Patio Chair vs. "Patio Chair" vs. a patio chair

If “the materiality of language” is such an important object, there must be some more interesting verb we can apply to it than “foreground” or “be concerned with.” The materiality of language vs. the language of materiality.

***
Is there really such a thing as the materiality of language? Is it different in kind from the materiality of a chair?

***
The link between language and mass production is iteration. Even before mechanical reproduction made it possible to stamp out hundreds of thousands of indistinguishable patio chairs, any chair was already rendered infinitely repeatable simply by the existence of the indefinite article. In this sense, language could be seen as the negation of materiality. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that language can’t also have its own materiality.

***
Does the materiality of language encode history? If so, it can’t be encoded as materiality, since any encoding is inherently an abstraction, a signification—immaterial. (Does the materiality of a chair encode history?)

***
Is there a difference between “having materiality” and “being material”? Materiality as an attribute rather than a substance. (Materiality is not itself material.)

***
What is the materiality of a chair? Is it the aspect of the chair that exists in the absence of language? Then what is the materiality of language?

"Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."

“I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: 'Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.’

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whisky, bread and water.”
-Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

By the way, I read this book in the wonderful Harvill edition that, like the Japanese original, comes in two tiny (just over 4"x6") volumes. Even with the original box tossed and the color-coded covers replaced with heavy institutional rubber by the UVa library, there’s something really charming and appropriate to the novel about this design. It gives an illusion of serialization that speaks to the youthful quality of the story, as if this were a manga or young adult lit series. And it cries out to be tucked in a pocket and carried out into a meadow like the one in which the book’s key scene takes place. Most of all, it corresponds with the elegant slightness of the novel itself—the way in which Murakami’s prose (as translated by Jay Rubin) achieves lyric beauty while never pressing for literary grandeur, the tragic seclusion in which events befall his seemingly orphaned characters.

The novel left me wanting more, so much so that I immediately started in on Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. So far I’m enjoying it, but reading it in a clumsy 6"x9" edition, big enough for a hardback bestseller, I realize that what I really wanted was more like Norwegian Wood volume 3.

"Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?"

Today’s Reading: Robert Fitterman, Rob the Plagiarist

Conceptual writing seems to thrive on realizing the seemingly impossible, or at the least impossibly unpalatable: write a poem using only one vowel per section; transcribe everything you say or do for a week; write a book in one continuous sentence. So much so that a book like Rob the Plagiarist—a collection of shorter conceptual pieces written by Robert Fitterman between 2000 and 2008—seems almost oxymoronic. How can you write a conceptual poem under ten pages? How hard can that be? Is it even long enough to be unboringly boring?

And yet in many of these pieces Fitterman comes close to achieving something even more oxymoronic-seeming: a conceptualist lyricism. The book is explicitly concerned with subjectivities and the chasms and connections that exist between them, using the “plagiarist” techniques of appropriation and collage to turn the traditional narcissism of the lyric almost literally inside out—to create poems that look in on the subject from without rather than gazing out on the world from within. In “A Hemingway Reader,” Fitterman extracts the “I” statements from The Sun Also Rises in order to create a bleakly phenomenological record of the protagonist’s perceptual wanderings; then he revivifies the resulting text by “translating” it into his own contemporary New York experience, revealing a pattern of likeness and difference that suggests a genuinely touching meditation on the intersubjective value of literature. In “This Window Makes Me Feel,” the conceptual-lyric joining is even more explicit, actually declared in Fitterman’s gloss on the poem, which he explains was “propelled by my interest in subjectivity through appropriation. I.e., what would a text read like if it were entirely subjective, but not my personal subjectivity.” What it reads like, incidentally, is a chorus of lost, lonely, occasionally funny, often insecure voices that, through Fitterman’s linking of the poem to 9/11, becomes a chorus of the dead—anonymous voices and silenced voices being eerily isomorphic.

