It’s so cold at work that I still can’t shake it even at home
It’s so cold at work that my life feels empty even though everything is going better
It’s so cold at work that some guy won’t stop talking loudly on the phone outside my apartment
It’s so cold at work that I can’t get my work done
It’s so cold at work that I can’t even worry about her anymore
It’s so cold at work that I want to kiss all my friends
It’s so cold at work that I can’t wear nice shoes
It’s so cold at work that my Scott Pilgrim review is 1000 words too short
It’s so cold at work that 90 degrees outside feels refreshing
It’s so cold at work that I’m keeping a jacket there
On Ariana Reines's Sex Appeal (and Poetry as Perversion)
A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: Returning to this post in 2018 I'm tempted to delete it or edit it, but instead I'll leave it up with apologies for 2010 me, who got horny-on-main in a way that I'm afraid disrespected a great poet.
My whole body writes.
–Ariana Reines, “In the Most Holy Place Shalt Thou Eat It”
Today’s Reading: Ariana Reines, The Cow
I’ll go ahead and say it: Ariana Reines might be the sexiest poet alive. Not just because she herself is physically very attractive. And not just because her poetry is full of feverishly horny lines like “If I don’t fuck today I’ll die.” Not even because, in blogging out her recent trip to Haiti, she’s established herself as an heir to the late, similarly sexy Kathy Acker.
No, Ariana Reines—in her writing and in the persona that swirls like a pheromone-laden postcoital funk around it—is sexy in scary, counterintuitive ways. Sexy in the way that knife play might be, for some people: through the careful handling of keen edges and the threat at any moment of splitting the surface and drawing blood. Or like erotic asphyxiation: through the impairment of normal brain function under a looming shadow of death only slightly less terrifying than the display of trust the entire act implies.
In other words, her poetry (like all good poetry?) is a perversion, not only of the normal (“normal”) use of language, but of normal relations to the body and the world, of normal boundaries between public and private or between fearlessness and submission (like all good perversion?). I first really read her work in the Gurlesque anthology, but that label seems completely inadequate to these poems: there’s not much about them I’d call girlish, and absolutely nothing -esque. Instead, they’re intensely feminist and female without ever being doctrinaire or exclusionary. They depict the itchy, refractory experience of embodiment in ways that play rough with the politics of modern gender, yes, but can also powerfully resonate with anyone who’s ever suffered from a body of any sex:
Imagine a gut for the writing to go around. The dark can be a place. The gut. Imagine it. The mental city means it’s built of menial jobs that make it become itself. The mind. Uncensored thirties. A hovel to live in. The best way to go is the endlessest. I will not train myself to love this shit.Not to mention that, as seen above, she can drop those vision-blurring, spine-tingling, top-of-the-head-removing lines of the sort I usually associate with personal icons like Dickinson, Yeats, or Plath. Like Anne Boyer or Tao Lin, Reines seems to suffer from a special, prophetic kind of crazy, and the rest of us are just lucky that whatever existential dis-ease plagues her also drives her to bring those struggles to light in such startling and raw ways.
–“Dear Marguerite”
All of which is just to say that she’s a really fucking good poet. Not much sexier than that.
Okay, Kendra Grant Malone, I guess you win.
Today’s Reading: Kendra Grant Malone, Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful
Kendra Grant Malone is a poet and fiction writer I first came across on the same DRUNK blog where I discovered Daniel Bailey and Bryan Coffelt. Like Bailey, she could be seen as part of a “New Sincerity,” a wave of young poets who eschew the impersonality of most innovative poetry and even the rhetoricalness of most mainstream poetry to just, sort of, write what they feel, in a way that looks like nothing so much as the poetry you remember from your undergrad lit mag. (Here’s the thing, you (I) actually liked a lot of that poetry, and felt somehow that it was “wrong” or just not permitted for you (me) to do so.)
