Wherever We Put Our Hats

The premiere issue of Wherever We Put Our Hats, edited by Jon Leon and featuring work by Joel Dailey, Bruce Covey, Aaron Tieger, John Latta, Aaron McCollough, Jon Leon, Kate Schapira, Jennifer Moxley, and Eric Amling, as well as excerpts from my blog collaboration with Alli Warren, is now available. Click here for details.

Whither BLOG?

Stephanie asks:

But if it's at all true that the proliferation of poetry blogs changes their social function or dynamic, then where is poetry BLOG going, and might its social energy be re-articulated towards supporting or creating an alternate retail-distribution model or marketing arm for poetry publications, I mean the kind printed on paper? Is that even desirable?

I've been meaning to respond to this post for days, because it gets at a lot of the anxieties I've been having about blogging of late--well, not so much anxieties as a sense of disorientation, ungroundedness.

It's funny that in some ways, poetry blogs are starting to become more like what some naysayers wanted them to be at the outset: more like forums for discussion and debate--more formal and critical--and less local, daily, diaristic. Or perhaps it's that my blog seems like it's going that way. There's no question that there's been an explosion of discussion: just look at the spikes in posts in anybody's comment box. Enough so that flamers are actually bothering to take their venom there. (Was there no room left at the Poetics list?)

The odd thing about the appearance of flamers is that they're usually a sign of a forum crossing a certain threshhold of publicness and impersonality. If you're going to tell someone you know that he's an idiot you'll probably do it privately. People usually only feel safe enough to engage in public nastiness when there are no personal consequences; once the blogger becomes a "public figure" he/she is fair game.

And hence the increasing difficulty of coming to terms with what Stephanie's calling all-caps BLOG: the whole universe of poetry conversation going on out there. Even a year ago it seemed like it was possible; now I'm more and more aware of the concentric circles of blogs that I read, and how there are always more beyond that. This is, perhaps, why it's starting to look more like debate: what I think of as the original group of poetry bloggers I read seemed, as if by coincidence (though of course it wasn't), to share some kind of baseline aesthetic. I would venture to say that that's no longer the case; a more explicit discussion of aesthetics has become necessarily precisely because the poetry blogosphere is growing, and getting less homogeneous as it does.

I don't know what this says about the future of poetry blogging. I'd like to think, as Stephanie suggests, that it can continue to remain a form with its own integrity, a true alternative to the poem-on-the-page-surrounded-by-white-space of print publication (or the justified margins and neat columns of print criticism). But I wonder if it will increasingly become an adjunct of print culture, a mere pointer to the "real" work that is going on elsewhere.

Starbucks Doesn't Think I'm Sexy (III)

The phone rings this afternoon. Robin answers it and hands it to me.

"It's for you."

"Who is it?"

"Starbucks."

I take the phone and spend several minutes talking to a very nice woman whose job, I can only imagine, must be that of professional apologizer. The very cadences of her voice begged forgiveness for intruding on my valuable time, while simultaneously expressing the gratitude that a multinational corporation could never speak in its own person. I was informed by this lovely, disarming voice that my comments on the Starbucks Asian-man-turns-white commercial had been duly passed on to the appropriate people and would be taken into consideration for the future.

That was very nice of them, I said. But that meant the commercials were still running, unaltered?

Well, she confessed, yes, that was true, but she assured me that future generations of Starbucks marketers would benefit from my wisdom.

She also told me, in what was an almost embarrassed aside, that some Asian Americans in fact liked this commercial.

Robin suggested that they should have at least sent me a case of free Frappuccinos. You know. To see if they work.

Do You Have The...

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich remarked a few days ago that he, unlike some of his predecessors, had the "testicular virility" needed to stand up to corruption. Chicagoans report they are confused.

Starbucks Doesn't Think I'm Sexy (II)

Dear Timothy,

Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company.

We appreciate you sharing your feedback regarding our recent television commercial with us.

As a global company, Starbucks is committed to diversity in all areas of our business and we are deeply passionate about doing the right thing. We regret if the commercial was in any way misinterpreted to be insensitive or offensive, as this was never our intent. We are currently looking into this and will take appropriate action.

If you have any further questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us at info@starbucks.com or 888-235-2883.

