T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (in Comic Sans)

THE WASTE LAND

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off . . .”

Meet Emily Pumpkinson, the Gourd of Amherst.

Unfortunately, Emily isn’t bright enough to photograph in the dark.

Also, the inside of her head is infested with brain slugs.

Generally feeling a little sad about Emily right now.

“The sky the color of tenure”: On Jim Behrle’s “Succubus Blues”

If all the poet-bullies on the internet were as funny, weird, and self-deprecating about it as Jim Behrle, it might actually be a bad thing that Silliman closed down his comments. Behrle’s online persona is like a broken clock that always points to “self-important douche”—except that since he’s talking about other poets, he’s right way more than twice a day. So: refreshing.

That would only make him an interesting online curiosity, though, if his poems didn’t back it up. Well, I’ve just finished reading his most recent chapbook, Succubus Blues, and I feel that I can fairly say he does alright. I’m not sure if he’s really (as he’s declared himself) funnier than most of the Flarfists, but he sure as hell holds his own, and by pairing his cut-up/standup routines with a more straightforward first-person voice, he gives himself a chance to really maximize the dynamic of comedy and pathos that Flarf usually only teases.

If that doesn’t quite happen, maybe it’s because Behrle’s sincerity remains more artificial than Flarf’s artifice. Where the best Flarf poets can—by channeling their own deepest anxieties through the chorus of Google—tap into something that feels both fundamentally human and utterly impersonal, Behrle’s shticky pseudo-confessions tend to bury him further in a kind of hard-luck, “don’t-get-no-respect” persona. There’s huge poetic potential in his strange mix of exposure and artifice, vulnerability and facetiousness; but as of yet he may be best tapping that potential through his series of endlessly churned-up, ambiguously one-sided internet feuds. He may just be the first literary artist whose true medium is the flame war.

Whatever else he is, though, he’s also kind of clever smart-ass that poetry still needs more of, full of sick satirical burns like “I adored the blurb you gave me so much / I wrote you a thank you blurb,” or “I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way.” And then there is that other voice that lurks behind the wisecracks, the one that, in “I Establish Rapport,” seems to genuinely wish it could do just that—the voice that hates all the careerism and fakery not for its own sake but for the way it isolates and dehumanizes; the skillful lyric voice that can instantly pivot our viewpoint from the togetherness of the crowd to the loneliness of the performer: “We can’t help it, Jim, we touch and feel loved / Although completely alone / Behind the mic I’m burning too.”

“This is as good as I’m ever gonna be / So, you’ll have to be the one to change into a green brutal / Diamond,” Behrle writes in one self-deprecating yet ironically wonderful moment. Could be—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still got better. Or if not, hey, there’s always the flame wars.

Inexplicably, the only place on the internet to ask this question...

Are cats our friends?

On “A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever” by Bryan Coffelt

I had to wait a while for my copy of Bryan Coffelt’s chapbook The Whatever Poems, long enough to generate a kind of private hype in my head that might be difficult for any chapbook to live up to. But if the extra build-up made The Whatever Poems itself seem merely-good in my reading, the wait was more than paid off by the other micro-chap that I bought along with it, A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever. Tiny rectangles stitched with virgules and dashes, the poems there (or is it a single sequence?) visually recall Emily Dickinson; but in their swirling, mosaic use of shattered fragments of language, they’re closer to Dickinson’s latter-day acolyte Susan Howe. This one might be my new favorite poem:

     phantoms
     April / adorned with — the blossoms
     adorned with — the pallor, the guilty
     erasingly tingly Wi-Fi
     dying fingers
     / adorned with —
     the bricks the Harvard bricks, suited
     adorned with — doggie-style analog
     spectrum — the being mule-like of it —
     adorned with —
     reunions & reunions & reunions

Coffelt is a young poet seemingly still sorting through a range of influences—language writing, Flarf, MuuMuu House–like minimalism—and sometimes his work seems visibly experimental. In this little pamphlet, though, he’s hit on a style that feels both timeless and blindingly contemporary, luminous and depopulated yet scab-pickingly emotional. Like Howe’s—or the more intensely focused of Pound’s or Dickinson’s—it’s the kind of poetry that seems carefully chiseled and at the same time totally authorless, as if it condensed out of the air, or radiated from the sun.

And in a show of great instincts, Coffelt has underlined that effect by not putting his name anywhere on the book. With its landscape orientation and slight page count, the book feels like some kind of reverse-polarity Chick tract, a subtle bit of viral marketing that cries out to be passed on. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to keep it more, I’d be tempted to leave it on a bench somewhere—a little mystery (which of course Google would make it easy to solve, leading the finder back to Coffelt’s blog and perhaps out into the wider world of good poetry) for anyone called to pick it up.

***
Oh and I guess you can read the whole thing as a blog post, too, though I think it must lose a lot without the clean, poem-per-page presentation of the print version.