If Rob the Plagiarist doesn’t achieve the monumentality of Day or the virtuosity of Eunoia, well, it’s clearly not aiming to—it’s really more of a rarities and b-sides collection backing Fitterman’s ongoing epic project Metropolis. And for just that reason it offers a refreshing alternate take on conceptual writing, a break from the technicians, salesmen, and solicitors that can put such a Warhol-cum-carnival-barker face on the movement’s public presentations. There are bold and novel pleasures to be derived from that sort of thing, and no one would champion them more than me. But a book like Rob the Plagiarist offers smaller, quieter pleasures that are no less deserving of appreciation and, in their relative fragility, perhaps even more deserving of attention.

Café Press

in a mad world only the mad are sane

Magnet in a mad world only the mad are sane

Mini Button in a mad world only the mad are sane

Trucker Hat in a mad world only the mad are sane

Rectangle Magnet (100 pack)

in a mad world only the mad are sane


Mousepad in a mad world only the mad are sane

Wall Clock in a mad world only the mad are sane

Teddy Bear in a mad world only the mad are sane

Round Ornament

Large Mug

Messenger Bag


in a mad world only the mad are sane

T’s

Dog T’s

True or False

Today’s Reading: Hannah Weiner, We Speak Silent

Even though the book came out in 1996, I insist that Hannah Weiner actually intended the Bob Dylan voice in We Speak Silent to sound like George W. Bush. Listen to this: “heh heh heh I sneaked in another two pages // heh heh heh im just fooling i love ya     smush.” Or how about: “heh heh heh you put that book away or else.”

The book’s all about some kind of telepathic communication anyway, so who’s to say she wasn’t inadvertently channeling the governor of Texas? And he gets such good lines!

    sweetheart please the torture of meeting someone new is
    impossible     they ask you how old you are and what
    you do for a living

    sweetheart what are you gonna do when you meet me
    have fisticuffs or somethin

    sweetheart next time call when youre supposed to and
    never mind your mysteries or i'll punch ya

I mean, c’mon! It’s too good not to pretend it’s true.

Fighting the Flarf Wars

Michael Robbins has written that Flarf is “a flash in the pan,” “a fart in the wind,” “stupid,” “boring,” and “garbage” (both in the comments, scroll down).

Michael Robbins has also written this and this.

Okay, I'm lost.

Best Poems I've Never Read

Today’s Reading: Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems, pp. 158-183

Remember those alarming, spectacular lines of Anna Akhmatova’s I quoted here a while back: “Change has made me weary, / Fate has cheated me of everything.” I read them in a copy of Akhmatova’s Selected Poems that happened to be hanging around town, and they inspired me to pick up her Complete for myself. It’s a different translation, and in it those lines from my previous post read like this:

    The whisper of the autumn in the maples
    Was pleading: “Die with me!

    I am betrayed by my doleful,
    fickle, evil fate.”

Yikes. That sucks. Right?

So, do I question the quality of this $30, thousand-page doorstop I just acquired? Or do I have to concede that the lines that seduced me into buying it in the first place were more the creation of a translator (there are a few different Akhmatova selecteds, so I’m not sure which) than of the poet herself? The truth may lie somewhere in between, but my guess is more towards the latter, since the Collected is, I think, a more recent translation, and why would you take those lines out except for fidelity to the original?

But I’ll probably never know for sure. If it were French or Spanish or even German I could look at the original and take a decently educated guess, but Russian?—they don’t even use real letters! I admit to reading very little poetry in translation, and this is maybe why. What a helpless feeling, to be looking right at something so beautiful and yet not really be able to hear or see it, not even to verify if it’s really there. Actually, it’s not so out of tune with the melding of desire and despair in so many of Akhmatova’s poems:

    I no longer smile,
    A freezing wind chills my lips,
    One less hope becomes
    One more song.
    And this song, against my will,
    I devote to desecration and mockery,
    Because it is unbearably painful
    For the soul to love silently.

Wow. Okay then, if there’s some poetry lost in this particular translation, there’s still plenty left in which to rejoice.