Now Malone has a little (tiny) e-chapbook up that takes that tendency all the way. These poems are as self-involved and exhibitionist as they can manage, full of self-flagellations and sexual confessions that more or less openly invite you to judge the poet personally (“i don’t even know who i would call / tonight, for sex / because i don’t feel like trying hard / or listening to anyone talk about themselves / which is a courtesy you must provide / if you are about to use them / for their body”). And as I read the poems, I found myself doing just that, looking not so much at the content of the confessions as at the self-dramatizing narcissism that seems to prompt them and thinking, “I don’t know if I like this poetry because I don’t know if I like this person.”
Then, eight poems into the ten-poem selection, Malone pulls off a trick that reminds you (me) that this really ain’t your college lit mag after all: she drops in a totally self-aware and really affecting poem about the very act of judging that she’s just been baiting you (me) into, about the meaninglessness of judgments and the pain and confusion of being judged and the impossibility of refraining from judging others even while you’re begging not to be judged yourself. And then you (I) remember that that’s what all these poems are about, not just in their desperately insecure content but even more so in their quietly confident form, in their choice of an aesthetic that does away with all kinds of artistic point-scoring and then defies you not to dismiss it as amateurish. You feel a little ashamed to like these poems as you feel a little ashamed to like this poet, but you do and you’ll be happier if you just go ahead and embrace it.
When I got to the end of this book my first thought was, “Okay, Kendra Grant Malone, I guess you win.” Which means, “Yeah, okay, I will go ahead and buy your full-length poetry collection when it comes out,” and is maybe all I needed to say here.
Kendra Grant Malone is a poet and fiction writer I first came across on the same DRUNK blog where I discovered Daniel Bailey and Bryan Coffelt. Like Bailey, she could be seen as part of a “New Sincerity,” a wave of young poets who eschew the impersonality of most innovative poetry and even the rhetoricalness of most mainstream poetry to just, sort of, write what they feel, in a way that looks like nothing so much as the poetry you remember from your undergrad lit mag. (Here’s the thing, you (I) actually liked a lot of that poetry, and felt somehow that it was “wrong” or just not permitted for you (me) to do so.)
Now Malone has a little (tiny) e-chapbook up that takes that tendency all the way. These poems are as self-involved and exhibitionist as they can manage, full of self-flagellations and sexual confessions that more or less openly invite you to judge the poet personally (“i don’t even know who i would call / tonight, for sex / because i don’t feel like trying hard / or listening to anyone talk about themselves / which is a courtesy you must provide / if you are about to use them / for their body”). And as I read the poems, I found myself doing just that, looking not so much at the content of the confessions as at the self-dramatizing narcissism that seems to prompt them and thinking, “I don’t know if I like this poetry because I don’t know if I like this person.”
Then, eight poems into the ten-poem selection, Malone pulls off a trick that reminds you (me) that this really ain’t your college lit mag after all: she drops in a totally self-aware and really affecting poem about the very act of judging that she’s just been baiting you (me) into, about the meaninglessness of judgments and the pain and confusion of being judged and the impossibility of refraining from judging others even while you’re begging not to be judged yourself. And then you (I) remember that that’s what all these poems are about, not just in their desperately insecure content but even more so in their quietly confident form, in their choice of an aesthetic that does away with all kinds of artistic point-scoring and then defies you not to dismiss it as amateurish. You feel a little ashamed to like these poems as you feel a little ashamed to like this poet, but you do and you’ll be happier if you just go ahead and embrace it.
When I got to the end of this book my first thought was, “Okay, Kendra Grant Malone, I guess you win.” Which means, “Yeah, okay, I will go ahead and buy your full-length poetry collection when it comes out,” and is maybe all I needed to say here.
"It was played to death / and its remakes are crap / but still it sounds okay Walt Whitman"
Today’s Reading: Anne Boyer, The 2000s: A History of the Future in Advance of Itself (click to get the whole thing free, because Anne Boyer is open-source and awesome like that)
The form of these poems—hyperparatactic prose—should be familiar to readers of New Sentence writers like Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian. Their tone of Jeremiac hysteria might ring a bell for fans of contemporary mad-poets like Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, or Hannah Weiner. But Boyer is witty, weird, and, yes, sincere enough to make these familiar ingredients feel completely fresh and genuine.
