseki) out there to boost the administration's credibility and provide cover for racist policies, then brush such figures aside when they turn out to have minds of their own.

The technique of suddenly ending
for Alli Warren

with an as-yet-unnamed dog like shading
with fuck-me boots
with a "happy birthday blog"
with something soft spattered on the windshield
with fog no fog doesn’t look that dirty smog
with a broomstick or a chemical light
with an approved device
with thicker
with black assigned a number out of the set of numbers
with a medium drink
with profound apologies for all those who might have been humiliated
with a head in the bag

The Sun-Times asks: Can rockers be poets?

Check out the lovely new cover for Pinoy Poetics. (Thanks Eileen!)

So it seems the new Blogger interface just really doesn't like Netscape. (Well, in fact, Blogger software in general doesn't like Macs, which I don't get.) Working in Internet Explorer is a little better. But part of what's been so appealing about Blogger to me (and, I imagine, to a lot of people) is that it's been relatively low-tech and hence relatively idiot-proof; I have the energy to blog, just barely, but not the energy to figure out precisely how my blogging software works.

Blogger proudly proclaims that its new software is "100% geek-ified", which just depresses me; all these poets' clumsy and faintly ugly and definitely amateurish Blogger blogs have felt to me like a kind of tech beachhead--content, ironically enough, trumping form.

Or maybe I just fear change.

Anyway, all of this is probably going to accelerate my abandonment of Blogger in favor of blogging at my own site somewhere; I know that would be at some level more work, but at least I would have a bit more control over the means of production.

My verdict: this new Blogger interface really stinks.

I'm surprised that in the coverage of prisoner abuse in Iraq I haven't heard any discussion of the infamous Zimbardo prison experiment, in which students assigned to play the role of prison guards became so abusive and violent toward their "prisoners" that the experiment had to be aborted.

We're flipping channels the other night and come across a news channel discussing abuse of Iraqi prisoners with the headline: "Who's to Blame?" To me, the answer seems obvious: "Bush." But Robin points out that while Bush might be responsible for all manner of things, maybe we can't hold him directly responsible for the conditions inside one Iraqi prison.

At first this seems reasonable to me; indeed, it's the same logic that the Bush administration is using to protect the president and Donald Rumsfeld, laying the blame squarely on a few low-level, bad-apple soldiers (and on a reserve general who was the only woman to hold a command in Iraq). But the more I think about it, the more I think my first instinct was right. We have no one but Bush to thank that the major achievement of the "war on terror" has been a culture of lawlessness, from the Patriot Act to secret detentions to "unlawful combatants" denied even the most basic of human rights.

The Bush administration's idea of a response to the abuse scandal is to put Abu Ghraib prison under the command of a general whose previous assignment was Guantanamo Bay, where no one is allowed to see what's going on, prisoners are explicitly denied any legal rights, and those who try to talk about the place are charged with espionage. In fact, it was this general's idea to place military police in the service of intelligence-gathering interrogators--a decision, it's becoming clear, that is heavily to blame in allowing abuse of prisoners to become so widespread, so casual.

A lot of people are saying Bush should fire Rumsfeld. Sure. There's no doubt Rumsfeld knew about abuse of prisoners and not only did nothing, but didn't give a damn. But Rumsfeld's departure would almost certainly mean at least the temporary installation of deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary--and if anybody could be worse, Wolfowitz would be. Rumsfeld, for all his arrogance and bluster, is at base a soulless, tunnel-vision technocrat, one who's so wedded to his vision of a "smaller" (read: understaffed, underprepared, undersupported, and misguided) military that he's willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives and destabilize the whole Middle East to prove his point. (The overwhelmed and untrained reservists who perpetrated the known abuse are the poster children for Rumsfeld's Army.) But Wolfowitz is a real fanatic--set from day one on the invasion of Iraq and a sweeping vision of American empire in the Middle East--and would likely prove impervious to even the limited kind of embarrassment that Rumsfeld's experiencing right now. Hit one weasel in this administration and a bigger one pops up.

Nor are poets excepted from the Chicago distinction of "retro" vs. "metro."

Q: You always seem so not Chicago, with this I mean you are not a beefy sports fan type how do you reconcile Chicago aesthetics with your work?

A: People often think I'm from the east coast. I guess it's because I'm in touch with my feminine side. Have you seen my hair lately?

Keep hearing "Hugh Jackman" as "Huge Ackmen."

I got an email from Jason Chin, the "retrosexual" pictured on the second page of Sunday's Trib story (not the trendy Asian guy pictured on the story's first page). (Chin's quoted as saying: "All of my friends dress like bums...We dress up when we need to, kind of like firemen around a firehouse waiting for the bell to go off...I buy whatever shampoo is on sale at Walgreens.") He tells me that he was interviewed and photographed nearly two months ago, which casts doubt on my suggestion that his photo was chosen to counteract suspicions that portraying an Asian guy as the "metrosexual" might be racist.

But I don't know if that changes the basic fact that the cover image puts a questionable racial stereotype into play. There was still a conscious decision on someone's part to make the "retrosexual" (who's associated with totally secure Midwestern masculinity) a white guy and the "metrosexual" (who's associated with questionable masculinity and sexuality) an Asian--a choice that also speaks to me about the desire Chicago continues to have to see itself as a white city, since the "metrosexual" is portrayed as an L.A./NYC phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Chicago says: "I am so straight that it hurts."

