Saturday, February 28, 2009
Tom Clark on Dangerous Writing / Dangerous Blogging
Tom Clark offers some new posts on blogging, stealth, and subversion at Vanitas. He also includes recent news reports about Egyptian and Chinese bloggers who often face torture, or even death, because of their political views. There are great discussions of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Curzio Malaparte, too.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
David Orr's New York Times piece on "greatness" isn't news to anyone, but it did make me spit a mouthful of wine across the room tonight, for anyone interested in the projective state of my thoughts on contemporary mediation of, uh, "verse." Wow.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Sympathy * Prejudice * Obsession
Exterminating Angel was checked out, so over the weekend I saw Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), starring Silvia Pinal, Francisco Rabal, and Fernando Rey. This was the first film Buñuel had made in Spain after leaving the country in the 1930s. One reason it works so well is because of the symbolic relationship the film establishes with his audience. Viridiana arrives not as a film-for-film’s-sake expression of formal values, but as a social testament against the history of Spanish fascism (Franco, of course, was still in charge during shooting). Buñuel also lashes out at the Catholic Church and its collusion with Spanish fascism. So on a very general surface, it’s easy to see that Viridiana was made for an audience familiar with the recent European events that included the rise of fascism and its decline after the war. The film won a Palm d’Or at Cannes in 1961, and received condemnation shortly thereafter by the Vatican: Franco, angered by the disapproval, ordered the film’s archives destroyed.
What I find interesting is that Viridiana managed to address a number of issues related to the church, politics, gender, class, and labor. This would have helped insure an audience for the film, for it spoke to then-contemporary concerns. But those aspects alone don’t make the movie so great, especially from our viewing perspective today. What makes Viridiana so marvelous is the incongruent arrangements of the symbolic acts that mark the film. The Saturnalian inversions of high and low, the erotic presence between the main character, her uncle, and cousin, and the sexual intimacy she radiates for God and leper alike, all interact to tell us something about human motivations—that kindness and cruelty often share the same bed, or that religious desire and earthly passion remain indifferent to God or other: desire itself dominates the decisive acts that give life meaning.
The narrative melodrama of Viridiana provides a simple surface on which Buñuel enacts the more mysterious accounts of human desire. He ranges on screen between images that provoke indifference or laughter from viewers—all pointing to the failed transaction attempted on behalf of desire. The scene of the Last Supper that he illustrates with beggars and social outcasts is hilarious and repulsive, and ultimately it moves closer to a nascent gospel interpretation than the now-stock images of divine communion render. The weirdness and candor of life is here, and it makes evident that for Buñuel the surreal is not a fanciful construction, but is made in images gathered from the experience of every day life. When Viridiana, for instance, sleepwalks to the fireplace to gather ashes that she will later spread in her sheets, a bare leg is exposed to her uncle, provoking his desire. The leg, the ash, the coarse night gown Viridiana wears all congeal into a surrealist image that speaks to the weirdness of life rather than calling attention to itself: form is in the service of poetry. Walter Benjamin’s angel-of-history came to mind as I watched this movie, for Buñuel trades in the broken heap of images that constructs the past—and the present. He dreams into a future from the remains of cultural debris, and renders it new.
I keep turning to Buñuel to re-examine the impulses behind modernism. I admire his vision and his submission to material reality. He adheres to the mundane in his art—applying practical wisdom through narrative. This sense of phronesis enables a bond of trust between auteur and audience, as the boundary between the dramatic act and the repressed experience of daily life meet, briefly, in film.
For many years I have argued that film and cinematic theory are far superior to the metacritical jargon of poetry. This is not just due to the scopic advantage of film: the difference lies in aesthetic and rhetorical commitments, too. Perhaps the expense of making movies forces directors to make critical decisions that poets have no way of imagining. The pressure to justify one’s moves in cinema is great—even if you are an avant-gardist like Buñuel: you want to be responsible with your material resources.
In a book Lyn Hejinian published several years ago—Devotional Cinema—Nathaniel Dorsky argued that being, like the frames in a film, was “aerated” by non-being—the equivalent of the black bars intruding on the exposed images of filmic frames. The metaphor, regardless of “truth” value, provokes for me profound reverence. In fact, this sense of reverence accompanies Buñuel and others Dorsky identifies as great modernists, like Antonioni and Ozu. This sense of reverence, or devotion, is what I seek also in poetry. Now by saying that my critics will label me as some kind of anti-modernist conservative: but nothing could be farther from the truth. The experimental daring and the ethical wagers made by these artists risk everything to bring a new vision to the world. And I wonder what poets risk in their commitments to various ideologies, fashions, trends, market approvals, and pack values?
When poets proclaim a carefully staged disregard for, say, investigative poetics, arguing instead on behalf of a self-expressive preference in poetic pursuit, I wonder about the legacy of the modernist values that gave permission to proceed in the first place. The past is a wreck, but it doesn’t go away simply because of ignorance shown toward it.
In my thoughts recently on devotion in art I’ve been turning again to Christain Bök’s —Eunoia. While I have ongoing, though productive, arguments with myself about Bök’s work, I absolutely adhere in sympathy with his devotions (or pathologies, whatever they be). Such labor in language represents a commitment to submit the self to something other. And yet now we live in a moment where extraordinary rhetorical strategies are used to establish distance between self and text, self and others, self and language, self and the proclaimed commitments imagined by other versions of the self in order to avert the more difficult human exchanges that expose the self rather than hiding it. All this effort to perform categorical cultural expectations only bulldozes more promising possibilities in language. Postmodern, late-to-nearly-gone-cap, I-Pod era America ain’t all that advanced over anything else that’s come before it: we still must give voice to our commitments and sympathies. While some don’t want to discuss commitments or sympathies, the lack of evidence of the latter signals a disturbing failure in the former. Even Burroughs, my hero, reads to this day—and even with his glorious depictions of ass sex—like an earnest Charles Dickens. He exposed his sympathies, uplifted his prejudices, and gave preference to his obsessions. Print that on my gravestone! Of course, his work needs no critical clarification: it's apparent when you open the book.
What I find interesting is that Viridiana managed to address a number of issues related to the church, politics, gender, class, and labor. This would have helped insure an audience for the film, for it spoke to then-contemporary concerns. But those aspects alone don’t make the movie so great, especially from our viewing perspective today. What makes Viridiana so marvelous is the incongruent arrangements of the symbolic acts that mark the film. The Saturnalian inversions of high and low, the erotic presence between the main character, her uncle, and cousin, and the sexual intimacy she radiates for God and leper alike, all interact to tell us something about human motivations—that kindness and cruelty often share the same bed, or that religious desire and earthly passion remain indifferent to God or other: desire itself dominates the decisive acts that give life meaning.
The narrative melodrama of Viridiana provides a simple surface on which Buñuel enacts the more mysterious accounts of human desire. He ranges on screen between images that provoke indifference or laughter from viewers—all pointing to the failed transaction attempted on behalf of desire. The scene of the Last Supper that he illustrates with beggars and social outcasts is hilarious and repulsive, and ultimately it moves closer to a nascent gospel interpretation than the now-stock images of divine communion render. The weirdness and candor of life is here, and it makes evident that for Buñuel the surreal is not a fanciful construction, but is made in images gathered from the experience of every day life. When Viridiana, for instance, sleepwalks to the fireplace to gather ashes that she will later spread in her sheets, a bare leg is exposed to her uncle, provoking his desire. The leg, the ash, the coarse night gown Viridiana wears all congeal into a surrealist image that speaks to the weirdness of life rather than calling attention to itself: form is in the service of poetry. Walter Benjamin’s angel-of-history came to mind as I watched this movie, for Buñuel trades in the broken heap of images that constructs the past—and the present. He dreams into a future from the remains of cultural debris, and renders it new.