***

On a sort of thematically related note, someone at Harriet is blogging about what might be my favorite book of poetry that I’ve never read, Alice Notley’s At Night the States. That I’ve never read because it seems to be tragically out of print; my favorite because of the thrilling poems it contributes to Notley’s selected, Grave of Light. But Emily Warn seems to have shelled out for a used copy (starting from only $65 on Amazon!) and is writing about it, along with my favorite Notley book that I have read, Margaret and Dusty.

I hope she’ll get around to writing about the title poem as she promises. In the meantime, you can read that poem at the Poetry Foundation’s website, or you can hear Notley read it herself at Pennsound. (Oh internet!)

Why Friends Are Better than Conceptualism

I guess I’m not really sure where Vanessa Place is coming from with this. Is she serious? If so, it seems a little hostile and even kind of domineering. I mean, did anyone actually ask why Conceptualism was better than Flarf? And if they did, would “Conceptualism is cool kids in suits, Flarf is dweebs in spaceman costumes” be the most enlightened/enlightening answer?

And if she’s not serious, then didn't the whole pretend Flarf-Conceptual War end after the Whitney reading? In that case, ironically, she’d be the dweeb, showing up late to a meme that everyone else is already done with.

Either way, Drew Gardner kind of pwns her with his response. I mean, the whole bit about Conceptualism recycling forty year old moves from the visual arts is a bit of a cheap shot, but “Conceptualism wants you to know it has read Lacan”? Oh, snap.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I have to pick a side, I’ll go with the funny ones. But seriously, why do we always have to fight? Or even pretend to fight? There are way more fun things to do, and I hope some day Flarfies and Conceptualists will all get to sit around in heaven and do them to one another. Until then, reluctantly:

The available words in whatever order works

Today’s Reading: K. Silem Mohammad, Sonnagrams 1-20

I could wax academic about how these anagrammatic scramblings of Shakespeare’s sonnets reclaim lost affective territory for poetry, how they recover the “superficial” values of wit and formal skill from the cult of meter-making argument and content-extending form. I could add that using Shakespeare as source material is the perfect way to make such a reclaimation, since the Bard is both the literal poster boy for the kind of poetry-person who sneers at such “mere” cleverness, and a classic practitioner of it himself.

But any kind of dissertating would seem counter to the spirit of these poems. They’re simply fun, and funny as hell. Like Christian Bök in his Eunoia (a clear influence), Mohammad has set himself a formal challenge so elaborately impossible-sounding that content can be left to shift for itself—there’s delight enough in seeing him crack yet another lettristic rubik's cube and still manage any kind of sense at all.

Mohammad clearly realizes that fact, and he uses it as fodder for a couple of pretty good self-deprecating jokes (“something something something, rhymes with girl”), but also, more radically, for self-celebrations that seem part battle rap, part ghazal: “I am the holy idiot of rhymes; / I dish these tasty iambs in my sleep,” “...I pray this adage may hold tight: / Mohammad sweetens seagull panties right.”

When is the last time a poet was allowed that kind of swagger? And really, in the net-down world of post-confessional, free verse lyric, what could a poet ever do to earn it? Prior to all of the very legitimate conceptual readings that can and should be offered about these poems, it’s a joy to see a poet simply taking joy in the endless recombinatory possibilities of language.

There’s “the best words in the best order,” and then there’s this.

****
Lots of Sonnagrams around the web, here are a few:

Boo
BOMBlog
Gammm
Lemon Hound
Wag's Revue
YouTube

"I support anything that goes against nature."

No Wrong Way?

Today’s Reading: Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, pp. 245-315

Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel told in footnotes to a long poem, presents some unusual choices for readers. Do you read straight through, preface then poem then notes? Read the notes as you go, along with the poem? Do you read as you might a real critical edition, the poem first without notes, then again with the notes? Or do you take the narrator/editor’s typically egocentric suggestion and read the notes first, then the poem with the notes, then the notes alone for a third time? Do you follow the cross references in the notes even though they may refer you to later plot developments? Do you read the whole index?