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Places Where I Read “Richard Yates” by Tao Lin

A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: This is a fictionalized account of Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I realized that at the time and was deeply disturbed by it, hence my unwillingness to say anything substantial at about the book then.

—Laundromat on Preston Avenue.
—Charlottesville train station.
—Train from Charlottesville to New York.
—Friend’s apartment in Manhattan.
—Sushi restaurant near that apartment.
—Train from New York to Charlottesville.

I think that’s all I want to say about it right now.

Things That Always Work

When someone yells out “solo,” or something similar, to announce a solo—that always works.

You can do it earnestly:



You can do it ironically:



You can do it like a little girl who just saw a spider:



Or you can do it all like “Whatever, I don’t care”:



Doesn’t matter. It always works.

Partial List of Things That Ariana Reines Can Do, Based on Her Book "Coeur de Lion"

She can write and even publish a poem in what seems like the next thing to real time, as kind of journal of a failed relationship, and yet still give it a shape and arc that couldn’t have been planned out to be any more satisfying or true. She is able to burrow through the weltering, needlingly poetic emotions of breaking up and somehow bring the whole thing down for a safe landing in the prose of getting-over-it, without any feeling of anticlimax—she is able to make an anticlimax that feels earned? She is able to take apart this guy, the guy she had the relationship with, so intimately and so relentlessly that you actually feel sorry for him even though it’s pretty clear that he pretty much deserves it, and she is able to make herself more and more engaging as a narrator the meaner she is. She is able to make you feel embarrassed for the guy and for yourself just by quoting a few bits of his love letters, which are pretty normal, among her own language, which is seriously not. She is also able to drop old-school poetry lines like this on you and make you fucking believe them:

     Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
     Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
     Where are the bitches who know what they want
     Who love what they do, bosomy and declarative,
     Happy to be artistic in this stupid night.

She is able to write a second book in the year after publishing her very successful first book that is better, more profound, and yet also more accessible than that first book, and then publish it herself in a tiny run with no blurbs and little promotion like, “Oh, here’s this great book I wrote, I’ll just toss this out there, I’m sure there’ll be more where that came from.” And, unless I’m seriously wrong, she is able to be right about that, because this woman seems to produce poetry the way that other people produce sweat, as if she just has some special glands that make her excrete amazing poetry just by sitting around. Or else she is really good at giving that appearance, like Yeats wrote, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”; I wouldn’t want to give the impression that she doesn’t do that, I’m sure she does, or she might anyway.

The Coeur de Lion of the title turns out to be a cheese, which at some point in the poem gets compared to the poet’s vagina. She is able to make that comparison work, as like, the central motif of a one hundred page love poem. She could write stuff like “Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube” all day and it wouldn’t make this book any less amazing; delivered in her skinny, almost violently controlled lines, with her mysterious and unrelenting conviction, that shit sounds fucking profound.

When I got to the page in the book where the following lines appear, by themselves, I actually read them over a good five or six times, because she told me to, that’s why:
  
     I love words
     Cos they’re so weak
     (repeat)

Basically, she can do what the hell she wants, is what I’m saying.

The Conspiracy Against Growing the Hell Up Already

So Adam Fieled wants to “take up cudgels” against the “outré,” the “ethnic,” and the “deviant,” because they constitute a “conspiracy” against “consensus opinions... borne out or subtly shifted over long periods of time.” But don’t leap to accusations of “regressive conservatism”; it’s just that in today’s world, “the way forward is the way back” because “it must be.”

Okay, that’s a cheap shot, but not that cheap. Those quotes aren’t that far out of context: Fieled really does link “the ethnic and the deviant” as the two things that “political correctness” gravitates towards (which means that “deviant” stands for what here—gays, women, outsider art, all of those?). And the essay contains a quantity of metaphoric violence that would make Marinetti blush, all starting fires and burning things to the ground and building on the ashes.

Here would be a less cheap response, and the reason why I normally try to abstain from responding to this kind of thing at all: The entire argument that poetry has “has ceased to be itself” because there’s a lot of it you don’t like should be embarrassingly solipsistic. I happen to read a heck of a lot of poetry that I like all the time, and I bet a lot of it is exactly the stuff that Fieled thinks is “moribund.” Some of those “grayish fortresses” he wants “burnt to the ground” happen to have people living in them, you know. Somehow, though, he seems to feel that the world would be objectively better if he could displace those people to make more room for himself. Poetry becomes a weird kind of aesthetic colonization, a zero-sum game in which the would-be conqueror's personal satisfaction is equated with the right alignment of the universe.

If Fieled wants to see a different kind of poetry in the world, all he has to do is write it, or spread it where he finds it in the writing of others. These are activities that I gather he’s participated in, and none of them require him to destroy the work of others to make room—as should be evident from his own healthy list of publications, apparently none of which were canceled in order to publish an extra book by (I’m guessing here, since he doesn’t name any names) Kenneth Goldsmith or Ron Silliman. Seeing poetry you don’t like isn’t a reason for a revolution; it’s a reason to go read a different book.