Sincerely,
Neil V.
Customer Relations Representative

Starbucks Doesn't Think I'm Sexy

So there's this new (I think) commercial on for Starbucks Frappuccino-in-a-bottle. I've only seen it once (it's also noted here, here, and here), but as far as I can reconstruct it, it goes like this:

There's a shot of an Asian guy reading, possibly in an office break room. He's wearing something like '50s nerd glasses, but they're really retro-nerd glasses, so the effect is, I presume, ironic. For a moment I'm having that odd exhiliration angry asian man reported on a few weeks ago: the possibility of seeing an Asian on television in a totally normal role.

A blonde woman (also wearing glasses) enters the room and opens a large refrigerator, inside which is a Starbucks Frappuccino. As she reaches for it the refrigerator door blocks the face of the Asian guy. When she closes the door, Frappuccino in hand, the Asian guy has changed into a white guy: apparently it's crooner Michael Buble, but wearing the Asian guy's nerd glasses.

He takes off the glasses and proceeds to follow the woman around the office serenading and flirting with her as her coworkers move obliviously about.

So. Drink a Frappuccino; jump-start your day; turn your dorky Asian officemate into a sexy white man.

The Blogger's Code? (II)

A bit overwhelmed (though in a good way) by the conversation going on in my own comment box. It's the first time I've ever had enough comments here to actually think about the phenomenon. Shanna's right--they are one of the best things about blogs, making conversation possible in a medium that's often thought to be totally solipsistic--but they also weirdly (again, in a good way) make the blog no longer entirely written by you. I mean me.

Also I've been sidelined by some kind of computer meltdown, now fixed. A "shared library error." That will teach me to be generous with my books.

Okay, back to the topic. Excellent thoughts by Jonathan, Nick, and Anne Boyer about praise, criticism, and competition (in poetry and elsewhere in life). I'm still thinking, though, about the oddness of all these "poetry blogs" that are not blogs of poems. What are they then?

I said they're not blogs of poems or of primary "work." But then of course Stephen Vincent reminded me that both his and Nick's blogs have often reproduced journal and notebook entries that, if perhaps not always "poetry" in the strictest sense, are certainly creative work. But here again is an oddity: both Nick and Stephen have posted passages from notebooks already written, sometimes years or even decades in the past. It's my sense (I hope I'm not being presumptuous) that for them the (laborious) process of transcribing and posting that work is a kind of rewriting and rethinking--a pulling back from and examination of the work (and the self) even as it's also a reexperiencing.

Brian Campbell commented that he admires Simon De Deo's blog because "it reviews actual poems, which are the ultimate thing here, eh?" Fair enough--but there's that "actual poems" thing again, which always makes me wonder what "unactual poems" the rest of us are discussing.

My larger question, though: are reviews the "ultimate thing" among the poetry blogs I read? I'd say, frankly, no; if these are not poem blogs, they are also not criticism blogs in the narrowly evaluative sense. I suppose you'd say that on some days Ron Silliman is acting as a reviewer, but (to many people's frustration) he always goes far beyond the up or down judgment to some much more sweeping context.

So what are they? I guess I'd have to say they are poetics blogs, meaning by that discussion about and engaged with poetry in the deepest sense, but operating at some more general, abstract level, less interested in judgment per se then in an ongoing conversation about an unfolding aesthetic. Which means the scope is not limited to the reviewer's horizon: I think the best discussions I've had about individual poems out here have been about Shakespeare and O'Hara.

As soon as I say that I wonder where that places those blogs that blend poetics with the more diaristic aspects of the blog form--which are also some of the most exciting and compulsively readable, like Stephanie's and Jordan's. I actually don't think that's an accident; the blog's blend of formality and casual dailiness seems part and parcel of whatever poetics is being explored here.

But as I've said, I feel very uncertain about these generalizations I'm making; I feel the ground has shifted a lot. In part that's because I've left the physical community (the Bay Area) in which I started blogging; there was a brief period there where real and virtual communities seemed to be reinforcing each other, and things kind of took off and we couldn't blog fast enough. But that was also the root of my sense of this project as part of a supportive (non-competitive) community. Since then I've moved, started a job, and gone dormant for nearly a year, and am still trying to get my bearings again. I'm not sure whether my description is accuracy, or nostalgia.