She has tricks for taking you off-guard, for one thing—like when she launches into a somewhat scathing, though never unbelievable, close reading of her own poem midway through it; or when, just a few pages later, she suddenly shifts into the language of a fully blown and beautifully aching love poem. But what really animates these poems is the merciless critical eye that Boyer turns on her contemporary moment, the same crabby righteousness that makes her blog and even her twitter feed such harrowingly essential reading. Somehow Boyer manages to be both a defiant dropout from modern life and at the same time a deadly accurate observer of it, as unnerving to see as someone standing in the doorway at a party and taking notes.
Boyer’s observations can take the form of deadly one-liners: “It was like an art exhibit after postmodernism: 100% subtitle,” “They say irony and I say good luck with that.” But more often her shots are deeper and darker, depicting a world of infinite connection and wealth in which somehow every experience is one of isolation and poverty. She can strike an impossible balance between satire and vulnerability: “I searched on the Internet for that guy’s name + freedom and that other guy’s name + love.” Or she can write with bitter realism about the quiet desperation of American life:
***
Meanwhile, her other free book, Ma Vie En Bling, is roughly equally as good. It has poems with unnumbered sections that each start on a new page, so you finish the first part and think, “That was a really good poem,” then you turn the page and think, “Oh cool, there’s more.” Major themes include pornography and rabbits, and damn-I-wish-I-had-written-that good titles include “He Hates My Life of Art and Beauty.”
The form of these poems—hyperparatactic prose—should be familiar to readers of New Sentence writers like Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian. Their tone of Jeremiac hysteria might ring a bell for fans of contemporary mad-poets like Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, or Hannah Weiner. But Boyer is witty, weird, and, yes, sincere enough to make these familiar ingredients feel completely fresh and genuine.
She has tricks for taking you off-guard, for one thing—like when she launches into a somewhat scathing, though never unbelievable, close reading of her own poem midway through it; or when, just a few pages later, she suddenly shifts into the language of a fully blown and beautifully aching love poem. But what really animates these poems is the merciless critical eye that Boyer turns on her contemporary moment, the same crabby righteousness that makes her blog and even her twitter feed such harrowingly essential reading. Somehow Boyer manages to be both a defiant dropout from modern life and at the same time a deadly accurate observer of it, as unnerving to see as someone standing in the doorway at a party and taking notes.
Boyer’s observations can take the form of deadly one-liners: “It was like an art exhibit after postmodernism: 100% subtitle,” “They say irony and I say good luck with that.” But more often her shots are deeper and darker, depicting a world of infinite connection and wealth in which somehow every experience is one of isolation and poverty. She can strike an impossible balance between satire and vulnerability: “I searched on the Internet for that guy’s name + freedom and that other guy’s name + love.” Or she can write with bitter realism about the quiet desperation of American life:
I was alive for years and had a job then. Whoever said we worked without risk has lied or spoken only for herself. I sit all day and everything around me is brutal and sloppy. They get angry with me. They always have. Someone bites my fingers. Someone yells. I was on the porch telling the visitors that I would like to feel a little less battered by the facts.As those quotes suggest, Boyer is also fearlessly self-implicating (“I was a poet who wrote on the Internet. History provided me with my future’s true love”). That sense of standing in the doorway—disgusted by the scene but ultimately trapped both by social pressures and by one’s own desires, if not by the fact that there’s literally nowhere else to go—gives the book its overarching tone, one of wounded ferocity or self-emulating tenderness. It is, as Boyer recognizes, not just the twenty-first century condition, but a fully existential plight. Time past and time future are contained in time present, as Eliot wrote, and all time is perhaps—as he also feared—unredeemable: “What I was thinking was not contingent on the millennium. What I was thinking was ‘life has been so hard for many of us and what we really need to do is rest.’”
***
Meanwhile, her other free book, Ma Vie En Bling, is roughly equally as good. It has poems with unnumbered sections that each start on a new page, so you finish the first part and think, “That was a really good poem,” then you turn the page and think, “Oh cool, there’s more.” Major themes include pornography and rabbits, and damn-I-wish-I-had-written-that good titles include “He Hates My Life of Art and Beauty.”
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?
***
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.
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.
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)
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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
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.
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.
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!)
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:
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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