The Trouble With Words

Last week’s visit to Naropa challenged and humbled my thinking about writing and poetry. Not only was it a pleasure to work with so many talented and curious students, and to speak with artists whose work makes me reflect on the complex practices and possibilities in words and performance (I’m thinking of Jack Collom, for instance, who manages to attend the practical details of the world with a writing practice that is inclusive of life, mind, heart, and eyes), but I also was able to witness the work of many people who take direction from multiple sources. Alberto Ruy Sanchez’s lecture on the rituals of the dead in rural Mexican communities offered a great opportunity to consider the use of the poetic in daily life while Michelle Ellsworth’s performances centered on relations of the individual to religion.

Karl Gartung, visiting from Milwaukee, gave a reading that helped slow my thought to look again at the page with greater care. “[W]e must / act,” he writes in Now What Memory Has Become So Important, “on our local / curiosities / constructing / such truth / as may be constructed / at close range.” Such “close range” listening really does speak to the heart of poetic practice writers last week at Naropa discussed in great detail, if through different voices and perspectives. What humbled me was the pace—the very life pace—of many writers—how in their attentive labor they trust so totally in an abiding curiosity, bringing words and poetry within range of some as yet unspoken claim. I felt as though somehow these last months or years I have been adrift in my practice, too easily opening myself to the theoretical rather than attending the fluid, practical traces of life and feeling that finally only matter to the poem as an artifice of collective possibility.

Partially, I’m thinking of recent personal conversations with Tom Clark, Jenny Dorn, Kenny Goldsmith, and others. In very different ways I hear in them challenges to my own senses of priority, and to the kinds of claims I make on an art—on the history of such a thing.

Correspondingly, I found the performances and words of choreographer Simone Forti particularly vital as her work speaks to the intersection of the every day with larger social experience. Simone’s performance Saturday night in Boulder was one of the most terrific things I’ve seen in a long time. Her monologue was sustained by physical movement across the stage, integrating a pliant, questing mind with an open and burdened body of feeling. She interrogated history—her personal and familial history—in conflict with what we settle for, winding down as social artifacts, compliant to the crippling modes of thought we are often too fearful to engage and address. The bravery of the exposed body, the staged body, the improvisational modality of a body in space, somehow rose up through the words, a secondary, descriptive source to the conceptually energetic play within physic casement.

Insofar as the week focused on notions of community, I was gratified to witness so many corresponding associations of thought about poetry as communicative possibility. On the 6:30 am drive to the Denver airport with Hoa and sleepy boys I pledged to bring all my efforts at writing down, closer to the ground, and to do what feels so difficult, particularly in digital space, but to use these electronic tools to bring what I can to the page—or to the screen. I feel more and more certain that digital communication—particularly blogs—fail in that Marshall McLuhan sense of the medium-is-the-message to construct adequate public forums for discussion—or to even extend humanly useful or meaningful language that can rise above the flattened social reality of the web. The medium dictates the news, which is reduced to sound bites of info, too often garbled in the half-light of kinetic engagement.

As a blogger I want to resist the medium as much as I can to avoid things that happen so frequently, like two weeks ago here, where a quick response to something triggers a number of masques in the comments fields, where writers rehearse their particular affinities, often at the willful exclusion of a willing and engaged opposition. The blog world too easily dumbs things down. While many compelling writers blog at Harriet the conversations there can feel stilted, performed, too cleverly arranged, or positively designed. The responses are by far some of the most predictable, a few blowhards returning again and again to dictate the drift. My favorite blogs—like Wood’s Lot provide a tremendous service, presenting news of use to a community of writers and readers—and he does so without the need of crippling commentary. I want to think about how my words contribute to that community—and not to anything under possession of “me.” While I want to “hold onto my ego” I’d like it complicated by its relation and distribution among others.

So this is just to say that Naropa was a marvelous experience—a rich and exhausting one. Anne Waldman’s a force of nature, and deserves a thousand notes of gratitude and respects for her efforts to sustain the light in a dark and crumbling world (I’m tired, sorry, the metaphors of light and darkness will have to do). For myself, I plan to become more capable of the often impossible and demanding role of writer, though I really doubt there’s any satisfaction in such a task. The words just don’t correlate. The self spins too quickly beyond their local truths. The mind errs in extremis as it tries to accommodate cultural notions of where words should go. The emotions devour the calm and centered purpose one expects. The world’s duplicitous objectives attempt at all times to devour the writer, even as the writer devours herself for overstepping in an effort to reach a beyond that runs alien to all one claims to be. The birds have it better. Like the Arkansas goldfinches we saw from under the apple tree in Jack Collom’s yard.