The Blogger's Code?

Jonathan describes his "blogger's code," which "says not to criticize the poetry of another blogger who is known to me primarily, or principally, as a blogger, and is not a quote unquote famous poet."

I think I probably feel that way as well, although I've never really articulated it to myself that way. But what I've really been thinking is that Jonathan's tenets only make sense given the peculiar traits of the poetry/blog community we're a part of (although the boundaries of that community have gotten a lot blurrier to me of late). Among them:

1. No one in this community, with the possible exception of Ron Silliman, is a "famous poet": i.e. I wouldn't know them through a significant body of published and widely read work before encountering them in blogland. Those who have published books have usually published one book and/or maybe a few chapbooks. (This is getting more complicated as more established poets start to write blogs; but I'm guessing that Jonathan would not view such poets as immune to critique.)

2. The primary purpose of blogs in this community is not the publication, exchange, and critique of our own poems. Many of us never post our own poems on our blogs at all, while others keep separate poetry blogs. When I have posted a poem on my blog, I don't think I've ever received a direct comment on it. That's in sharp contrast to the way poetry circulates in other online venues (e.g. discussion groups, message boards, or even other kinds of blogs), which function as something like virtual workshops or poetry-swaps.

I don't object to this element of poetry blogging; in fact, I rather like that the poetry/poetics blogs I read are something onto themselves and not merely channels for the propagation of "real work." But I wonder why this is the case.

3. The relationship between this group of bloggers is communal rather than competitive. As Nick and others have pointed out in Jonathan's comment box, that's rather surprising: in most other spheres it's natural to view other poets as "the competition." But it seems as if most of us, in blogging, are wearing our reader/responder hats (appreciation, analysis, critique) rather than our poet hats (awe, envy, resentment, theft).

For some, this communal sense is actually a weakeness of blogging: we're all buddies who would never say a bad word about each other. The Chicago Reader (irritatingly little of which is available online) ran a story in last week's books issue on book review blogs, noting that print reviewers tended to view bloggers (among whom the author counted herself) as "one big, giddy circle jerk." I'm thinking also of a recent blog entry by Patrick Rosal on the productive value of competition, of "trying to write a better poem than someone else" (while remembering "we all got to eat at the same table").

Personally, I prize that sense of community; but perhaps that's because I'm uncomfortable with the kind of naked striving (after publication, awards, publicity) that seems to characterize the lives of many professional poets (and others, honestly; it's why I decided in college I could never be a journalist). In the one place I've seen a real, thriving poetry community--the Bay Area--it always seemed to me that a community produced work as effectively as did a bunch of individuals competing: people doing good stuff encouraged you to do good stuff too, but not necessarily to beat them.

The Chinese (American) Notebook

Ron Silliman muses today on the phenomenon of scribbling into a notebook while listening to another poet read: "the trifecta of literary environments, the best possible context in which to produce work."

I've found this to be the case as well, on some occasions. Though usually what results for me is a weird work in which the reader's words get collaged with my own: that was the case with my poem on Robert Creeley, which I posted here recently.

But I never saw the listener-scribbling-in-a-notebook phenomenon more evident than at Silliman's reading in July '03 at 21 Grand in Oakland. At one point I recall looking down my row and seeing nearly everyone in it with their head bent over a notepad.

To be fair, there was some element of journalistic competition going on: nearly all the notetakers were bloggers who raced home to file reading reports. But I was curious to look back and see what it was I'd written down. So here, more or less verbatim, is what I wrote in my notebook that night:

VOG--Voice of God         He looks just like his web site

Viagra Falls
Language Poetry an exercise in nostalgia-->SF poems

The ease w/which a spouse strips naked

why men don't put the seat up

women's clothing

aftertaste of honey mustard pretzel lingers in my beard

Planet of the Apps

writing--anxiety

In Philly a sleeveless shirt is called a wife-beater

This is CNN

"Data Quest"

Pubic hair caught between 2 teeth
World in which Strom Thurmond outlives Kathy Acker

Ovid among the Scythians

I woke with a tenderness above the cheekbone

dreams

Poet be like cod--looking at KK

tooth extraction

Who listens? Who hears?