I keep turning to Buñuel to re-examine the impulses behind modernism. I admire his vision and his submission to material reality. He adheres to the mundane in his art—applying practical wisdom through narrative. This sense of phronesis enables a bond of trust between auteur and audience, as the boundary between the dramatic act and the repressed experience of daily life meet, briefly, in film.
For many years I have argued that film and cinematic theory are far superior to the metacritical jargon of poetry. This is not just due to the scopic advantage of film: the difference lies in aesthetic and rhetorical commitments, too. Perhaps the expense of making movies forces directors to make critical decisions that poets have no way of imagining. The pressure to justify one’s moves in cinema is great—even if you are an avant-gardist like Buñuel: you want to be responsible with your material resources.
In a book Lyn Hejinian published several years ago—Devotional Cinema—Nathaniel Dorsky argued that being, like the frames in a film, was “aerated” by non-being—the equivalent of the black bars intruding on the exposed images of filmic frames. The metaphor, regardless of “truth” value, provokes for me profound reverence. In fact, this sense of reverence accompanies Buñuel and others Dorsky identifies as great modernists, like Antonioni and Ozu. This sense of reverence, or devotion, is what I seek also in poetry. Now by saying that my critics will label me as some kind of anti-modernist conservative: but nothing could be farther from the truth. The experimental daring and the ethical wagers made by these artists risk everything to bring a new vision to the world. And I wonder what poets risk in their commitments to various ideologies, fashions, trends, market approvals, and pack values?
When poets proclaim a carefully staged disregard for, say, investigative poetics, arguing instead on behalf of a self-expressive preference in poetic pursuit, I wonder about the legacy of the modernist values that gave permission to proceed in the first place. The past is a wreck, but it doesn’t go away simply because of ignorance shown toward it.
In my thoughts recently on devotion in art I’ve been turning again to Christain Bök’s —Eunoia. While I have ongoing, though productive, arguments with myself about Bök’s work, I absolutely adhere in sympathy with his devotions (or pathologies, whatever they be). Such labor in language represents a commitment to submit the self to something other. And yet now we live in a moment where extraordinary rhetorical strategies are used to establish distance between self and text, self and others, self and language, self and the proclaimed commitments imagined by other versions of the self in order to avert the more difficult human exchanges that expose the self rather than hiding it. All this effort to perform categorical cultural expectations only bulldozes more promising possibilities in language. Postmodern, late-to-nearly-gone-cap, I-Pod era America ain’t all that advanced over anything else that’s come before it: we still must give voice to our commitments and sympathies. While some don’t want to discuss commitments or sympathies, the lack of evidence of the latter signals a disturbing failure in the former. Even Burroughs, my hero, reads to this day—and even with his glorious depictions of ass sex—like an earnest Charles Dickens. He exposed his sympathies, uplifted his prejudices, and gave preference to his obsessions. Print that on my gravestone! Of course, his work needs no critical clarification: it's apparent when you open the book.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Kenneth Irby
I wrote this in 2001 for American Book Review and thought that a review of Ken Irby's Studies: Cuts, Shots, Takes (First Intensity, 2001) deserved a second life online. A bibliography of his work is available here, too....
In a perfect world, where poetry received its deserved attention, there would be great fanfare and proclamation announcing a new work by Lawrence, Kansas, poet Kenneth Irby. His small press publications--Relation (Black Sparrow, 1970), To Max Douglas (Tansy, 1971) and Call-Steps (Station Hill, 1992), to name a few--have extended poetry with concerns of local ritual, observation, and relation. His specific attentions are given broadly to the American West, but more personally his work shows a process of mind and imagination that pursues the domestic interaction of one's place in "the father time [and] the mother space" (12). "There is no placement but fixation," Edward Dorn said about Irby’s early work. That fixed, or really, planted, notion of the poet at work in his or her place remains a primary concern of his recent writing. He continues Charles Olson's investigation of place, but does not share that intent of project, preferring a freedom of perceptive and organic experience woven into the history evident through him. This spiritual capacity for the locale of personal experience--that nexus of the real and the imagined--recalls Robert Duncan, whose carefully measured words preface Studies: "…this consonance I seek between actuality and the poem is not easy."
These poems continue the careful and observant work collected in Call-Steps, finding intimate threads through the daily pursuit and inquiry of poetic practice. Like fragments of some greater, still-in-progress work, the untitled poems in Studies mark time and embody experience with music that registers time through the ear. The interchange of g’s and s’s against the bilabial p’s and b’s in the following two-line poem extends a literary care for the syllabic pulse of poetry. Instead of description these lines lift out, charged, sounding the poet's alert perceptions.
With this close capacity for listening through an environment’s sonic range, of finding in place an extended ecological subtext, subtler currents of place and time reveal themselves. Memory, the subconscious reflex of sensation, and mental images of experience are sub-themes of Irby’s art. A kind of sorrow moves through this book too, a sadness haunting each perception or imaginal encounter.
Daemons of place appear in Irby’s poems as manifestations of his landscape, his sorrow geographically located. Kansas like America more broadly has been pushed down under weight of wagon trains, highways, lust, broken hearts and empty dreams. The psychic shock of settlement, and the socialization or destruction of the archaic, return in local and obdurate acts evident to sensitive perception. Although he writes a journal narrative, not abstracting or expanding to a more general view, the metonymy of the local suggests a broader concern, “The bounty of somebody else put some place else” (22). A “pair of wornout levis in the grass by the road,” is a synecdoche where the cultural artifact of the jeans becomes an image of abandonment in his post World War II American West.
Of course, I could be projecting my own sensitive abstractions onto this image, as well as others in the book. I can almost hear his voice reminding me, well, they’re just a pair of Levi’s. But a poem, as artifact of perception, lives in the imagination of its readers too. Writing, in this sense, becomes an art of heart and trust. Our faith in certain poets to show us our environments, to help us find our place, is strikingly essential.
There’s a vigorous and open disposition that lets Irby endure whatever sorrow his land and time present to the imagination. His organizing processes are receptive to phenomena, integrated into the poet's body and the variegated body of his verse. He pursues the vision of a common ground with a kind of Quixotic charge, so that landscape, plants, dreams, conversations, food, books, music and other domestic concerns converge in quiet meditation, or release sudden song. His resilience and optimism deliver these poems with transparent accuracy, and there’s an urgency of the lived moment expressed here too. Not that for him the world is redeemed, but that through poetry redemption remains a possibility. Sound and time build tension and expectation, as in this selection from a hymn to winter solstice:
Guy Davenport once said that study, like sex, is ruled by Eros. Through it this small book proposes the act of study as a way of finding out, and stepping out. These are intimate communications, notes to us readers who are logged in to our very separate experiences of geographic and social condition. But what we find here puts us in possession of a living ground, transposed to us, a gift from a heart in a never settled heartland.
