"#ode @GrecianUrn": New Media Micro-poems For July

So every month this year, I've been setting little goals for myself-- sort of a way to break the traditional ominous monolithic New Years Resolution into reasonable chunks. Anyway, it doesn't matter what I did these previous months, but for July I've decided to try to post, every day, a 140-character or less prose poem on popular micro-blogging website Twitter (if you still don't know what that is you can ask your mom or your dad and they can maybe help you set one up). 

This is an idea I've kicked around for awhile, and if I was still an undergrad I think I would've liked to have done another Summer Fellows project based around it, but, ah well, I guess I'm just doing it for fun. Ideally, this will not only be a neat exercise in working around fairly strict formal constraints, but an experiment with how poetry functions in relationship to new social media (and an opportunity to thaw out my prose poetry chops).

Of course this isn't an entirely new idea; short fiction in particular has been getting shorter and shorter over the past few decades, and poets have been churning out epigrams since before Martial. Still, the idea of ultimate conciseness and economy is something that grabs every writer at some point, and holds an undeniable allure. Italo Calvino, in writing about Quickness as a literary ideal in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, writes

I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: "Cuando desparto, el dinosauro todavia estaba alli" (When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there).

(and of course, how much of Stein's Tender Buttons could easily fit into Twitter's narrow text-boxes?)

Anyway, if you'd like to see what I come up with, I invite you to follow my experiment here  (new account so I don't bug people who don't give a shit about poems). I'll be right up front and say there's a perhaps 75% chance this will be a trainwreck, but hopefully it will at least be an interesting one.

Guest-Article on "The Devil's Accountant"

In lieu of a for-reals update, have a look at a guest-article I wrote for Paul Oliver's terrific lit-blog The Devil's Accountant. Oliver used to be the co-owner of my all-time favorite bookstore, Wolfgang Books in Phoenixville, and he's been doing a great job of turning the spotlight on some obscure gems. 

This month has been singled out in particular as "Lost Books Month," looking at the unjustly obscure, untranslated, and out-of-print, so I contributed a piece on Iain Sinclair's gorgeous and hallucinogenic poem/essay Lud Heat. Read it here  and dig into the archives while you're at it.

"Cool Toys From Outer Space": Is Christian Bok a mad genius or an anti-poet?

Here's Christian Bok, interviewed in the latest Believer about his upcoming project:

 The Xenotext Project is responding to the millenial science of genetics. I'm trying to write a book of poetry in which I translate a single poem, through a process of encipherment, into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and then, with the assistance of scientists, I plan to build this genetic sequence in a laboratory so that I can implant the gene into a bacterium, replacing a portion of its genome with my text. The bacterium would, in effect, be the poem.

 I've selected an organism that is widely regarded to be the most unkillable bacterium on the planet, an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans. [...] The microbe is basically so durable that, if I were to store a poem in the matrix of this organism, I would effectively be creating a literary artifact that (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes and the Voyager probes) would be one of the few objects so far created by humans to outlast terrestrial civilization itself. I am hoping, in effect, to write a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes. I guess that this project is a kind of ambitious attempt to think about art, quite literally, as an eternal endeavor.

 I think the idea is fascinatingly weird and pretty beautiful on the conceptual level. However, this also strikes me as one of those ideas that's a lot more fulfilling to think about than to actually experience. 

 For example, Bok's most famous collection Eunoia, has a similarly high concept conceit-- each of the book's parts relies on one noun. Its the kind of baldly Oulipean poetic escape-artistry that makes writers like myself who still use their hands to count out iambs whistle through our teeth and sweat about the brow in sympathy. Here's the thing though-- Eunoia impresses because of the difficulty involved in writing it, not for the writing itself. Here's a sample from Chapter I:

 Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks-- impish hijinx which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz-- griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which phillipic wit is still illicit.

 I admire the acrobatics required to get that far, but I come away feeling like he hit the nail on the head in the excerpt's self-lacerating first part. "Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic?" he writes, and I have to say that's where it seems to end as well. It's a kind of stunt poetry.

 Of course none of this is new. You can look at the dada poets drawing words at random out of a hat and contextualizing the result as poetry, or Perec's A Void, a novel which excluded the letter E, or Queneau's Exercises in Style, or Tsepeneg's Vain Art of the Fugue and so on up to recent mainstream successes such as Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Let's even throw in hypertextual experiments like Pale Fire, Dictionary of the Kazhars, and Hopscotch.

 All of the above books I would call successful, more or less, at what they set out to do-- or at least I can say that upon finishing them I felt a pleasure and contentment that more than matched the preliminary excitement/amusement at their respective "trifling gimmicks" (to borrow Bok's phrasing). So what's the distinction, setting aside the rather brutal and pointless-to-argue discussion of fundamental authorial merits? 