"Ghosts"
"Final Form"
Silence of the looms

How will I know when I don't make a mistake?

finite words in a life--one hoards them

the joy of doubt

A-GGGG! (III)

A few more contributions over the past few days to the avant-grrr. Jasper Bernes agrees that we would have "a difficult time defining a-g writing as a function of the text itself." Josh posts an email exchange with Reginald Shepherd, who criticizes the avant-garde’s “reflexive dichotomizing,” which neglects “actual poems.” Chris Lott argues for beauty and clarity and declares “It’s OK to enjoy Ray *and* Rae.” Jordan says: “Climb down from art history before it gets dark.”

As I read Shepherd’s and Lott’s remarks (and glance into Ron Silliman’s comment boxes), I find that it never ceases to amaze me how angry Silliman can still make people. Why is that? What nerve is it that he’s touching? Is the playing field now so level for experimental writing that Silliman’s polemics aren’t needed? Will Silliman’s condemnation end Billy Collins’s career? Where do I go to leave comments on Billy Collins’s blog to tell him exactly what I think of him? Did I miss Ron Silliman’s election as Poet Laureate of the United States?

I’m particularly puzzled when Shepherd and Lott remark that all this discussion drives us away from “poetry itself” or “the text itself.” Anyone who reads Silliman’s blog knows that something like 80% of his posts are reviews and appreciations of various writers he finds important, accompanied by remarkably detailed close readings of individual poems—analyses of form, sound, and rhythm that would have to please even the most hardened formalist. In fact, today Silliman offers praise for the “austere approach” to art, in which the reader “has nothing to do but actually look, read, hear,” regardless of context. The difference is that for Silliman, this ultimately leads to work that is non-referential—“reference” itself being a kind of pointing away from the work.

I’ve also tried here to offer readings of a range of poets, from Nick Flynn to Lorine Niedecker to Lisa Jarnot. But those kinds of analyses don’t seem to draw the attention that’s paid to one unkind word about Billy Collins.

This is where Ange Mlinko is right: the binaries of text/context and form/content don’t line up cleanly either with each other or with the binary of avant-garde/mainstream. If part of the avant-garde critique is that most poetry is insufficiently aware of its context, the other part of it is that most poetry is insufficiently aware of its form—or, more precisely, of the contingency of its form, of the fact that no form is natural or set for all time. (Another binary that doesn’t line up is that of politics/poetry. Shepherd hauls out the old canard about the avant-garde trying to substitute poetry for actual politics; surely many poets are equally guilty of this, and if we follow Shepherd’s arguments there’s no reason to think that Marilyn Hacker’s poems will change the world anymore than Ron Silliman’s. And no one’s going to win if we play the game of who’s-more-politically-active-than-who.)

It’s “School of Quietude,” more than any of Silliman’s coinages, that gets folks the most riled up. I suspect one function of the label is to improve upon Charles Bernstein’s ‘80s designation of mainstream poetry as “official verse culture,” a formula that strikes some as too purely institutional. (After all, several Language writers hold Iowa MFAs, and several now occupy prominent academic positions.) Conversely, “School of Quietude” may strike some as a too purely aesthetic label (a “school,” a particular style, rather than an academy)—anything that looks or sounds a certain way. But I think the point of both terms, as I’ve tried to argue in my last few posts, is to pinpoint the ways institutions and styles are deeply linked to each other, rather than simply to say “Poet X is bad because he went to Iowa” or “Poet Y is bad because she writes first-person lyric.”

What’s perverse, to my mind, is that the avant-garde, which points out the divisions and exclusions within the poetic landscape, is now accused of creating those very divisions. It’s avant-gardists, Shepherd suggests, who “reflexively dichotomize” and retreat into cliques; Chris Lott posits “an either-or system of aesthetic exclusion” as a “defining characteristic” of the “post-avant crowd.”

What do Shepherd and Lott offer instead? “Beauty” and “clarity” (Lott) and the unfashionable ability to “enjoy” “actual poems” (Shepherd). Fair enough. But these aesthetic positions must recognize themselves as positions, not as the absence of any position or as some idea of pure critical neutrality that welcomes any “great” work, whatever its kind.

