In his introduction to the book I am now reading, Rob Stephenson's excellent Passes Through, Lance Olsen notes that the book "is the opposite of an easy or fun book, at least by current Oprah-ized standards. It is, rather, a limit text — one that takes writing to the edge of readability, then challenges us to invent new ways to speak about its strangeness."
I love literature that does this sort of thing well, as Stephenson's does. I hunt for good examples of such writing to highlight on this blog (I rarely write about books I dislike.) But there is a practical problem most people have with reading such material: It isn't that they can not learn how to read it if given some instruction and time, it's that they are too damn busy and tired to read anything but Oprah-ized books.
I know. I feel an urge to read those books, or just watch tv, when faced with Stephenson's. I worked on computer web pages for seven hours today. I am exhausted, my eyes are tired, and doing more 'work' with my brain or my eyes is out of the question. How can I read Stephenson's book?
It is a question we who work in this field need to ask ourselves. While Lance, of course, is not accusing anyone of being lazy in their reading habits, he is implicitly pointing to the energy we expect of our readers. It's not unfair — nobody has to read our books. But is it impractical?
The answer is a resounding yes. Experimental literature is impractical to its very core; in fact, that may be one of its reason to exist. To display the limits of practicality.
But it is a privileged position to be able to question practicality. So many of us are so ensnared in it that we have little hope of participating in any more than a tangential way in the literary world. I suppose it is true that everyone involved in the literary world feels some alienation from it. But it is clearly true that some more than others feel this, and it has an impact on how we read and write.
The ironic thing is that this alienation may in the end be a blessing more than a curse. As Stephen Kuhn's Structuer of Scientific Thinking points out, a lot of new discoveries in science come to those new to the field. In other words, people for whom the dominant paradigm is known, but who still have not fully become ensconced in it. Creativity occurs in the gap between the dominant paradigm and the gradual awareness of its full implications.
Science is very different from literature, and its ways of knowing are much more rigidly policed and institutionalized. But there are similarities. And the liminal space of being in and out of the practical world, in and out of literary world, and so on, creates the space for some spectacular creativity.
But the problem is time and energy. The practical world, the very practical world that offers so much to what could be a good engagement with writing, can suck you dry, leaving any creative reading or writing unfinished.
Preliminaries
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Brenda Iijima's poetry book "revv.you'll-ution"
This book is intense, has a tremendous momentum, and is at times hilariously funny. The most obvious example of the latter are some photographs taken of stuffed animals and placed in natural settings. She says of her mother who appears in one such photograph, "The only animal perceptible in this photo is Erika Uchman."
This brings to the fore one of the central concerns of this book; the way there is, on one level, no interaction between humans and nature because we are nature and everything we do is, on one level, "natural." It also teases out some of the complexities of how nature and artifice interconnect, interfere, and hurt one another. This is a book concerned with "mending" the earth. At times Iijima does not shy away from even using scientific statistics to help with her themes.
The poetry is something else. It is taut, tight, and has little extraneous. Some poems are mostly lists of rhythmically and aurally powerful words. Others feature long, sometimes broken up lines that retain the intensity, just in a different way. The poetry is so full of energy it leaps off the page and, for me at least, grabs me wholeheartedly. In addition, to hear her read on youtube, the intensity is immediately evident, but the crowd does not seem to respond to her humor -- such as the unabomber being fed dehydrated mash potatoes in his supermax prison.
This is a poetry of the local, how we interact in a variety of ways even with dirt. It is also poetry of the earth and the sky. Everywhere, however, Iijima insists on the intersection of human with nature. There is never one without the other, at least not now, when every tree seense either to have been planted or to have been allowed to live because of a choice on the part of people.
This is difficult poetry that tries to articulate the almost inarticulable — that space between the natural and language where we can see what an aspect of nature is, including our interaction with it, only with the most careful parsing of words, and only for a glimpse.
This book, full of generosity of spirit, takes a multi-faceted and multi-various approach to the ways language, human culture, and nature interact in complex ways. Her language manages to offer glimpses of this dynamic that actually get beyond the language a little bit. At times with her writing I felt as if I left the poem partly behind and encountered a phenomenon of real clarity. This I can say of very few other writers.