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed the book, here’s not quite what I did but what I wish I had done: read poem and notes at the same time, referring back and forth; followed most of the cross references, but bailed out if they seemed to be heading for anything too “spoilery.” The novel drops some hints, I think, about what would've been Nabokov’s own preferred reading, but it also seems to be designed to be fairly resilient in the face of other choices, able to be read as a linear narrative with a few twists or as a more Faulknerian sort of out-of-sequence meditation.

Interestingly, the book allows you to choose your own level of modernist difficulty—you can read one thing at a time, or you can be juggling at least three. And, at the same time, of course, it’s a novel about reading, about the narrator/editor’s failure to read the poem and (to an uncertain degree) the world as it really is. Meanwhile the book’s slew of irresolvable choices reminds you, the reader, not to look down too much on his misreadings, as ludicrous as they often seem, because reading isn’t always all that easy, is it?

One thing I’ll say for certain: DO spend some time with the index. Written in-character, it’s full of clever bits like a series of cross references that lead around in a never-ending loop, and possibly the solution to one of the book’s minor mysteries (though I couldn’t work it out). And, I think, its last entry should be regarded as the real ending of the novel, the kind of simple, lyrical eulogy you expect as the final signature to any of Nabokov’s books.

Belated Movie Reviews: Did Ron Silliman Already Say This, I Feel Like He Probably Did

Sunshine (2007) – As a 2001 for the actual twenty-first century, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is quicker, slicker, and shallower than its ancestor—but then how could it not be? Stylish to a fault, the film features a cast of inexplicably young and hot space travelers headed by Cillian Murphy, who’s apparently become one of the world’s elite physicist and an astronaut at an age when most people would be lucky to have finished their PhDs. But whatever—the cast is hot, and Murphy is perfectly sinuous and watery in the role, and whatever the movie lacks in intellectual depth it more than makes up in an overwhelming sense of physicality.

The real subject of the film is mortality—its inevitability and its shockingness—and for that purpose seeing the young and vital bite it is much more powerful anyway. The film’s freshness comes from establishing a scenario in which the characters’ deaths are inevitable, their lives expendable, and then, unlike so much recent sci-fi adventure, not flinching from that setup. As every character’s death becomes more and more of a foregone conclusion, the stakes become how they will die—heroically or indignantly or in horrible suffering or, usually, in ways that combine two or three of those things at once. Characters are incinerated by the sun and frozen in the vacuum of space, they are slashed and impaled and crushed, they face asphyxiation and hypothermia and insanity, and they do it all 93 million miles away from a home that’s a dying planet anyway, while orbiting an impossibly giant ball of fusioning hellscape.

Every death is inevitable; most fiction lets us forget that by providing an arbitrary end point beyond which a character need only survive in order essentially to live forever. Aside from being simply thrilling and beautiful to look at, Sunshine gets its power by reminding us of that fact. You walk away from the movie with a sense of your own mortality that’s not only heightened but also elaborated, a consciousness of the infinite possibilities for extravagant suffering and irreparable harm that lurk just beyond the safety caps of our everyday existence, and that are bound to be visited on all of us sooner or later. But you walk away, too, with a deepened sense of what it might mean to give meaning to that death—that the ultimate act of sacrifice can’t be to give up one’s life so that someone else can live, because everyone dies and, as Derrida (roughly) said, no one can die in my place. Rather, the ultimate reality of heroism—if that means anything—is to suffer, to suffer greatly and potentially without limit, for the sake of a good that you yourself will never see.