In a perfect world, where poetry received its deserved attention, there would be great fanfare and proclamation announcing a new work by Lawrence, Kansas, poet Kenneth Irby. His small press publications--Relation (Black Sparrow, 1970), To Max Douglas (Tansy, 1971) and Call-Steps (Station Hill, 1992), to name a few--have extended poetry with concerns of local ritual, observation, and relation. His specific attentions are given broadly to the American West, but more personally his work shows a process of mind and imagination that pursues the domestic interaction of one's place in "the father time [and] the mother space" (12). "There is no placement but fixation," Edward Dorn said about Irby’s early work. That fixed, or really, planted, notion of the poet at work in his or her place remains a primary concern of his recent writing. He continues Charles Olson's investigation of place, but does not share that intent of project, preferring a freedom of perceptive and organic experience woven into the history evident through him. This spiritual capacity for the locale of personal experience--that nexus of the real and the imagined--recalls Robert Duncan, whose carefully measured words preface Studies: "…this consonance I seek between actuality and the poem is not easy."
These poems continue the careful and observant work collected in Call-Steps, finding intimate threads through the daily pursuit and inquiry of poetic practice. Like fragments of some greater, still-in-progress work, the untitled poems in Studies mark time and embody experience with music that registers time through the ear. The interchange of g’s and s’s against the bilabial p’s and b’s in the following two-line poem extends a literary care for the syllabic pulse of poetry. Instead of description these lines lift out, charged, sounding the poet's alert perceptions.
Along the grain of marble where the leaves grow slack and
start to drop
the Autumn cascade in the stone pulses blue as breathing
under its skin (18)
With this close capacity for listening through an environment’s sonic range, of finding in place an extended ecological subtext, subtler currents of place and time reveal themselves. Memory, the subconscious reflex of sensation, and mental images of experience are sub-themes of Irby’s art. A kind of sorrow moves through this book too, a sadness haunting each perception or imaginal encounter.
last night I saw my father and wasn’t sure he wasn’t still alive
sitting knees up reading in bed and all absorbed as I was in what
is in what is not lost
a moment the face fedoraless in the photo made just before he
left for the war
a moment some kid in a t-shirt and backwards baseball cap
studying for an exam
the face as the hat as the bed as the body of vision as the tense
as the death
gone to me (21)
Daemons of place appear in Irby’s poems as manifestations of his landscape, his sorrow geographically located. Kansas like America more broadly has been pushed down under weight of wagon trains, highways, lust, broken hearts and empty dreams. The psychic shock of settlement, and the socialization or destruction of the archaic, return in local and obdurate acts evident to sensitive perception. Although he writes a journal narrative, not abstracting or expanding to a more general view, the metonymy of the local suggests a broader concern, “The bounty of somebody else put some place else” (22). A “pair of wornout levis in the grass by the road,” is a synecdoche where the cultural artifact of the jeans becomes an image of abandonment in his post World War II American West.
pockets empty but for a few odds and ends
a marble or two, a couple of pebbles, some smashed links of a
chain, a nut, a foreign coin (how did it get left?), faded
matted ticket stubs
all that it mattered to life to keep always along (23)
Of course, I could be projecting my own sensitive abstractions onto this image, as well as others in the book. I can almost hear his voice reminding me, well, they’re just a pair of Levi’s. But a poem, as artifact of perception, lives in the imagination of its readers too. Writing, in this sense, becomes an art of heart and trust. Our faith in certain poets to show us our environments, to help us find our place, is strikingly essential.
There’s a vigorous and open disposition that lets Irby endure whatever sorrow his land and time present to the imagination. His organizing processes are receptive to phenomena, integrated into the poet's body and the variegated body of his verse. He pursues the vision of a common ground with a kind of Quixotic charge, so that landscape, plants, dreams, conversations, food, books, music and other domestic concerns converge in quiet meditation, or release sudden song. His resilience and optimism deliver these poems with transparent accuracy, and there’s an urgency of the lived moment expressed here too. Not that for him the world is redeemed, but that through poetry redemption remains a possibility. Sound and time build tension and expectation, as in this selection from a hymn to winter solstice:
the day’s the year’s walk to come
to search a mystery in your own face in everyone’s
o spirit, I’m too old
wouldn’t it be better if I just went home to bed?
o no
the rituals to turn around and upside down
to free from the bonds of all the rest of the year and
years and days
even if just for the blinking of an eye to start to last
light the temenos of a candle
of a light lit and it
long looked at
and through it (44)
Guy Davenport once said that study, like sex, is ruled by Eros. Through it this small book proposes the act of study as a way of finding out, and stepping out. These are intimate communications, notes to us readers who are logged in to our very separate experiences of geographic and social condition. But what we find here puts us in possession of a living ground, transposed to us, a gift from a heart in a never settled heartland.
Rhetoric Mannequins
While Hoa read poems, sat on poetry panels, and divined the tarot at the Effing Press booth in Chicago at AWP, I stayed home with the kids, played papa, read stories, chopped up a star jasmine that had overwhelmed our porch, and visited Antone’s Records for some T-Bone Walker, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Lighting Hopkins essentials (I’m the featured poet at Arkansas State’s “Delta Blues Symposium” this spring, and I want to brush up on the blues, particularly the Texas fertilizations of it via the classic Austin honky-tonk, Antone’s). Once I got the kids in bed Friday and Saturday nights, I indulged, thanks to my good friend Kim, in a weekend of Luis Buñuel, specifically The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Diary of a Chambermaid. Both remind me why Buñuel remains such a singular auteur and critic of the decay that resides in the heart of the dirty little human soul. Like Old Man Monteil shooting butterflies for target practice (close range) and Joseph the gardener’s violation of innocence in the woods (he leaves an escargot on the leg of the girl he has just raped and slaughtered), I couldn’t help but wonder, as I often do, about the distance between surface social exchanges and the more hidden urges that reside within. Americans generally cast themselves in a narrative of innocence (remember the official threads of heroism and violation just after 9/11?). But the bodies pile up in the woods; the transgressors go free; the victims remain that.
You see a more coded version of this in the poetry blogosphere—the social arrangements that sustain it are mostly treacherous. Recent skirmishes among the diminishing strands of avant-gardism (I never understood “post-avant” except as a toothless, post-political version of social networking) have erupted here, and the evidence of predatory acts and innuendos are recorded, though fortunately no bodies have surfaced. What interests me, however, is trust: who am I willing to commit to in this treacherous and lovely journey in poetry (in life?)? This is what, in part, led me to Slow Poetry: I wanted to offer a platform through which many different perspectives could meet, in earnest, to think through the present. I’m looking forward to the new Slow Poetry feature in Big Bridge. It should be available soon, and I’ll announce it, for sure, here. And you know, I don’t have to like those I trust. I am capable of the most impersonal of relationships. But that sense of trust, of common effort in the adventure of poetry must remain vital.
I’ve often benefited from Tom Clark’s voice—in poetry and conversation—because it arrives with singular devotion for what can and cannot be trusted. His sense of things—the gnarled social snares and stares, say—inspired long ago my curiosity in human behavior and in understanding the ways it contributes to dangerous ideological narratives. Over the weekend I responded to Tom’s recent post, “The Lonesome Guitarist,” (he offers perspective now as permanent guest blogger at Vincent Katz’s Vanitas). Here’s what I said:
[Tom], I also wonder about that guitarist, and how good it is to have some purpose--even if no one listens--if it's utter vacuum--the guitarist has adventure, purpose, drive--in the face of that vast silence. I don't think the audience has that same awareness of adventure. They may despise the guitarist's awareness of it, too. But I've always resisted that sense of poetry's uselessness. I think it was Duncan who said something to that effect--poetry does nothing. I don't believe that though--but you can't count on response. No one loves the guitarist; they love his song. And since they love the song, they will not remember the singer. I like the image of a poet as a medieval craftsman. Those cathedrals remain, but who remembers the masons and architects who made them. For me, poetry gives something that others don't have: a way to enter the world more efficiently.