This brings to the fore one of the central concerns of this book; the way there is, on one level, no interaction between humans and nature because we are nature and everything we do is, on one level, "natural." It also teases out some of the complexities of how nature and artifice interconnect, interfere, and hurt one another. This is a book concerned with "mending" the earth. At times Iijima does not shy away from even using scientific statistics to help with her themes.
The poetry is something else. It is taut, tight, and has little extraneous. Some poems are mostly lists of rhythmically and aurally powerful words. Others feature long, sometimes broken up lines that retain the intensity, just in a different way. The poetry is so full of energy it leaps off the page and, for me at least, grabs me wholeheartedly. In addition, to hear her read on youtube, the intensity is immediately evident, but the crowd does not seem to respond to her humor -- such as the unabomber being fed dehydrated mash potatoes in his supermax prison.
This is a poetry of the local, how we interact in a variety of ways even with dirt. It is also poetry of the earth and the sky. Everywhere, however, Iijima insists on the intersection of human with nature. There is never one without the other, at least not now, when every tree seense either to have been planted or to have been allowed to live because of a choice on the part of people.
This is difficult poetry that tries to articulate the almost inarticulable — that space between the natural and language where we can see what an aspect of nature is, including our interaction with it, only with the most careful parsing of words, and only for a glimpse.
This book, full of generosity of spirit, takes a multi-faceted and multi-various approach to the ways language, human culture, and nature interact in complex ways. Her language manages to offer glimpses of this dynamic that actually get beyond the language a little bit. At times with her writing I felt as if I left the poem partly behind and encountered a phenomenon of real clarity. This I can say of very few other writers.
improvisations
before
the instant
the unrealized plan
response among artifice
among nature
among the interplay
in &
about
— Jefferson Hansen
the instant
the unrealized plan
response among artifice
among nature
among the interplay
in &
about
— Jefferson Hansen
Friday, July 23, 2010
Huth, my book, and so on
check out Geoff Huth on telephone poetry.
Also, I have a new book out, entitled Jazz Forms (Blue Lion Press), which is essentially my selected poems from 1988-2008. The press, run by Peter Ganick and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, uses Lulu as its printer. My book is available for either $9 hard copy or for free as a download.
"Poets have long been mesmerized by jazz. And when they get together in the same room they tend to resemble each other. But Jefferson Hansen has done something different in Jazz Forms. The impulse might still be mimetic but he translates what is is listening to into a work that is full of ecosystems and associations, full of things like birds and fires and air and bears and babies. The jazz in Jazz Forms leads to trance, is transformative."
— Juliana Spahr
Also, I have a new book out, entitled Jazz Forms (Blue Lion Press), which is essentially my selected poems from 1988-2008. The press, run by Peter Ganick and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, uses Lulu as its printer. My book is available for either $9 hard copy or for free as a download.
"Poets have long been mesmerized by jazz. And when they get together in the same room they tend to resemble each other. But Jefferson Hansen has done something different in Jazz Forms. The impulse might still be mimetic but he translates what is is listening to into a work that is full of ecosystems and associations, full of things like birds and fires and air and bears and babies. The jazz in Jazz Forms leads to trance, is transformative."
— Juliana Spahr
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Federman #5
This is the 5th post on Raymond Federman's last novel, SHHH.
A reader backchanneled me because she was concerned about whether the closet incident actually happened since Federman's own daughter seemed to question it, and what sort of aid such questioning might give to Holocaust deniers.
These are good questions. I am not an expert on Federman, I was merely reviewing his book. So if others want to jump in, I would be delighted. That said, from my reading of this book, Federman's fidelity is to a complex notion of 'honesty.' At the end of the afterword Pelton quotes him as saying,
"There is no distinction between memory and imagination, I would not falsify, because I would not lie, because when I walk down the street, my sisters might turn the corner ahead of me and meet me there, and I have to believe that, and how could I tell them when I saw them that I had lied."
By 'lying' I don't believe Federman is referring to getting his facts straight. I believe he is talking about getting his memory straight, all the while knowing that it is riddled with imagination. Did he get put in the closet? Or did he put himself there? Did his mother tell him to "shhh'? We will never know, not because we were not there, but because memory and imagination are profoundly interconnected. To deny this is to be dishonest.
As for Holocaust deniers, in order to keep them from doing any profound harm, we must keep them out of political power. On one level, it is a political struggle of our imaginations, and our stories, against theirs.