It is now quote week

"Contemporary writing requires the expertise of a secretary crossed with the attitude of a pirate..."
-Kenneth Goldsmith

If I wait long enough, other people will articulate all of my beliefs nicely, that way it is easier

"Poetry demands of its readers a version of literacy that's the near-neighbor of illiteracy: its obscurities (which might be as minimal as the artifice of meter and line breaks; as we know, the obscurities of poetry have no known upper limit) license the reader or demand of the reader that she give up, at least for a time, 'deciphering' the words in front of her in favor of the 'different meaning' or 'invented' poem that spontaneously arises. You have to be either an expert or—it nearly amounts to the same thing—lack all the expectations that ordinary educated literacy installs in readers. A good poem offers not communication but communion and imagination. It asks the reader to become, at least for a moment, the writer or the breather of the poem. It inspires."
-Joshua Corey

"to be apoet"

"You should have an in-depth understanding of 'the state of things.' Like an advertiser, basically. Let’s at least consider adopting the messiahs as our own. All of them. Jesus, McDonald’s, whatever’s the most captivating at the moment should be revered. Miley Cyrus. Lady Gaga. Allah. Kobe Bryant. Jenna Jameson. At least to get a better idea of where things are going. Look around you, what are the trends? All of these things will help us play in this impossibility."
-Bryan Coffelt

Imaginary Fan Letter in Response to "Eeee Eee Eeee" by Tao Lin (as if Melville House Press Were Silver-Age Marvel)

A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: I later learned about Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.

Today’s Reading: Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee, pp. 85-211

Dear Dennis and Tao:
Near the end of Eeeee Eee Eeee you had the President say: “Actually there is a oneness in the world because of consciousness and this oneness—what does it want, mostly. To avoid pain and suffering, seek pleasure and happiness. Patriotism and everything else like language denies the oneness; makes a twoness, threeness, so on.... You live a horribly distorted life.... Any unsarcastic thought or action is a horrible distortion. Anything is a horrible distortion.” I don’t know if that’s what Tao actually thinks, but the President really goofed!

In order to be a distortion of the oneness, language and everything like it would have to be added onto that oneness from outside! There would have to be something like a separate person that was not part of the oneness but was trying to see the oneness through a medium like language, which would also have to be separate from both the oneness and the person. There would also have to be a way that the oneness “really” looked, if you could somehow see it without any distorting medium.

But really, since the self and language and everything else are all part of the same oneness, the way that language makes everything look separate isn’t a distortion, it’s just a point of view. It’s like the way that a thing might look blue under one light and purple under another and be totally invisible under no light at all. The thing isn’t really blue or purple or totally invisible, it’s all of those, depending on the light and your eyes seeing it. None of those ways of looking are distortions or things added to the thing from outside it; they’re all versions of the thing in relationship with different other things (light, eyes). All the thing is is relationships with other things, so none of those relationships is any more “true” or “distorted” than another.

That one goof aside, Eeeee Eee Eeee was a great novel! I loved how seamlessly Tao managed the asequential narrative and how loaded with indeterminate meanings all the talking animals seem to be. And Ellen was a really likable character—I don’t understand why she doesn’t have any friends! I think in your next book, you should have her meet someone like Sam from Shoplifting from American Apparel and get married. Also, that story Tao just published on Storychord is maybe his best yet! Until Zachary German starts using compound sentences, make mine Melville!
                                                   Morgan Myers
                                                   The Internet
                                                   The proximate future
Okay smart guy, now answer this one: if everything is part of the same oneness, how do you get any relations in the first place, huh?

Readings from the Gurlesque Anthology (#1--Ariana Reines)

Todays Reading: Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, eds., Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, pp. 27-65

“Spackles the info bits. Language is the kind of failure inside of which you learn to fall in love. Much of her giant digestion has to do with metaphor or is it, is its essence. I don't care about my sorrow anymore because I and the minors who used to be me are not curable. Giantessa, hide me”
                                            -Ariana Reines, “Valve”

It seems necessary to read these poems as being extremely sincere, by which I mean both “sincere to an extreme degree” and “extreme in a sincere way.”

But then it seems necessary to be unsure whether the person being sincere in the poems is really Ariana Reines, or something like a small puppet of meat she has constructed inside her, like a conjoined twin or an unwanted pregnancy, for the purpose of articulating extremely sincere poetry.