*
Jodi Dean has more to say on tag clouds and symbolic efficiency in a reply to Jane Dark. Again, my understanding of the significance of symbolic efficiency has to do with the fact of our capacities to mediate experience, knowledge, dreams—whatever. Buñuel has a particularly powerful and humorous ability to arrange images in ways that an audience can delight in even as they confound or refute expectations of what constitutes reality. The aimless ambulation of bourgeois couples in Discreet Charm—or the blasted butterfly—orients our viewing of the narrative: they make sense in this context of motives. Some, mostly grad students it seems, have made hasty comments around the web of late suggesting that I support some kind of message-driven poetry, presumably based on half-crocked readings of my symbolic efficiency posts. Nothing could be further from the case. I am not contributing to a formal discussion of poetry. Look at Buñuel for humor, fun, scenes of social urgency, and dire, deep-cutting jokes within a formally challenging and compelling series of episodes or rehearsals. And yet, he frames these in narratives common to, uh, the human condition, or whatever you want to call it (are we allowed in avant-garde world to address this? the condition of our suffering? or must all be an endless joke, crass, hipster irony forever helping us evade some necessary stance in the poem—in life?). Anyway, no doubt some one will jump on me here for crying out for a more “serious” poetry. It would be interesting to see some actual curiosity and risks of thought around poetry instead of the quick, one-upmanship “masculinist” gaming routines that continue in the comments stream here, despite Henry Gould’s good recent contributions. One trick pony rides around the poetry big top won’t do—and I ain’t speakin’ just to the you-know-whos announcing poetry with an “F” before their “larf.”
Sunday, February 15, 2009
New from Effing
Scott Pierce has been busy lately making beautiful books. Check these out:
In the Bird's Breath by Marcia Roberts
and
Kiss a Bomb Tattoo by Hoa Nguyen
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Little Red Leaves
Announcing the third issue of Little Red Leaves.
Featuring work from Lisa Jarnot, Sarah Campbell, Erica Kaufman, Dennis Phillips, Sun Yung Shin, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Elizabeth Barbato, Richard Kostelanetz, Bonnie Emerick, Adam Golaski, Jessica Wickens, Bronwen Tate, David Hadbawnik, Tung-Hui Hu, Shiela Murphy, Linh Dinh, Eric Baus, and Rick London.
Also in this issue are
--an excerpt from a collaboration between Erica Lewis and Mark Stephen Finein,
--poems from Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Rick London and Omnia Amin),
--and an excerpt from Norma Cole's Do the Monkey.
Featuring work from Lisa Jarnot, Sarah Campbell, Erica Kaufman, Dennis Phillips, Sun Yung Shin, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Elizabeth Barbato, Richard Kostelanetz, Bonnie Emerick, Adam Golaski, Jessica Wickens, Bronwen Tate, David Hadbawnik, Tung-Hui Hu, Shiela Murphy, Linh Dinh, Eric Baus, and Rick London.
Also in this issue are
--an excerpt from a collaboration between Erica Lewis and Mark Stephen Finein,
--poems from Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Rick London and Omnia Amin),
--and an excerpt from Norma Cole's Do the Monkey.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Naropa University Summer Writing Program Blog
Here's a new blog from Naropa's Summer Writing Program. I'll be teaching during the fourth week. We'll read poetry, too: selections from Kevin Killian's newest, along with C. A. Conrad, Linh Dinh, Kristin Prevallet, Roberto Tejada, Etel Adnan, and others. Still thinking through the main contours of the class now....
Monday, February 09, 2009
Poetic Phronesis
Besides symbolic efficiency and symbolic action, I’ve been thinking about phronesis as a basic aspect of poetry and the social or ethical environments that support it. Phronesis—“practical wisdom”—arrives from Aristotle, and Steven Mailloux devotes a chapter to it in Disciplinary Identities. Typically, it was used by the Greeks to denote the sphere of everyday life wherein decisions and actions were made about the practical matters one might confront. (Hannah Arendt, for example, identifies it as a significant aspect of the public sphere.)
A contemporary version of this can be found operating in the blogosphere and in the conversations that transpire in the comments boxes there. Conversations are generally entered quickly, based on knowledge at hand, in order to increase the perspectives of the various participants involved. We typically don’t think of these claims as being directed to the realm of sophia—truth. We are dealing with doxa instead, opinion based on knowledge-at-hand, experiences of one’s interpretive practices. Phronesis is mutable and undefined because it is dependent upon situations that call its wisdom into being for those moments. From a psychoanalytic perspective you might say we don’t know what we know until it’s called forth from us in these moments. It is historically located, and therefore changing, but we can’t conduct the business of everyday life without it, not to mention politics and other public practices that involve our relationships with others. We don’t live by formulas—we search through ourselves to determine where we are at given moments. (Think of Derrida’s sense of hospitality here, too—we don’t know who will knock at the door, and yet we answer it.)
Mailloux writes about it in the context of the disciplinary division of English studies and speech departments, and I think he’s onto something important for poets, too, since many of us possess knowledge of our subject based on various identities within these institutions. Mailloux, by asking that we consider a rhetorical-hermeneutic practice attempts to account for both interpretive and productive approaches to English studies. For poets, I think his argument offers value as a way to reflect on the dual aspects of our craft—our techne—insofar as it is both interpretive and productive, straddling lines that consist of the materiality of language and the ethical dimensions of practical life. I think, therefore, that it would useful to look at Mailloux for a moment, especially when he writes:
Insofar as contemporary poetry intersects with disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and ecology, linguistics and art history, geography and philosophy, it becomes necessary to anticipate the affinities and differentials that exist in how we talk about our practice. Although poetry is not a discipline of any kind, it crosses paths with many projects in and out of the academy in its efforts to bring another kind of knowledge to the world, one that moves from phronesis to poetic techne, too—from the practical experience of our personal lives to the public experience of our social lives in and out of language on the page.
Part of what I want to say is that conversations in the blogosphere or elsewhere about the practice of poetry and ethical or social situations that give it definition and shape for others are necessary for the ongoing fluidity and movement of poetry as an art that straddles the practical and theoretical, the experienced and imagined, the felt and the thought. Insofar as we learn to speak with others about what we do—applying pressure when necessary and conceding the value in other practice when it is so recognized—then we are able to expand the capacities of our ability to advance new work into the world. This is not a formal problem—it is essentially an ethical one. The formal surface of a poem can be “inappropriate” (though it better bite), or it can be something else entirely. The thing is that it must open boundaries and not reinforce them; poetry must provide possibility and not foreclose on phronesis with theory; poetry must enhance theory by showing its practical value. We can say that poetry does not do these things—that it is not responsible for anything but itself—and this is absolutely true, too. And yet, as our lives interact within various disciplines, our sense of poetry moves over lines defined from without, and we can’t help responding in various ways to the influences of our working life, or professional life, our domestic life, our political life, and so many other intersecting claims on poetic attention, practice, ethics, and theory.
Because poetry is so fluid, and because the history of Modernism has provided so many marvelous formal possibilities and because Modernism is rich with aesthetic theory, we might now begin to approach the situation we inhabit on the margins of various disciplines to see, ethically, how these diverse parts can fit into present conditions. The old, stale avant-gardism of us-v-them, of rewriting literary history to suit the determined needs of particular in-groups, the avoidance of hard questions about contemporary practice and knowledge must fizzle away in order to bring forward the new. And by the new I mean new perspective—not necessarily form. That make-it-new thing is not just located within a formalist machinery, but in a living body of thought and practice that we, as poets, engage in.