But this is not good enough for me. On another level I want to securely say that we Holocaust believers are in the right. And here is where I believe Federman does run into trouble, and he is conscious of it. He writes of himself in the book: "Federman ... your readers are ... going to wonder what's happening to you." My contention is that it is not simply his telling the story of childhood that pushes him to "the edge of the imposture of realism," but the need to tell his story of the Holocaust.
Perhaps the sheer weight of witness testimony is what we need. With so many stories, partly imaginary as with all stories, of the Holocaust, denying it becomes quite difficult. That said, it may be wishful thinking. How often are people more swayed by facts and evidence rather than ideology?
I end with the rather depressing conclusion that Holocaust deniers are probably more a political, rather than an evidentiary, problem. Because you can get some people to believe anything. Hence, Federman: be honest to your memory and what it constructs for you, not to what it is supposed to construct. Resist easy stories.
In this sense Federman is a hero. He could have written his own great success story: escapes the Holocaust, comes to America, fights in Korea, gets an advanced degree, gets a professorship, becomes an important novelist. It was perfectly available to him. Federman tried to write this novel, then destroyed it, because it was a lie, because it forced his life to a frame, namely, the traditional Western plot-line. He chose to become a lesser-known avant-gardist and remain honest.
This individualistic honesty leads to a complex worldview, which tends to resist the simplifications of Fascism and other authoritarian ideologies.
A reader backchanneled me because she was concerned about whether the closet incident actually happened since Federman's own daughter seemed to question it, and what sort of aid such questioning might give to Holocaust deniers.
These are good questions. I am not an expert on Federman, I was merely reviewing his book. So if others want to jump in, I would be delighted. That said, from my reading of this book, Federman's fidelity is to a complex notion of 'honesty.' At the end of the afterword Pelton quotes him as saying,
"There is no distinction between memory and imagination, I would not falsify, because I would not lie, because when I walk down the street, my sisters might turn the corner ahead of me and meet me there, and I have to believe that, and how could I tell them when I saw them that I had lied."
By 'lying' I don't believe Federman is referring to getting his facts straight. I believe he is talking about getting his memory straight, all the while knowing that it is riddled with imagination. Did he get put in the closet? Or did he put himself there? Did his mother tell him to "shhh'? We will never know, not because we were not there, but because memory and imagination are profoundly interconnected. To deny this is to be dishonest.
As for Holocaust deniers, in order to keep them from doing any profound harm, we must keep them out of political power. On one level, it is a political struggle of our imaginations, and our stories, against theirs.
But this is not good enough for me. On another level I want to securely say that we Holocaust believers are in the right. And here is where I believe Federman does run into trouble, and he is conscious of it. He writes of himself in the book: "Federman ... your readers are ... going to wonder what's happening to you." My contention is that it is not simply his telling the story of childhood that pushes him to "the edge of the imposture of realism," but the need to tell his story of the Holocaust.
Perhaps the sheer weight of witness testimony is what we need. With so many stories, partly imaginary as with all stories, of the Holocaust, denying it becomes quite difficult. That said, it may be wishful thinking. How often are people more swayed by facts and evidence rather than ideology?
I end with the rather depressing conclusion that Holocaust deniers are probably more a political, rather than an evidentiary, problem. Because you can get some people to believe anything. Hence, Federman: be honest to your memory and what it constructs for you, not to what it is supposed to construct. Resist easy stories.
In this sense Federman is a hero. He could have written his own great success story: escapes the Holocaust, comes to America, fights in Korea, gets an advanced degree, gets a professorship, becomes an important novelist. It was perfectly available to him. Federman tried to write this novel, then destroyed it, because it was a lie, because it forced his life to a frame, namely, the traditional Western plot-line. He chose to become a lesser-known avant-gardist and remain honest.