This is what Silliman was getting at, I think, when he charged Billy Collins with “intellectual dishonesty.” Collins presented his selection of “accessible” over “inaccessible” work for 180 More as merely pragmatic, appropriate for an “introductory” anthology—a choice that transcended aesthetics or politics. But it was of course an aesthetic choice, one that served to exclude a vast range of writers. Collins had the right, of course, to choose whatever writers he saw fit for whatever reasons he cared to give. He could simply have said that Rae Armantrout was a bad writer, or ignored her completely. But to present this choice as a non-choice—to insist that a whole spectrum of writers simply naturally had to be excluded from the anthology—that is, indeed, a kind of dishonesty, one made worse by the fact that Collins was obviously fully aware of the kinds of writers who would be excluded by his choices.

I’m not saying that Shepherd’s and Lott’s positions are anything like as bad the way I’m characterizing Collins. But I do think Collins shows an extreme version of what happens when you claim to transcend aesthetic divisions and dichotomies: you can end up obscuring your own aesthetic, even to yourself.

And just as importantly, you can obscure your own relationship to the structures of power that continue to influence the way we read, write, and publish poetry. While Collins, Shepherd, and Lott either reject avant-garde groupings or seek to transcend them, what’s interesting to me is the way they make their claims in a world indelibly marked by the avant-garde critique. Shepherd describes himself as being “published by a ‘mainstream’ press”; Lott places himself among those who “appreciate work that is ‘conventional’” and who “ride the fence.” The scare quotes are there, but aren’t these terms being used precisely the way they might be used by Silliman or any of his avant-colleagues? Does Shepherd’s ironic characterization of himself as “mainstream” keep him from repeating the same arguments that “mainstream” has used over the past three decades to dismiss avant-garde writing? It’s taken the avant-garde to make the “mainstream” visible to itself; talk of transcendence sounds to me a lot like that mainstream trying to forget, to incorporate a few pleasant flourishes from the avant-garde and then to get past the whole business. Too late: it’s obvious we’re all post-avant.

A-GGGG! (II)

Josh Corey asks:

Where do we place a poet who produces normative free verse but publishes it with small presses and keeps blog? Did Ashbery lose his avant-gardener status the moment Auden chose him as a Yale Younger Poet? If Jorie Graham wrote the exact same poems but published with O Books instead of HarperCollins, would the poems somehow be different, or at least read differently?

Here's the thing: the very idea of "normative free verse" is an effect of poetic institutions. If we could imagine a world in which poetry was entirely local--circulating only among peers who passed around small-press manuscripts and knew each other through reading series, but whose work never circulated outside a narrow geographical area--if there was no Harvard, no Iowa, no New York Times Book Review, no University of Chicago Press--there would be no such thing as "normative" verse. (I'll leave it to others to decide whether this would be a poetic utopia or a wasteland of isolation.) The normative can't be detached from the powerful, national channels through which it circulates; and whatever you want to say about MFA programs, at the very least they have the function of strengthening an idea of normative verse by offering formal, professional training in poetry writing. (That's not to say that they offer only one idea of the norm; a small but important group of MFA programs have helped to cement "experimental" style as a viable alternative within American writing, but possibly at the cost of making such styles paradoxically stable and rigid.)

The hypothetical practioner of "normative" verse, then, is working in a mode that's inseparable from certain institutions. It wouldn't make much sense to argue that such a writer is remotely "avant-garde" because he or she publishes with a small press or has a blog, any more than Seamus Heaney ceases to be an institution by issuing the occasional broadside or limited edition.

It would be nice to argue that blogs are an inherently subversive form, but for all their troubling of the media waters they can be just as reactionary as they are radical. It might be more accurate to say that a practioner of "normative" verse does not need a blog, except as an auxiliary or stepping stone to the "real" goal of publication in a prestigious journal. And indeed, I do think there is some divide among poet-bloggers in this respect: between those for whom the blog is a largely casual adjunct, a way to promote "real," off-line work, and those for whom the blog is an end in itself (perhaps for writing that has no other obvious potential outlet). Both seem perfectly legitimate uses of the form, but I don't think there is much that is "avant-garde" about a blog unless it is doing something that couldn't really be done in another forum.