I kind of want to look at it as a question of longevity-- a gauge of the work's ability to know just how long to draw itself out, when to stop doing tricks and either end or become something deeper. 

 In the first case, you have the dadas, who moved onto something new whenever audiences (or themselves) became comfortable with a spectacle. After all, if you expect it, it's barely a spectacle. It was all about transience, about keeping in a constant state of agitated "revolution" (or novelty, whatever)-- if they were diligent about anything it was about not letting a schtick live long enough to become stale. I'd also group the Oulipeans here, whose experiments are mostly play for the sake of play, completely ludic and unassuming. Queaneau's book is a lot of fun, but not much more than that, and it doesn't pretend to anything more than that, which is fine. P&P&Z, similarly, is a good joke that, while maybe not worth 14 bucks, is content with being read and laughed at and then forgotten about. Think of Artaud's quote, "Written poetry is worth reading once, then should be destroyed," or Bolano's Ramierz Hoffman writing poems in airplane-exhaust-- the obsalesance is not only forgivable but integral. Of course, speaking of Bolano, you also have the trick he and Borges pull off so well of sketching out a particular idea for a narrative or a literary movement in the context of a fictional bibliographic universe-- I love reading about Menard's Quixote but I don't know if I'd want to read Menard's Quixote itself.

 The other option, of course, is to give the reader a reason to give a shit beyond the initial oohs and ahhs of formal contortion. Pale Fire is a great, great novel, and not just because of the whole foot-note conceit. Same with Vain Art of the Fugue, which takes Queaneau's pleasantly glib idea (variations on "man walks onto a bus and..." and turns it into an existential love story. Then there are cases where the virtuosity is less tied up with the integrity of the narrative, but is sort of icing on the cake of a good story. Meno's novel gets some great ironic moments out of its Encyclopedia Brown trappings, but it would still be a good read without the decoder ring and cake recipes. 

 Its this latter category of books, the Nabokov and Calvino masterpieces, that I admire the most-- experiments are great, but without an emotional anchor it begins to feel cold and empty after a little while, overly clever at best and downright masturbatory at worst. I think this is where Bok and I most fundamentally disagree. In the same interview I quoted above, he says:

 To write a poem nowadays is tantamount to visiting a pioneer village, where you watch someone hammer out a horseshoe. To write a poem is to knit a doily for a candy dish. [...] I definitely want to make discoveries about language, and I think that poets are like the technicians at Area 51, reverse-engineering alien tools for use in the human world. I doubt that I'm going to get to play with cool toys from outer space if I do nothing more than write emotive, lyrical poems about my intimate, personal life. I think that poets need to be more ambitious.

 I think he's missing the point-- I think the kind of poem he dismisses there is precisely the most ambitious. It opens up the most guarded workings of another human life to the reader, it creates a relationship between reader, text, and author that is deeply humanizing. I admire his ambition (I guess), but it's the attempt to engage the living world through language that makes a great poet, not an attempt to engage language qua language  through language. What's his end goal?

 I'll end with another quote about technical innovation in poetry, from the opposite side of the spectrum. From the Preface to Paradise Lost:

 The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched meter and lame meter; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have explained them.

 What good is a formal constraint if it isn't for the greater benefit of the poem? When the technical limitations of your project prevent you from expressing what you've actually set out to say, there's no reason to hold onto it. I'm still impressed by the idea behind Bok's biological poem, but I hope that that starting motive isn't the end of his investment in it. I think a bad, hollow poem outliving the human race might be worse than no poem at all. 

 

 

 

Ammons' Ommatium

 A.R. Ammons isn't what I'd normally describe as a "visionary" in the way you'd call Blake or Whitman visionary-- the term has a connotation of almost delirious freedom to it, a sense of the poet's work belonging totally to itself, as independent from context as a plateau or a grizzly bear or whatever. A naive formulation of the idea, I guess, but it's the sense that I get reading those two poets, while Ammons (sort of like Gary Snyder) brings a zen-like control and restraint to his poetry. If Whitman is being bowled over by the waterfall, then Ammons is the focused appreciation of a lone drop. "The Story," for example, in its entirety from Brink Road:

"Oblivion keeps the caterpillar bright."

It has a haiku-like economy that's really striking, and even in his longer works there's the sense that every single syllable has a real heft to it.