A contemporary version of this can be found operating in the blogosphere and in the conversations that transpire in the comments boxes there. Conversations are generally entered quickly, based on knowledge at hand, in order to increase the perspectives of the various participants involved. We typically don’t think of these claims as being directed to the realm of sophia—truth. We are dealing with doxa instead, opinion based on knowledge-at-hand, experiences of one’s interpretive practices. Phronesis is mutable and undefined because it is dependent upon situations that call its wisdom into being for those moments. From a psychoanalytic perspective you might say we don’t know what we know until it’s called forth from us in these moments. It is historically located, and therefore changing, but we can’t conduct the business of everyday life without it, not to mention politics and other public practices that involve our relationships with others. We don’t live by formulas—we search through ourselves to determine where we are at given moments. (Think of Derrida’s sense of hospitality here, too—we don’t know who will knock at the door, and yet we answer it.)
Mailloux writes about it in the context of the disciplinary division of English studies and speech departments, and I think he’s onto something important for poets, too, since many of us possess knowledge of our subject based on various identities within these institutions. Mailloux, by asking that we consider a rhetorical-hermeneutic practice attempts to account for both interpretive and productive approaches to English studies. For poets, I think his argument offers value as a way to reflect on the dual aspects of our craft—our techne—insofar as it is both interpretive and productive, straddling lines that consist of the materiality of language and the ethical dimensions of practical life. I think, therefore, that it would useful to look at Mailloux for a moment, especially when he writes:
Academic disciplines are hierarchically organized, institutionally supported, self-perpetuating networks of practices for knowledge production and transmission. As such, they are technologized reductions, methodologized encapsulations, explicit formalizations of practical, nonmethodical, nonformalizable activities of coping with and in the world. That is, disciplines are, fundamentally, the transformation of practical wisdom into accredited techniques, of phronesis into techne. This transformation of everyday phronesis into specialized techne becomes part of the conditions of possibility for the paths of thought in any disciplinary community. In tracking these paths, then, one must trace the rhetorical hermeneutic practices of disciplines against the background of everyday activities in the world, disciplinary techne in the context of extradisciplinary phronesis. This extradisciplinary phronesis, always historically situated and thus potentially changing, provides a perspective through which disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdiciplinary, and nondisciplinarity can be thought and perhaps transformed. This practical wisdom makes up part of both the object and context of inquiry, forming a temporary ground for self-reflection and potential reformation. Such revisions can begin by giving historical accounts of particular disciplines, their domestic identity formations and their foreign relations with other disciplines. These foreign relations include shared sets of interdisciplinary practices as well as the academic extensions of phronetic political concerns from beyond the academy. [Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition. (2006). NY: MLA.]
Insofar as contemporary poetry intersects with disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and ecology, linguistics and art history, geography and philosophy, it becomes necessary to anticipate the affinities and differentials that exist in how we talk about our practice. Although poetry is not a discipline of any kind, it crosses paths with many projects in and out of the academy in its efforts to bring another kind of knowledge to the world, one that moves from phronesis to poetic techne, too—from the practical experience of our personal lives to the public experience of our social lives in and out of language on the page.
Part of what I want to say is that conversations in the blogosphere or elsewhere about the practice of poetry and ethical or social situations that give it definition and shape for others are necessary for the ongoing fluidity and movement of poetry as an art that straddles the practical and theoretical, the experienced and imagined, the felt and the thought. Insofar as we learn to speak with others about what we do—applying pressure when necessary and conceding the value in other practice when it is so recognized—then we are able to expand the capacities of our ability to advance new work into the world. This is not a formal problem—it is essentially an ethical one. The formal surface of a poem can be “inappropriate” (though it better bite), or it can be something else entirely. The thing is that it must open boundaries and not reinforce them; poetry must provide possibility and not foreclose on phronesis with theory; poetry must enhance theory by showing its practical value. We can say that poetry does not do these things—that it is not responsible for anything but itself—and this is absolutely true, too. And yet, as our lives interact within various disciplines, our sense of poetry moves over lines defined from without, and we can’t help responding in various ways to the influences of our working life, or professional life, our domestic life, our political life, and so many other intersecting claims on poetic attention, practice, ethics, and theory.
Because poetry is so fluid, and because the history of Modernism has provided so many marvelous formal possibilities and because Modernism is rich with aesthetic theory, we might now begin to approach the situation we inhabit on the margins of various disciplines to see, ethically, how these diverse parts can fit into present conditions. The old, stale avant-gardism of us-v-them, of rewriting literary history to suit the determined needs of particular in-groups, the avoidance of hard questions about contemporary practice and knowledge must fizzle away in order to bring forward the new. And by the new I mean new perspective—not necessarily form. That make-it-new thing is not just located within a formalist machinery, but in a living body of thought and practice that we, as poets, engage in.
James Howard Kunstler on "Stimulus"
From today's Clusterfuck Nation post:
A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question, largely along party lines -- simply those who are for it and those who are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party -- including supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to mention President Obama -- has a position for directing public resources and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security, future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable, walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change that will tear the nation to pieces.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Philip Metres on Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
Philip Metres has written a review of Kent Johnson's most recent book over at Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & Peacemaking. He writes:
Johnson has become, with all his work, from the Yasusada and Greek "translations" to his "own" "original" poems, perhaps our preeminent parodist. When his poetry works--and it does more often than it fails--it acts as a cauterizing burn, painfully staunching our wounds. The few moments where Johnson falters, as far as I can tell, are when he seems to stop believing in his own scary abilities to throw his voice into any poetic medium, grows self-conscious and then winks, thus betraying that longing (fairly universal to us poets) to be admired by one's contemporaries.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Jordan Davis on Kevin Davies in The Nation
Davis is a much more nimble prose writer than Gary Sullivan, but he can't help defining the turf, disregarding a large number of writers and performers who, he claims, have been conditioned by, uh, society? poetry? cultural markets? Not sure. I mean, it's a fine closing gesture for a book review in a large magazine, but he draws a weird line in the sand when invoking Edge Books:
"It is true, and too bad," he writes, "that we [royal?] have been conditioned [by who, or is it whom?] not to expect commentary this trenchant from our poets [really?] There are others where Davies came from. [So Davies is the tip of some "trenchant" ice berg?] Many of them are also published by Edge, a small press in Washington, DC. [Or Ugly Duckling? Effing? Factory School? Palm? why such a narrow boundary?]"
Okay, I'm being overly picky. But the urge expressed here is the same as Sullivan's more lumbering and artless claim discussed in the post below. The [here only barely disclosed] in-group possesses the correct "trenchant" position. The hoards beyond that line, uh, fall short, or, how did Gary put it, oh yes, are "well meaning" but "dry" in their poetics of "avoidance"? Why tie up Davies' book in such insignificant lines of definition? Will readers beyond the Edge Books crowd tremble? Are we that scared? The question is, for whom is this book written? Are you saying, Jordan, that it can persuade an audience of some socio-cultural position? Or must the audience already be prepared for its critique--already in agreement with its "trenchant"ness? I'm just curious....