Re Ashbery: again, I don't think that avant-garde can really be understood as a status that an indivdiual writer has or doesn't have (like street cred, or something). Yes, it is often used in that sense. But Ashbery's a good example here: there are certain gestures he makes in certain contexts that I would clearly want to describe as avant-garde, and others that I would not. It's not so much about the person as about the moment and the context, as well as the content and the form. Language writers like Charles Bernstein, for instance, often celebrate some of Ashbery's earlier work (esp. The Tennis Court Oath), but express frustration with Ashbery's later canonization, and Bernstein even (if I'm recalling this correctly, from an early essay) charges Ashbery with being "complicit" in his own maisntreaming. Auden's patronage of Ashbery could easily have ended up looking like an aberration, if Ashbery had chosen to go down a certain path; but once Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror swept the awards and allowed Harold Bloom & co. to proclaim Ashbery a part of the Great Tradition (Keats, Yeats, Stevens, etc.) Auden looked prescient rather than boneheaded. As soon as Ashbery becomes an individual "case," the question of avant-garde is pretty much moot.

If Jorie Graham published with O Books, she would be Leslie Scalapino.

A-GGGG!

Josh Corey and Ange Mlinko debate whether folks like Anne Winters and Jorie Graham are avant-garde or not. If the discussion ulitimately feels unsatisfying, it's not because both don't make reasonable points, but because the question of who is or is not avant-garde can't be determined on merely formal grounds, i.e. just by reading a text and classifying it one way or the other. Avant-garde is not just a style; it is always also a statement about a work's context of production: the manner in which it appears and circulates, the place it takes within the institutions of art, the extent to which it displays (and demands) a critical awareness of all these things.

That shouldn't be reduced to a crude statement like "Winters and Graham cannot be avant-garde because they are published by Chicago or teach at Harvard." But even if they're not determining, such institutional questions are relevant.

More importantly, the question of avant-garde can't be settled by looking at an individual writer in isolation; fundamental to the idea of avant-garde is, ultimately, the idea of group or movement, one that's hard to reconcile with (and is, perhaps, actively opposed to) the image of a canon in which Poet A jockeys against Poet B for membership in a lineage of heroic greats. Shedding such group allegiances remains one of the prerequistes for being taken seriously as a Great Poet by mainstream critics; but membership in such a community is what allows the avant-garde writer to generate an aesthetic that might differ from the dominant.

I think this is why Jorie Graham has become such a troubling case for those who ally themselves with avant-garde writing. By any measure, Graham is one of the most prominent and successful of American poets. But her style, her surface, is just unconventional enough that it is regarded as "experimental" or even "avant-garde" by many of her mainstream readers--so much so that Graham has occasionally become a punching bag for conservative writers who loathe Language writing and its ilk. The irony is that, while Graham is often praised by critics for her openness to a range of styles, she's never allied herself with any group of experimental writers, and certainly not with Language poets. I imagine that Graham often enrages avant-garde writers because she's often used as a token of stylistic eclecticism ("Oh, yes, we have 'experimental' poets; we have Jorie Graham") in a way that allows for the exclusion of anyone who's doing anything more radical.

That latter strategy is central to Gregory Orr's NYTBR review. But the odd thing is that the more one is an avowed fan of Graham, the more her formal traits seem beside the point: cf. Cal Bedient's Boston Review piece, which reads Graham more as philosopher than poet ("she is more than ever obsessed with the x everyone and everything fundamentally is (or fails to be)").

I perodically come back and try to read Graham, but she just does nothing for me. Orr says she's "ostentatiously thinky," which is nasty on a number of levels (prejudices against smart women and arch academics among them) but probably fundamentally right. Discursivity per se, which Josh is not a big fan of, isn't exactly the problem; it's more like an overdramatized self-consciousness, a sense of a poet trying to "look in" on the process of thought and then constantly reminding you that she's doing it: a trait I see in a funny cross-section of poets ranging from Frank Bidart to Leslie Scalapino. I'd distinguish that from a linguistic self-consciousness because the former is ultimately all about the ego turning in upon itself, while the latter hopefully works toward some awareness of the objective materials that make the ego what it is.

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

20% Yankee

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

A little surprising. I thought I'd score a little higher on the Midwestern scale; I even tried to skew the results by using my childhood terminology ("pop," which they also seem to say in Toronto--is this a more general Canadian thing?) rather than the "soda" I've been ridiculed into adopting in Boston and SF. I guess my time in Boston (rotaries, guts) left quite a linguistic impression.