Air America Radio seems to be off the air in Chicago for the time being. My first inkling that there was a problem came a couple of weeks ago when I flipped on the radio to 950 AM and heard what sounded like Cantonese talk radio coming out of the speaker. Apparently a financial dispute led the station's owner to pull the plug; a court injunction put the station back on the air through April 30, but now it's gone for good.

Cassie on waiting for the bus in Rochester.

Just when I convince myself that Chicago isn't the cultural backwater that people say it is, the Sunday Trib comes along and knocks my block off. This can usually be accomplished through just a glance at the front page of the Perspective section (I can't usually bring myself to look further than that), which has recently featured such gems as a slew of defenses of "traditional marriage"; this week there was a self-congratulatory editorial about how the victory of African American state senator Barack Obama in the Democratic primary shows how Illinoisans have all gotten "beyond race", which seems to mean that white Illinoisans no longer hate blacks so much that white voters would automatically oppose a black candidate. (This in contrast to the "bad" old days of the '80s and Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, when the City Council divided essentially along racial lines--old-guard white Democrats against black Democrats and a handful of white "lakefront liberals" who backed Washington.)

That's pretty indicative of how the Chicago press has responded to Obama; even though both the Trib and the Sun-Times endorsed him, the Sun-Times felt obligated to declare that its endorsement was not "a gratuitous nod to [Obama's] race"--as if the assumption would be that an endorsement of a black candidate could only be motivated by political correctness, and that any such candidate would be presumed underqualified. Thus the papers get to score points by praising the "right" kind of African American candidate (Harvard education, university professor), while still holding him at arm's length, and then get to use it as a club against other African American leaders. I'm sure that the Trib's colorblindness won't prevent it from endorsing Obama's lightweight (white) Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, in the general election, or from unleashing nasty attacks on Obama in the months to come.

This Sunday, though, the evidence was in a cover story trumpeting the Chicago man's rejection of the fashion-conscious, well-groomed "metrosexual" in favor of the "retrosexual" , with the latter being the guy who is "clean but not coifed, 'put together' but not cutting-edge. He spends weekends at sports bars, avoids malls, is in shape but not ready for the cover of Men's Health. He watches sports, not E! channel red-carpet coverage of the Oscars."

The real kicker was the illustration; the "retrosexual" was a blond-haired white guy wearing a blue button-down shirt and khakis, while the "metrosexual" was a guy in a colorful striped shirt and nice slacks--who just happened to be Asian. (That somebody on the Trib must have worried about racism was clear from the photo on an inside page that showed a "retro" Asian guy dressed just like the white guy on the cover.)

Trust Chicago to take embattled white hetero masculinity (and homophobia, and racial stereotype) and turn it into some kind of fashion statement.

And the Asian guy's stripey shirt looks familiar. Oh, damn. I think it's hanging in my closet.

Two years ago, a friend I'd known since junior high went missing while visiting friends in Ohio. His car was found abandoned along a rural highway, but there was no sign of him. Earlier this week the police found some bones about a quarter mile from where his car was found, and they've just been identified as his. Because it had been so long--and they were not able to find most of the skeleton--the local authorities say they will not be able to determine the cause of death.

A few months ago a former girlfriend of his thought she spotted him in a Chicago restaurant; she saw a man who seemed to have gestures and expressions that were identical to his. She left the restaurant and called another friend of ours who rushed over to the restaurant, but by that time the man was gone and the restaurant's staff had no memory of his being there.

And while we're on the topic of bland eclecticism, here's another relevant Poggioli tidbit:

"A period having many styles has none...[M]ass cultures...take their styles where they find them--from cultures and societies different from theirs. In short, the absence of a style of its own is not exclusive to capitalism or socialism, but happens in any democratic society, whether it is liberal or not; in any 'quantitative' civilization, which is technical and industrial.

"Precisely by being styleless, this type of civilization prefers an eclectic style, where what is technical ability in an aesthetic sense joins with technical ability in a practical sense...The artist in our time, precisely because he knows how to imitate effortlessly all techniques, ancient or modern, scientific or artistic...refuses to accept as his own style what has now become a purely mechanical production, what is thus a true negation of style...This tolerance is naturally only a purely negative reality and as such, provokes, in turn, the artist's intolerance...[T]he modern writer has no choice but to assume an attitude of absolute intransigence in the face of the indistinct multitude of his readers, an undifferentiated antagonism." (124-6)

Hey Eileen: So I'm wading through Renato Poggioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde (yes, still) and I come across, believe it or not, a reference to Jose Garcia Villa! Okay, not a very nice one, but I thought you might be interested.

"To the illusion that the arts were interchangeable and mutually corresponded, there was often added a childish belief that a transformation which was not formal and organic, but external and mechanical, could have a final and absolute value, rather than a merely instrumental and relative one. As an extreme example, suffice it to cite the so-called comma poems of the young Philippine-American poet José Garcia Villa, in which the space between each word is occupied by that punctuation mark: a purely arbitrary graphic novelty in which the poet claimed to see a literary equivalent of…Seurat’s pointillistic paintings!" (134)