"It is true, and too bad," he writes, "that we [royal?] have been conditioned [by who, or is it whom?] not to expect commentary this trenchant from our poets [really?] There are others where Davies came from. [So Davies is the tip of some "trenchant" ice berg?] Many of them are also published by Edge, a small press in Washington, DC. [Or Ugly Duckling? Effing? Factory School? Palm? why such a narrow boundary?]"
Okay, I'm being overly picky. But the urge expressed here is the same as Sullivan's more lumbering and artless claim discussed in the post below. The [here only barely disclosed] in-group possesses the correct "trenchant" position. The hoards beyond that line, uh, fall short, or, how did Gary put it, oh yes, are "well meaning" but "dry" in their poetics of "avoidance"? Why tie up Davies' book in such insignificant lines of definition? Will readers beyond the Edge Books crowd tremble? Are we that scared? The question is, for whom is this book written? Are you saying, Jordan, that it can persuade an audience of some socio-cultural position? Or must the audience already be prepared for its critique--already in agreement with its "trenchant"ness? I'm just curious....
Gary Sullivan in Poetry Project Newsletter
From a review of Sharon Mesmer's terrifically titled "Annoying Diabetic Bitch":
"The post-avant, poetic landscape has been dominated ["dominated," really?] in the last decade or so by well-meaning but fairly dry writing that carves out idealized, if not exactly utopian, space," Sullivan writes. "A poetics," he continues, "one might argue, of avoidance." (Wait, isn't this, no, uh.) He continues: "In this milieu, [milieu?] where poets have refrained from direct engagement [uh, which poets, who are we talking about--it's not Mesmer anymore?] with some of the uglier aspects of the social, poems that have foregrounded their author's refusal to whitewash their poems of ugly human nature have been met with strong resistance." (That last is a little hard to track--but I'm looking for the resistance.)
So, the "poetic landscape" is "dominated" by "post-avant[s]" who are "well-meaning" but "dry," and who practice a poetics of "avoidance"?
It's this kind of condescending, blanket generalization that makes flarf suspect. Instead of giving us a review of Mesmer's book, it's framed within the larger playground territory marked off by the school bully. This kind of frame does a real disservice to Mesmer's work, unfortunately. And it promotes tension and hostility on the scene, which is fine if this is how Sullivan wants to rewrite the last "decade or so." But the question of "avoidance" is really interesting, isn't it?
"The post-avant, poetic landscape has been dominated ["dominated," really?] in the last decade or so by well-meaning but fairly dry writing that carves out idealized, if not exactly utopian, space," Sullivan writes. "A poetics," he continues, "one might argue, of avoidance." (Wait, isn't this, no, uh.) He continues: "In this milieu, [milieu?] where poets have refrained from direct engagement [uh, which poets, who are we talking about--it's not Mesmer anymore?] with some of the uglier aspects of the social, poems that have foregrounded their author's refusal to whitewash their poems of ugly human nature have been met with strong resistance." (That last is a little hard to track--but I'm looking for the resistance.)
So, the "poetic landscape" is "dominated" by "post-avant[s]" who are "well-meaning" but "dry," and who practice a poetics of "avoidance"?
It's this kind of condescending, blanket generalization that makes flarf suspect. Instead of giving us a review of Mesmer's book, it's framed within the larger playground territory marked off by the school bully. This kind of frame does a real disservice to Mesmer's work, unfortunately. And it promotes tension and hostility on the scene, which is fine if this is how Sullivan wants to rewrite the last "decade or so." But the question of "avoidance" is really interesting, isn't it?
On Jack Collom
My Bookslut column this month looks at the work of Jack Collom:
RUDDY DUCK
or dumpling duck, daub duck, deaf duck,
fool duck, sleepy duck,
butter duck, brown diving teal, widgeon coot,
creek coot, sleepy coot, sleepy brother,
butter-ball, batter-scoot, blatherskite, bumble coot,
quill-tailed coot, heavy-tailed coot, stiff-tail,
pin-tail, bristle-tail, sprig-tail, stick-tail, spine-tail, dip-tail,
diver, dun-bird, dumb-gird, mud-dipper,
spoon-billed butter-ball, spoonbill, broad-billed dipper,
dipper, dapper, dopper, broad-bill, blue-bill,
sleepy-head, tough-head, hickory-head,
steel-head, hard-headed broad-bill, bull-neck,
leather-back, paddy-whack, stub-and-twist,
lightwood-knot, shot-pouch, water-partridge,
dinky, dickey, paddy, noddy, booby, rook, roody,
stiff-tailed widgeon, gray teal, salt-water teal
Friday, February 06, 2009
Or, from another direction: Zen Koan for Flarfists
What's the difference between flarf
Or anything Kasey M. promotes
And the poetry of
Philip Whalen?
Answer that
In its simplicity
And immense complexity
And write me back.
Or anything Kasey M. promotes
And the poetry of
Philip Whalen?
Answer that
In its simplicity
And immense complexity
And write me back.
David Hadbawnik on Flarf and Symbolic Efficiency
David Hadbawnik offers a useful reflection on some of the exchanges that have taken place here and elsewhere over the last couple of weeks.
John Latta on the Flarfization of Kevin Davies
Boy, if this doesn't put it all into perspective.... John Latta on recent reviews of Kevin Davies by Jordan Davis and Drew Gardner, with forays into the hyperbolic claims of flarfisters:
Another (thing) is what one ’d call the Silliman Manœuvre, exercised here rather clumsily by [Drew] Gardner. True to name, it’s a species of prestidigitation, a hand job, that endeavors to insert oneself into history by means of claiming precedent (“begin with Issa,” gulp) (and subsequent—“a new form of pastoral Flarf”) all up and down the line, the progressing line. (There’s a counter-thrust, also wield’d by Silliman, that depends on a kind of eyelid-batty ingénue deflecting of all history. One sees it in “The New Sentence” in the faux-naïve: “I know of no precedent for this . . .”) In Silliman’s own current position of (how did Baraka put it, “self satisfied mediocrity”?), he needs Flarf just as much as Flarf needs him (legitimizing Big Daddy). Note how quickly he jumps to list any miserable Flarf bits on what passes for a blog these days, though (largely, “prophylactically”) avoiding any trouble spots where Flarf-talk grows contentious, oppositional. The bande à Flarfy clearly fills some gaping hole in Silliman’s narrow “post-avant” world where tiny groupuscules of (urban) warriors do battle against the benight’d School of Quietude (Silliman’s resemblance to Nixon here shouldn’t be miss’d: recall the way Tricky Dick summon’d up the “silent majority” to prop up a different argument)—indeed, Silliman’s been looking for such a “body” for years (see earlier premature hosannahs for the likes of the New Brutalists, or incredibly presumptuous back-formations like the New Western Zen Cowboys, gulp.)