I'd like to know what 5% of my speech is "Dixie," though.

Fooey! (II)

Double ugh. I was trying to reserve judgment on Alan Cordle's intentions, but I now see that the blast of embarrassing publicity the NYT article generated has encouraged him not to crawl into a hole (which I would probably do) but to bring Foetry roaring back--cringeworthy sign-offs notwithstanding.

It's all too obvious at this point that Foetry's methods, which claim to expose poetry's reduction to personal politics, have simply exacerbated that reduction. In both the real, evil poetry world and the mirror image Foetry creates, poets are nothing but conglomerations of connections, pedigrees and power. Foetry is the poetry world's loyal opposition: it reduces literary power to its crudest terms, and envies that power rather than seeking to offer an alternative. In that respect, at least, Thursday's foolish NYT article is correct: in the world as seen through Foetry, poets are a bunch of craven buffoons, madly scrambling for scraps that no one else cares about.

Ron is right: Foetry is just asking the wrong questions. Its "critique" has nothing to do with aesthetics, economics, or politics, but with the fantasy of any contest entrant anywhere: had things been "fair," I would have won.

"Objective" literary judgment? Come on. There's no such thing. I say that not because I think all judgments are just effects of power, but because I know that much of the contemporary poetry I value is precisely the kind that the "objective" judgment of the "best" critics says is bad.

Do the work you believe in. If you can win a Yale Younger Poets' prize by doing it, great. If not, either wait for future generations to discover your greatness or find other ways of getting things done: find other, better journals and presses, or start your own.

The crazy thing, as Ron and many others have pointed out, is that recognition in major contests is an utterly debased currency: given the invisibility of poetry in the major media and journals, you're likely gaining less of an audience (and certainly a less informed one) than by being published by a good small press.

Bottom line: Foetry changes nothing. Poets asked to be judges will pick poems in the orbit of their own aesthetic; that aesthetic is inevitably linked to the institutional contexts (universities, MFA programs, presses and journals) in which those poets exist; so even if you have a truly "blind" contest the same folks will keep winning. The rise of the MFA program just makes this process slightly more predictable. All Foetry does is give those who already possess power the ability to feel persecuted.

Which is to say: bring it on, Jimmy. Poetry needs you.

Fooey!

Ugh. The front page of the NYT arts section yesterday had me reaching for my airsick bag: there it was, an article on the collapse of Foetry. Congrats to Alan Cordle for doing the impossible: making people feel sorry for Jorie Graham.

Ron Silliman reflects a bit today on the whole thing. I already said my bit on it--almost exactly a year ago? Egads. What I couldn't have imagined with that original post was the extent to which Foetry's style of anonymous critique and "outing" would itself become the headline--quite literally.

Myopia

Updated: the link to the Myopic Poetry Series, at right. Next up: Dan Beachy-Quick and Stacy Szymaszek, this Sunday at 7.

This Isn't a War Story

but a layer of war around every hard-
boiled egg, running through what looks like
open ground
              and as if the newspaper
were striking on the hour
                            Who’s this girl’s-
best-friend, who is the next
term in the sequence
                       suffering
a term of art

                 Touch
is a sharp right
                 I know
I’m good
             a self-serve
wind brushing back the hair
of the head, the soft hair
of the face and arms
                       all tops and bottoms

I want to say: end
                   truck lane restrictions
                                           I
want to say: end
                 program
                         I want
to say: end
            to representation

WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE
                               where
each meat hangs from its own hook

Kinda Famous Asian American Writers Taking Over at Iowa

Okay, I'm just seeing how long I can keep this title thing going. But there's hasn't been much discussion about the fact that Lan Samantha Chang has been named the new director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That's kind of cool. I guess it just goes to show that if you become a famous Asian American novelist, you will be rewarded by being forced to run an MFA program.

Freaked-Out Asian American Writers at Indiana

Strange experience of scrolling through Ron Silliman's blog and suddenly seeing a Chinese face starting out at me from the screen: the uncanniness of this must say something about how rare it is.

Anyway, it turns out it's a link to an account of a minor Li-Young Lee freakout during a reading in Indiana; the subsequent discussion expresses admiration for his cheekbones.

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.