This kind of attitude is so prevalent, and I find it really frustrating and depressing. Maybe I should set fire to it?

(A much funnier response to similar attitudes that everyone should read is here.)

not experiment but equipoise

not heroics but healing

not nostrums but normalcy

not revolution but restoration

not agitation but adjustment

not surgery but serenity

not the dramatic but the dispassionate

not experiment but equipoise

Tao Lin, Lorrie Moore, a Chimp Washing a Cat

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.

I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s Like Life, realizing how directly Tao Lin imitated her in Bed (this is not an unfounded accusation, he’s more or less said so here). Yet somehow that doesn’t take away from my appreciation for Bed at all. Maybe it’s because of the way that Tao Lin’s reflections of other writers—whether it’s Moore in Bed or Anne Beattie in Eeeee Eee Eeee—are so cracked and distorted, in ways that are more idiosyncratic than most writers’ originality, ways that he maybe couldn’t help even if he wanted to. Even the flaws of Moore’s writing get picked up and heightened, as if unconsciously. Example: If Moore uses appositive descriptions along the lines of “the refrigerated smell... the vague shame and hamburger death of it” distractingly often, Lin in Bed uses them more often, more weirdly, and even more distractingly: “the word awning… the complete, incomplete word of it,” “the air conditioner… the biscuit-brown plastic appliance thing of it,” “her teeth, the private collection of them,” etc. What comes through is a kind of untameable unprofessionalism, rough edges and self-indulgences that would be polished away in any decent workshop, but that for Lin constitute something like a voice, one more vibrant than correct, more distinct—even in pastiche—than controlled. An overdriven version of his models that, for all the times I might wince at the weird grammar or repetitive tics, seems worth the costs for the sheer electricity and volume of it.

It’s kind of like watching a chimpanzee wash a cat. Bear with me here. You know the chimp’s only doing it in imitation of a human, you know you’ve seen humans do this a million times before, you even know that a human would, by some standard, do it “better”—but none of that makes it any less funny to watch. Whereas with a human the cat would be the star, somehow the chimp kind of steals the show. And, though the human might be the best way to get your cat clean, you know which one you’d rather watch on an endless loop on YouTube.

Of course, Tao Lin never really uses what he’s called his “Lorrie Moore” style anymore; it’s all about the “concrete style” now. But from what I’ve heard in advance of and about Richard Yates, due out in just weeks, I’m hopeful that he still won’t—still can’t—lose those rough edges.

Click My Name

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is spoof, what is crazy and what is the actual truth.

But it is easy to see the direction we are headed in. Martial law is a definite possibility.

Click my name and see my blog.

"Death is the Mother of Beauty" (on "Man on Wire")

Note: I've just got Netflix, so this may become something of a film blog for a while until I catch up on the many, many interesting semirecent releases I've missed.
 
The construction of this documentary sometimes strays towards the cheesy, as with the computer-animated plane that tracks the protagonist’s travels, or the borderline Unsolved Mysteries–style reenactments. Yet the incredible story of Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers fully shines through, aided by some incredible archival materials and by Petit’s own pleasantly hammy storytelling. It’s almost a stroke of luck that no motion footage exists of the walk itself, turning that impossible reality into a kind of sublime semi-absence at the heart of the film, leaving the filmmakers to linger over still-shots of Petit grinning as he strides confidently across the wire, or lying languidly on his back gazing up like a picnicker on a hill—except seen from a quarter of a mile below. Seeing these images, knowing what Petit went through to get up there, it’s difficult not to feel as overwhelmed by the event as the eyewitnesses telling the story—and even the cop who arrested Petit afterwards (captured in a contemporaneous news interview) appears to tear up a bit as he speaks of “watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world.”

Whatever pall of grim prophecy is cast over those words by the subsequent history of the World Trade Center is consciously ignored by the film, yet not tonally inconsonant with its implicit critique of the monomania, and the attendant selfishness and irresponsibility to those who aid and support him, that drives Petit to his miraculous performance. The image of this man defying all authority, from the police on up to gravity itself, to achieve something like tranquility and freedom on a literal walk through the clouds—it’s truly beautiful. But it’s also impossible to forget—indeed, it’s necessary not to forget, since the beauty depends on it—the 1300-foot deep mouth of death above which he balances.

When Mumblecore Meets Hardcore (on "The Girlfriend Experience")

I’m pretty pleased that Steven Sodergergh hired the world’s most market-savvy porn star and used her to make what amounts to a big-budget mumblecore movie about capitalism as prostitution. I dig the film’s implication that our high-gloss, sell-or-be-sold culture encourages us to hollow out our actual lives for the sake of our personal brands; and I love the postmodern twist of casting someone who’s by all appearances living that critique (and owning it?) to play the lead role. But—and this is a real question for anyone who’s seen the movie—how is the last scene not Ezra Pound–levels of anti-Semitic?

It's So Cold

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.

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.
                                       –“Dear Marguerite”

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.

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.

Wow, John Campbell.

Just wow.

"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:

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.”