These poems are all about “embodiedness,” yes, but being embodied is made to seem like being caked in blood or buried under rotting meat, or being a tiny, malformed fetus that operates a robot shell shaped like a full-sized human and made out of human meat.

So, yeah, really accurate.

My Michael Magee’s Susan Howe’s Emily Dickinson (’s Jen Bervin’s Billy Collins)

Today’s Reading: Michael Magee, My Angie Dickinson (click links to read some excerpts)

Reread this “classic of flarf”—in which Michael Magee cobbles together Google results into Dickinsonian hyphen-punctured hymn stanzas—and this time feel that I really “got it.” The secret is to relax your ear (mine has been overtrained to hear Dickinson’s characteristic cadences by attempting to write a dissertation chapter on her) so that the flashes of sing-song meter can get into a sexy wrestling match with the stretches of flarfy tumbling syllables. Like in this stanza, from one of the better poems, in which the final line delivers a nonsequitur both in content and in form:

    Nay — near superhuman said —
    Show me the Kournikova hate-mail —
    Show me the ways to button up buttons —
    That have forgotten they’re buttons —
    Show me the Buzz that was —
    Show me the way — to be — Squishy Can Man!

Forget Billy Collins’s creepy groping; this is the way to make (kinky, dirty, embarrassing) love to a fellow-poet and still show you’ll respect her in the morning.

That’s a metaphor that deserves some interrogation, I admit, but there’s a point behind it, and one that I think isn’t entirely alien to Magee’s book. Magee genuflects at the altar of Susan Howe’s Dickinson criticism in his acknowledgements and epigraph; but it’s hard not to believe that Howe is one target of his stated aim to “disrupt some of the pieties around Emily Dickinson’s work that I don’t believe have served her poems very well.” It’s especially tough when you consider that his title is a deliberate parody of Howe’s influential My Emily Dickinson, or that the visual and formal template of his Dickinson pastiches is clearly Ralph W. Franklin’s “domesticating” edition, so strenuously critiqued in the last essay in Howe’s The Birth-mark.

No woman—no person—Magee seems to suggest, could be well served by the kind of dehumanizing reverence that has led some of Howe’s inspirees to transform Dickinson’s most causal jottings into something approaching holy relics. While post-Howian interpreters like Marta Werner or Jen Bervin instill every paratextual mark with a kind of transcendental intentionality that paradoxically reduces Dickinson to the status of divine stenographer, Magee takes the opposite tack—dumping out the contents of Dickinson’s most inherited, least personal forms and refilling them with random junk, pure contingencies, in a way that grants Dickinson the vital human privilege of carelessness and accident. (Not to say that Werner’s and Bervin’s artistic readings don’t produce remarkable works of art in their own rights; it’s their readings, not their writings, that I’m arguing with.)

Bervin’s wordless canvases are, I think, still one layer of erasure shy of totally respecting Dickinson’s intentions—because Dickinson’s most likely intention, based on a lifetime of hoarding poems away in her fascicles, must surely have been that no one read the vast majority of her work at all. Once we admit that to read Dickinson in any presentation is to violate her authorial intent—indeed, to violate her privacy—then what good is there in denying that every edition is a compromise between the privacy of Dickinson’s drawers and the publicity of a Barnes & Noble shelf? Or in denying that every edition expresses the force of a desire as much the editor’s own as the poet’s—the editor’s desire for a certain version of the poet, the editor’s effort to shape that poet into being?

Billy Collins’s version of making love to Emily Dickinson is most unsettling because of the expressly objectifying way that it engages the poet’s person in the place of her poems. But it doesn’t help that Collins too wraps Dickinson up in a lot of depersonalizing pieties, a reverence that paradoxically demands her passivity in direct proportion to her transcendent presence (“the iceberg of her nakedness,” “like riding a swan into the night”)—sort of the way that Kevin Smith could only write a female God as mute. With the most appreciative and feminist of intentions, I want to argue, readers like Werner and Bervin try to write Dickinson as a mute God (less so Howe herself, whose critical work seems torn between humanizing Dickinson’s poetic process and sacrilizing the results of that process). Magee, by having the disrespect to talk back to Dickinson, shows respect enough to engage her work in a conversation—to let Dickinson step down from the pedestal and over to the podium, to acknowledge that the whole asynchronic conversation depends on her having written (written, with all the Derridean implications of the word, not spoken or drawn or channeled) in the first place.