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
John Latta on Ed Dorn & The Western World
John Latta has been posting some terrific pieces on the New Amiri Baraka essay (see links below) over at Isola di Rifiuti. An excerpt from today's, in his response to Dorn's “Inauguration Poem #2”:
A kind of vatic oracular (with blunt historical sense) that is lost, nigh completely subsumed by inconsequent dumb and dumber post-Language kitsch, rabid auntie neo-dada, and bland “art house” abstract fragments, all part of the goose-the-empty-air “turn to language.” What one is slowly coming to see: that formal move of the late ’seventies results in exactly the same kind of empty formalism as that of its ’fifties New Critical forebears. Warsaw Concerto, indeed. (What would Frank O’Hara say? The piece an empty faux-Rachmaninoff vehicle for a film, Dangerous Midnight (1941), about a Polish refugee in England, a “shell-shock’d” piano virtuoso. Teary sentimental slop codify’d. The difference: today the code is the material signifier itself, poker-faced and empty, or gaudily overload’d, either way untrustworthy, mock’d, with no sense of its human adequacy for the “small point,” or the grand.) A long way to go (back) to Yūgen territory.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Symbolic Efficiency
“[B]ut can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula [man as symbol-using animal] implies, just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by ‘reality’ has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? To meditate on this fact until one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate abyss. And doubtless that’s one reason why, though man is typically the symbol-using animal, he clings to a kind of naive verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality.” —Kenneth Burke, Language As Symbolic Action
A lot, over the course of the last week or so, has transpired in this space. And since there’s no way to address every single concern, and that much of what takes place in online sites such as this must remain unsatisfactory due to the limitations of such a forum, I offer some thoughts on “symbolic efficiency” and “symbolic action,” not because I want to torture everyone with rhetorical theory, or because I want to revisit my arguments about Flarf, but because these terms have come up, in many ways, in the comments fields under my post, “Blog Fields, Flarf, and ‘Tag Clouds,’” wherein I introduce some of the ideas I hope to rehearse more carefully below.
Before I do that, however, I’d like to say that I have been accused of promoting argumentation over conversation here, that my positions are fixed, and not open to other views. Perhaps there’s some validity in these claims, or perhaps they are wagered by those who would like to see another kind of conversation take place—and I would welcome another type, in another space, at another moment—one that emerges by its own dynamics.
What emerged here did so based on the submissions of various perspectives, some more satisfactorily expressed than others. People insinuate that I hold a fixed position and am looking for a fight when that is far from the case: I want to apply pressure and see what those whom I don’t understand say about their art.
Usually, however, when anyone mentions Flarf, comments shoot in with some kind of ad hominem, jack-off response. Not infrequently, critical comments are met with the most obvious forms of sophistry and dodge-ball-like ducking.
Add to this how those with investments in Flarf brought little to the conversation that might disclose their thoughts on their theory and practice. Instead, I was accused of arguing for argument’s sake. My “Tag Cloud” post was condescendingly put down, rather than engaged. Many of the great comments by Kent Johnson, Michael Robbins, David Hadbawnik, Joe Safdie, William Keckler, and others were dropped precisely at the moment when Flarfistes should have compelled the conversation in beneficial ways. Instead, there were mostly shallow exchanges.
There were, of course, good conversations and exchanges interspersed, and the record of this is recorded below. Despite these problems of communication, argumentation remains an effective tool for working out differences, and it’s a much more fluid and compellingly theorized art than many outside rhetorical studies would like to admit. My bias, in online exchanges, is to promote argumentation because that’s how new ideas and clarifications arrive to an interested community. If you seek conversation, however, visit us in Austin. We’ll take you on a hike, or drink a cold beer in an icehouse with you. Or send me an email, and we can talk. When 150+ people are shooting in comments it’s difficult to maintain the warm, personable airs that I would prefer to extend. After all, we all have our own life investments to maintain: jobs, other obligations, etc. I’m not sure why these blog exchanges virally take over and possess attention. This is one moment, one conversation, among many. We are not the sum of our blog comments….
But getting to symbolic efficiency:
First of all, any misunderstandings in the “Tag Clouds” post result from a rapid-fire application of Jodi Dean’s potentially useful notion of “Tag Clouds.” I should have skipped her provocative terms, however, and just gone straight to the source: Zizek (and behind him, Lacan). I’ve warped it to my uses because symbolic efficiency is important to grasp in criticism not only of Flarf, but also in understanding how other aspects of contemporary life contribute to this decline.
The term symbolic efficiency, you see, suggests that facts become true only if they are known by the “big Other” (the B. O. is shorthand for public opinion, social values, broadly perceived), in addition to ourselves. In traditional settings of social communication, the self or selves are registered by the big Other, and this registration is what Zizek means by symbolic efficiency: there’s more than a single subjectivity at stake. For Zizek:
The important thing here is that, according to Zizek, there can be a decline of symbolic efficiency, which means that solipsism proliferates; the views expressed in the social realms we inhabit begin to fragment; the symbolic efficiency gets fuzzy as facts begin to disassociate from cultural or social truth (provisory, not set-in-stone, capital “T” Truth). We all become little nodes, speaking our minds, satisfied that no one listens, that nothing is registered in the collective field of social possibility. We just like the movement of the gears, the endless chatter, the meaningless making, as if experiencing some kind of afterlife wherein words and acts used to matter, but now only seem to.
It’s like the can of Pepsi in a product placement on television or in a movie. The logo flashes and we recognize its symbolic purchase on our retinas, but its value is linked to the corporate strategy: the sale. It’s location in relation to reality defies the symbolic labor in the realm of the big Other: there conveys nothing real, producing instead a desire for something sweet, and only its promise of relief, the logic goes, can produce satisfaction.
Kenneth Burke sees this, I think, when he acknowledges that, since “man [sic] is the symbol using animal,” our knowledge of reality is mediated through the symbolic realm. Our words bring the world into focus, and associate with reality only dimly. And yet, that dim association gives the symbolic its value—its location in conversation—or in a poem. If reality and symbolization split apart altogether, we make no claims of knowledge, only we spin our narratives within a void of meaningful possibility: we are left with appetite, and the sheer reduplication of words devoid of significance in a corresponding reality.
Zizek and others see a decline in symbolic efficiency, and indicate that it’s a result of the ongoing transformation of capitalism. I suggested that Flarf naively contributes to this decline not because of its recycling of texts or its hyposyntax, but because it doesn’t account for its symbolization process—doesn’t suppose the significance of the big Other, nor does it much seek association between its symbolic acts and a corresponding reality.
As I try to understand the significance of Flarf, I hope that those who practice it or appreciate it can bear with my questioning. I haven’t wanted to dismiss it so much as challenge those with stakes there to more fully describe what they do. Of course, they don’t have to do that—my questions can hang there—and they are good questions that I think can lead to a more fruitful conversation—not just about Flarf—but about contemporary practice in general. I’m not crazy about using Zizek and Burke’s terms because they so easily move us into the theoretical realm, and I prefer more practical applications (and I’m probably misreading them, too, though hopefully in useful ways).
Looking back over the last several days, I’m compelled to apologize to anyone with whom I may have treated roughly in the heat of (rather exciting, you must admit) exchange. We’re all sensitive to tone and the way words register. Add to that the kinds of performativity that can take place and you have a recipe for misunderstanding and resentment.
The issues here, however, are bigger than Flarf, for contemporary poets, particularly in the avant-garde, have to attend the symbolic aspect of their writing in order to avoid a mimesis that reinforces dangerous ideologies. This is not an argument of form, but of the detonation of words in a particular field of action. We must think through the ideological gridlocks of our time in order to arrive at something really fun and amazing. The walls must come down. We need to reinvest in each other’s sincerest motives for establishing love, jouissance, play, humor, kinetic perception, committed statements—whatever—in a scene that threatens to cave in under the behemoth weight of the undisclosed self and its poorly understood motives here, tarrying in language. Where do we go next?
To end this rather long note, I just want to add that I will no longer accept comments to the posts below. I’m not interested in continuing those debates. I suggest, instead, that we move in another, more fruitful, direction, and imagine ways to more fully describe what any of us do in poetry—or, better yet—to continue in the acts of poetry—going to the sources, I suppose, that bring us here. It is an art of making. I welcome earnest, and committed discourse and acts--experience peculiar to this digital environment.