Recently I read Norton's 2006 reprinting of ommateum with Doxology, Ammons' first collection, out of print since 1955. There's vintage Ammons right off the bat, mixing dictions, in this case theological and taxonomical: a Doxology is a kind of praise song, and an ommateum is the kind of compound eye some insects have. It's an apt title (as well as one that's fun to say and makes you feel like a real fancy brilliant guy), as the collection is most striking when it diverges from what you'd expected from Ammons, mixing in generous parts Whitman and Blake, a Whitmanesque song of praise to the natural world focused through a perspective as gorgeously alien and inscrutable as Blake's densest material. 

According to the introduction, Ammons wrote it hot on the heels of a Whitman binge, and it shows-- there's a broader scope and feeling of surrender (or not? More of an offering up of the speaker, maybe) to nature ("The grass miracles have kept me down all autumn," or , as well as a use of prophetic, mystic-ish diction that does sort of remind me of Blake in its inscrutable and yet somehow complete-feeling esoteric cosmology. Here are the 16th and then the very first sections of "Doxology," which show-case both of these features nicely:

"Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river

I Ezra with unsettling love

rifled the mud and wattle huts

for recent mournings

with gold leaves

and lapis lazuli beads

in the neat braids loosening from the skull

Looking through the wattles to the sun

I said

It has rained some here in this place

unless snow falls heavily in the hills

to do this

The floor was smooth with silt

and river weeds hanging grey

on the bent reeds spoke saying

Everything is here as you can see

Firing the huts

I abandoned the unprofitable poor

unequal even in the bone

to disrespect

and casual with certainty

watched an eagle wing as I went

to kind and priest."

"So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

I listened to the wind

go over my head and up into the night

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

Over the bleached and broken fields

I moved my feet and turning from the wind

that ripped sheets of sand

from the beach and threw them

like seamists across the dunes

swayed as if the wind were taking me away

and said

I am Ezra

As a word too much repeated

falls out of being

so I Ezra went out into the night

like a drift of sand

and splashed among the windy oats

that clutch the dunes

of unremembered seas"

The voice here strikes me as so different from the Ammons I was familiar-- it was really a pleasant shock to read this collection. You can see that his control over diction and line is already pretty much aces here-- occasionally he'll go for a slightly over-the-top flourish ("Oh I said in the mistral of bleached/ and naked thought/ blood like a catalyst is evil's baptismal need"... well ok), and you'll be reminded that this is definitely the work of a young guy.

However, over all its a strikingly unexpected and fresh side of Ammon, a wilder, more wild-eyed side, that he remained proud of despite it's long unavailability. 

P.S. The introduction also notes how unfamiliar with the contemporary poetry scene of the time Ammons was, and goes so far as to describe the collection as "outsider art". I don't know about that, but it definitely feels somehow outside of its period (calling up Blake again), with a corresponding sense of barren loneliness to it. I guess if I wanted to be corny (I sort of do) I'd say that if Whitman wrote about Emerson's America, Ammons here writes about Leone's or perhaps McCarthy's, a deceptively blank and harsh landscape, a dry and enervating beauty (Ammons conflates, at times, the landscapes of New Mexico and the ancient Middle East in disconcerting and wonderful ways). If spaghetti Western poetry could be a thing, this would be it.

From Our Hearts to Our Necessities: A Little Bit About the Void in Roberto Bolano's Poetry

 

Read any given article about Roberto Bolano written since 2666's English debut, and you'll probably notice two points laid out again and again:

 1) Bolano's ouevre is massively intertextual, a kind of compact Philip Jose Farmer cosmology-- out of 2666's hundreds of characters, for instance, we see children from his novellas turned into hard-nosed border cops, recurring novels, off-hand references to menage-a-trois with old protagonists. Even the narrator, as Bolano had remarked in his working notes, is in fact the hero of an earlier work. Just as each of 2666's five parts read fine as individual novellas but are vastly enriched as a whole, Bolano's entire body of writing infuses and reinforces itself.

2) 2666 revolves around the problem of an absent center, or a "false" center (the novels of Benno von Archimboldi, the city of Santa Teresa) and a mysterious "secret" center Bolano leaves ambiguous.

With that out of the way, I've been surprised to see how little attention is paid to The Romantic Dogs, the only English collection of Bolano's poetry. Bolano famously considered himself more of a novelist than a poet, but his poems still demonstrate a distinct if abstract narrative bent. And, surprise surprise, it isn't any kind of stretch to read his poetry as both a vital segment of Bolano's overall meta-masterpiece, and as a definite expression of Bolano's fascination with false, missing, or hidden centers-- spiritual and narrative voids.

Most of the elements laced through 2666 are just as frequent and stressed in The Romantic Dogs-- we see the perverse Hegelian relationship between Mexico City, the U.S., and the towns along the Mexican border, a kind of pressure system that turns that strip of land into a kind of worst-case synthesis thunderhead of American and Mexican culture. In, for example, The Donkey:

...and with that Mario Santiago and I

Leave Mexico City, which is the extension

Of so many dreams, the materialization of so many

Nightmares, and retake our positions

Always headed north, always on the road 

Of coyotes,...