In that spirit, I hope, I’ll give Dickinson the last word, but framed (inevitably) by my own interpretation. In poem #429 in Franklin’s edition, Dickinson eloquently asserts the muteness of the divine in terms that perfectly anticipate post-Howeian, visual readings of Dickinson’s own poems. It’s an inarticulate sort of divinity that, I’d argue, ought to be wished on no creature of language, much less of poetry:

    Omnipotence - had not a Tongue -
    His lisp - is Lightning - and the Sun -
    His Conversation - with the Sea -
    “How shall you know?”
    Consult your Eye!

The Tao of Tao #2

A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: I later learned about Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.

Tao Lin has twelve new poems up at The Lifted Brow. He’s also casually tossed off twelve more “in the same style” in the comment stream at HTMLGIANT (scroll down), where all twenty-four poems have occasioned a debate that quickly jumped past “Are these poems any good?” to “Are these actually poems?”

I’m somewhat ambivalent about these myself. Taken individually, they seem almost prankishly slight; but as I read through either set of twelve consecutively, I find myself gradually becoming gently, inexplicably, yet undeniably moved. It’s like what Lin has said (here) about the intended theme of Shoplifting from American Apparel—that the passage of time itself is emotional. Lin seems to be reaching after those moments that are too slight, too vacant, too fleeting, to be caught by more traditional poetry. But that goal leads to an aesthetic quandary: he can’t turn those moments into something that would be “worth writing a poem about” without destroying his whole reason for writing a poem about them.

In response, it seems to me, Lin turns to two forms that specialize in capturing ephemeral sensations—upper limit haiku, lower limit tweet. Whether or not that move creates “actual poems” seems to be the question for most of the objectors over at HTMLGIANT. But it also seems to me to be a question that these poems can’t help but raise—that, in fact, they deliberately try to make us think about. As usual, Tao Lin winds up doing something that, on the surface, makes him look like a disaffected adolescent wiseass; but that, viewed more sympathetically, actually expresses a kind of pomo, existentialist Zen to which he is clearly deeply and sincerely committed.

Imaginary Fan Letter in Response to Fantastic Four #29, April 1964

Today's Reading: The Fantastic Four Omnibus, vol. 1, pp. 776-800

Dear Stan and Jack:
FANTATIC FOUR #29 was a great, action-packed story! The Red Ghost and his super apes are some of your nuttiest super villains ever, and I was happy to see them make a comeback. It would be great to see a story about what the super apes will do now that the Red Ghost isn’t around controlling them anymore. Even better than the issue’s villain, you finally had the Invisible Girl use her new powers like a full-fledged member of the team.

I do have one big gripe, though. It seems like the greater Sue’s powers get, the wimpier you make her personality. Back in #17, when all she could do was turn herself invisible, she had the guts to take on Doctor Doom himself single-handed! In #29, now that she’s strong enough to save the whole team from suffocating on the moon, she spends the whole ish whimpering and whining! And why did you have Reed Richards announce that the Red Ghost’s gun was empty at the end of the story? It turns Sue’s otherwise heroic act into a great big goof up! Reed’s saved her enough times, hasn’t he? Why not let her rescue him for once!

I’m telling you, Stan, in forty years time all this “Reed I’m frightened” nonsense is going to make your marvelous mags look more dated than a communist super villain out to win the space race!
                                                                                            Morgan Myers
                                                                                            The Internet
                                                                                            The Future 
What can we tell you, Morgan? If you think Stan and Jack are weird about women, wait till they invent Chris Claremont!