A lot, over the course of the last week or so, has transpired in this space. And since there’s no way to address every single concern, and that much of what takes place in online sites such as this must remain unsatisfactory due to the limitations of such a forum, I offer some thoughts on “symbolic efficiency” and “symbolic action,” not because I want to torture everyone with rhetorical theory, or because I want to revisit my arguments about Flarf, but because these terms have come up, in many ways, in the comments fields under my post, “Blog Fields, Flarf, and ‘Tag Clouds,’” wherein I introduce some of the ideas I hope to rehearse more carefully below.
Before I do that, however, I’d like to say that I have been accused of promoting argumentation over conversation here, that my positions are fixed, and not open to other views. Perhaps there’s some validity in these claims, or perhaps they are wagered by those who would like to see another kind of conversation take place—and I would welcome another type, in another space, at another moment—one that emerges by its own dynamics.
What emerged here did so based on the submissions of various perspectives, some more satisfactorily expressed than others. People insinuate that I hold a fixed position and am looking for a fight when that is far from the case: I want to apply pressure and see what those whom I don’t understand say about their art.
Usually, however, when anyone mentions Flarf, comments shoot in with some kind of ad hominem, jack-off response. Not infrequently, critical comments are met with the most obvious forms of sophistry and dodge-ball-like ducking.
Add to this how those with investments in Flarf brought little to the conversation that might disclose their thoughts on their theory and practice. Instead, I was accused of arguing for argument’s sake. My “Tag Cloud” post was condescendingly put down, rather than engaged. Many of the great comments by Kent Johnson, Michael Robbins, David Hadbawnik, Joe Safdie, William Keckler, and others were dropped precisely at the moment when Flarfistes should have compelled the conversation in beneficial ways. Instead, there were mostly shallow exchanges.
There were, of course, good conversations and exchanges interspersed, and the record of this is recorded below. Despite these problems of communication, argumentation remains an effective tool for working out differences, and it’s a much more fluid and compellingly theorized art than many outside rhetorical studies would like to admit. My bias, in online exchanges, is to promote argumentation because that’s how new ideas and clarifications arrive to an interested community. If you seek conversation, however, visit us in Austin. We’ll take you on a hike, or drink a cold beer in an icehouse with you. Or send me an email, and we can talk. When 150+ people are shooting in comments it’s difficult to maintain the warm, personable airs that I would prefer to extend. After all, we all have our own life investments to maintain: jobs, other obligations, etc. I’m not sure why these blog exchanges virally take over and possess attention. This is one moment, one conversation, among many. We are not the sum of our blog comments….
But getting to symbolic efficiency:
First of all, any misunderstandings in the “Tag Clouds” post result from a rapid-fire application of Jodi Dean’s potentially useful notion of “Tag Clouds.” I should have skipped her provocative terms, however, and just gone straight to the source: Zizek (and behind him, Lacan). I’ve warped it to my uses because symbolic efficiency is important to grasp in criticism not only of Flarf, but also in understanding how other aspects of contemporary life contribute to this decline.
The term symbolic efficiency, you see, suggests that facts become true only if they are known by the “big Other” (the B. O. is shorthand for public opinion, social values, broadly perceived), in addition to ourselves. In traditional settings of social communication, the self or selves are registered by the big Other, and this registration is what Zizek means by symbolic efficiency: there’s more than a single subjectivity at stake. For Zizek:
Lacan's point is not that, behind the multiplicity of phantasmatic identities, there is a hard core of some "real Self", we are dealing with a symbolic fiction, but a fiction which, for contingent reasons that have nothing to do with its inherent structure, possesses performative power - is socially operative, structures the socio-symbolic reality in which I participate. The status of the same person, inclusive of his/her very "real" features, can appear in an entirely different light the moment the modality of his/her relationship to the big Other changes (The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Center of Political Ideology).
The important thing here is that, according to Zizek, there can be a decline of symbolic efficiency, which means that solipsism proliferates; the views expressed in the social realms we inhabit begin to fragment; the symbolic efficiency gets fuzzy as facts begin to disassociate from cultural or social truth (provisory, not set-in-stone, capital “T” Truth). We all become little nodes, speaking our minds, satisfied that no one listens, that nothing is registered in the collective field of social possibility. We just like the movement of the gears, the endless chatter, the meaningless making, as if experiencing some kind of afterlife wherein words and acts used to matter, but now only seem to.
It’s like the can of Pepsi in a product placement on television or in a movie. The logo flashes and we recognize its symbolic purchase on our retinas, but its value is linked to the corporate strategy: the sale. It’s location in relation to reality defies the symbolic labor in the realm of the big Other: there conveys nothing real, producing instead a desire for something sweet, and only its promise of relief, the logic goes, can produce satisfaction.
Kenneth Burke sees this, I think, when he acknowledges that, since “man [sic] is the symbol using animal,” our knowledge of reality is mediated through the symbolic realm. Our words bring the world into focus, and associate with reality only dimly. And yet, that dim association gives the symbolic its value—its location in conversation—or in a poem. If reality and symbolization split apart altogether, we make no claims of knowledge, only we spin our narratives within a void of meaningful possibility: we are left with appetite, and the sheer reduplication of words devoid of significance in a corresponding reality.
Zizek and others see a decline in symbolic efficiency, and indicate that it’s a result of the ongoing transformation of capitalism. I suggested that Flarf naively contributes to this decline not because of its recycling of texts or its hyposyntax, but because it doesn’t account for its symbolization process—doesn’t suppose the significance of the big Other, nor does it much seek association between its symbolic acts and a corresponding reality.
As I try to understand the significance of Flarf, I hope that those who practice it or appreciate it can bear with my questioning. I haven’t wanted to dismiss it so much as challenge those with stakes there to more fully describe what they do. Of course, they don’t have to do that—my questions can hang there—and they are good questions that I think can lead to a more fruitful conversation—not just about Flarf—but about contemporary practice in general. I’m not crazy about using Zizek and Burke’s terms because they so easily move us into the theoretical realm, and I prefer more practical applications (and I’m probably misreading them, too, though hopefully in useful ways).
Looking back over the last several days, I’m compelled to apologize to anyone with whom I may have treated roughly in the heat of (rather exciting, you must admit) exchange. We’re all sensitive to tone and the way words register. Add to that the kinds of performativity that can take place and you have a recipe for misunderstanding and resentment.
The issues here, however, are bigger than Flarf, for contemporary poets, particularly in the avant-garde, have to attend the symbolic aspect of their writing in order to avoid a mimesis that reinforces dangerous ideologies. This is not an argument of form, but of the detonation of words in a particular field of action. We must think through the ideological gridlocks of our time in order to arrive at something really fun and amazing. The walls must come down. We need to reinvest in each other’s sincerest motives for establishing love, jouissance, play, humor, kinetic perception, committed statements—whatever—in a scene that threatens to cave in under the behemoth weight of the undisclosed self and its poorly understood motives here, tarrying in language. Where do we go next?
To end this rather long note, I just want to add that I will no longer accept comments to the posts below. I’m not interested in continuing those debates. I suggest, instead, that we move in another, more fruitful, direction, and imagine ways to more fully describe what any of us do in poetry—or, better yet—to continue in the acts of poetry—going to the sources, I suppose, that bring us here. It is an art of making. I welcome earnest, and committed discourse and acts--experience peculiar to this digital environment.
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