As well as his concept of the Latin American ethos as one intrinsically self-destructive, informed by a violence turned catastrophically inward:

Thousands of guys like me, baby-faced

or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,

brushing cheeks with death.

Travel, in these poems, is never fulfilling, the traditions of Latin American literature is never fulfilling, both of these as well as sex, friendship, history, are false centers, Bolano's poetry suggests-- heavy with the suggesting of meaning, but ultimately as flimsy and transient as any other symbolic anchor. 

...a spit in Religion's face,

A silk stab in the back of Happiness,

Sustenence of Morals and Ethics, the forward escape...

As the hunch-backed speaker of My Life in the Tubes of Survival puts it.

These two themes come together most powerful in a long poem titled The Worm, about a grotesque and potentially murderous figure making his through through Mexico:

I saw him with my own eyes: he looked like a worm with a 

straw hat

and an assassin's glare

and he traveled through the towns of Northern Mexico

as if wandering lost, evicted from the mind,

evicted from the grand dream, everyone's dream,

and his words were, madre mia, terrifying.

This traveller neatly sums up the same dynamic Bolano dug into in Part III of 2666, the idea of violence and cultural self-loathing as a kind of eidolon, a weary point of pride. At points the traveller exhorts the speaker to embrace poverty, embrace violence, even acknowledging the pointlessness of it-- suggesting images of Santa Teresa's chief of police shooting at wild dogs in a junk-yard.

 However, whereas the cynical Bolano of 2666 seems to have little hope for art as a redeeming force (consider how many artists and poets turn up in insane asylums, how the only instance in which the critics really act freely is in beating a defenseless cab-driver, and the self-destructive metaphor of the artist who cuts his hand off), Bolano the poet is a bit more optimistic. The Outsider Ape seems to scoff at the possibility of a painting inspiring real emotion, but at least acknowledges its heroic grasping at reality (shades of Ansky and his obsession with "semblences"). Twilight in Barcelona features a similar ambiguity-- what's more beautiful, the painting of Satie or the landscape that evokes its memory? Here's that conflict between apparent and hidden centers again-- representation is a seduction or a threshold-- whether the real signified by art is accessed through it or prohibited by it is up to the viewer. 

Poetry is his exception; free from the obligations of representation (I guess?), Bolano seems to see poetry as a kind of artistic collagen, binding impressions and moments together, making them stronger against obfuscation and despair. Ironically, in the same poems where Bolano rails against the romanticizing of cruelty, he makes poetry out to be a little too courageously transversive. Still, it's hard not to want to cheer him on in lines like these, again from The Worm:

I saw him and told him get out of my tracks, you prick,

poetry is braver than anyone,

the soils watered with blood can suck my dick, the 

evicted Mind

hardly rattles my senses.

From these nightmares I'll retain only

these poor houses,

these wind-swept streets,

and not your assassin's glare

Yeah, fuck you Baudelaire! The figure in The Worm is described as both dragging his despair behind him, and devouring it, a concise representation of the kind of masochism so much "realistic" art thrives on (and which, in my opinion, Bolano is sometimes guilty of himself).

A final example is in a suite of five poems; Dirty, Poorly Dressed, The Detectives, The Lost Detectives, The Frozen Detectives and Fragments. The immediate thought is of his second longest novel, The Savage Detectives. And sure enough, just as in his novels, these poems deal with a simultaneous stumbling after a hazily defined goal (what crime are these detectives trying to solve? I like to think maybe the Santa Teresa murders...) and struggle to escape an ad-hoc urban labyrinth. The search for truth is futile, and recursive, and pretty shabby, and ultimately a psychological issue more than anything: the speaker comes across his heart in the middle of the road, being eaten by red and black ants, while the detectives sit catatonic in pools of blood, afraid to disturb the crime scene. Images repeat themselves in slightly modified phrasings throughout these pieces, circular and circumspect.

 We are, in the end, left without much of a clue about the crimes, the detective, the speaker, or what it all means, despite covering the same ground over and over, in tighter and tighter loops. As in 2666 we circle around what looks like a center but never get any closer to meaning-- because meaning is elsewhere, or under our noses, or totally gone. Bolano doles out clues, but doesn't give away the ending-- this isn't Agatha Christie, where murder and blackmail have their place in a neat, morally tidy universe in which the man with the prim moustache always sets things straight. The reader is left lingering, hands overflowing with both beauty and ugliness, poetry and banality, all of the clues, some of the questions, and none of the answers.