This individualistic honesty leads to a complex worldview, which tends to resist the simplifications of Fascism and other authoritarian ideologies.
the erotic sounds
like the governors of
the down side
unstable
and unable to hold
the erotic sounds
the tapping around
the touching
demanding and soft
at the same time
and maybe easing
it all up and
down a bit
no prescription here
but glorious
governors play
the elected
number of shells
but justice makes
the number go higher
translating
the suspected and
the spread
going down:
incidental rains
rising and falling
all wet, all dry
all wet, all
barely dry
— Jefferson Hansen
the down side
unstable
and unable to hold
the erotic sounds
the tapping around
the touching
demanding and soft
at the same time
and maybe easing
it all up and
down a bit
no prescription here
but glorious
governors play
the elected
number of shells
but justice makes
the number go higher
translating
the suspected and
the spread
going down:
incidental rains
rising and falling
all wet, all dry
all wet, all
barely dry
— Jefferson Hansen
Friday, July 16, 2010
Interview with poet Crag Hill on his book 7x7
Crag Hill's 7x7 is a book of poems with each poem given the title of a card from the traditional playing deck. He makes use of a lot of randomness and quotation, as he will make clear below. Also, the book was written in 2003 and concerns itself with the early years of the George W. Bush presidency.
1. Is this the first time the whole collection has been published? I had no idea when I read this book that it was written in 2003. I thought that it was written recently and it was looking back on the past decade. I find this impressive: Your commentary on a specific political moment has some staying power beyond that time. What strikes you when looking back at them now? Do you see them as a type of political poem?
Yes, this is the first time this series of poems, composed in 2003, has been published in its entirety. I had been holding out, looking for a publisher who could print them on 8 1/2 x 11 playing cards in an 8 1/2 x 11 box (with rounded corners no less). As they appear in this book from Otoliths, they are in the order of composition, the year 2003 unfolding chronologically as it were. I'd like for the reader to be able to shuffle that chronology, seeing what happens, for example, when all the Kings and Jacks are juxtaposed. I'd like to subvert the notion of chronology itself-as if any present can be experienced without the past or future breaking into/through its chronic/logic.
The poems in 7 x 7 are first and foremost political poems, even if they may not have started out that way. I knew that in 2003 Cheney-Bush would invade Iraq (many of us knew that on 9/11); Colin Powell had already given his bogus presentation to the U.N. to gain international support (which never materialized the way it had for Afghanistan). Simply put, the 7 x 7 project was designed to keep me writing everyday (difficult to do then as a classroom teacher), envisioned as a daybook with Oulipian constraints (each stanza constitutes a day in a week in the year), cutting across what I was reading, seeing/hearing on radio and television, what I was thinking and writing in prose and poetry, the poems as documentation of what was happening within/without the spheres of my attention/s.
I'm gratified you find that the political moments have staying power; I worried that not getting 7 x 7 out while Cheney-Bush was in office would diminish the impact of the poems, our short public memory disappearing the references (the risk all political poetry takes, events receding into cultural obsolescence). Alas, our continued involvement in two wars keeps the poems pumped up with relevance.
I am struck by how much of my attention was consumed by the war that should never have been (which, of course, could never compare to the time and energy and turmoil of those who served in Iraq or those who lost loved ones). I wish I could have found something to do about it but fume and fester and write. If this is a daybook, I'm struck by how little of my domestic life entered these poems-my family, my travel, my job teaching high school English, my own study working toward another degree. Yet my reading-news, fiction, poetry, lit crit, my own notebooks-glares through.
2. [Please refer to these poems as they were published in the net journal "Hamilton Stone" throughout the rest of the interview.] All the poems in 7x7 take their name from a card from a standard playing deck. How does this randomness fit with the formal discontinuities in other parts of the poems?
I cannot recall if I chose playing cards to title the poems before or after other aspects of the project in place (ultimately each title corresponded to the card I slid from the diminishing deck). One of the 7s in 7 x 7 represents the number of days in a week. Thus the first day of the week has one line, the second day two lines, etc. (I have used the seven days of the week before-see The Week, The Runaway Spoon Press, 1991-to structure a writing project). The other 7 denotes the number of different sources I worked with to write the content of each stanza. I used seven playing cards to select each source for the day. If I pulled an Ace from the short stack, I selected from poetry in my notebook. For a 2, I selected prose from my notebook. With a 3, I chose a quote from a book I was reading. With a 4, I rewrote a passage from a book I was reading, changing the sense while retaining as much of the sound as I could. Drawing a 5, I quoted news from the internet or magazines (primarily Newsweek). With a 6, I quoted from a newspaper (most commonly The Moscow-Pullman Daily News, circulation 8000). Pulling out a 7, I quoted-or slightly misquoted/misheard-television and radio programs. For instance, in "Queen of Hearts," the first line is a taken from a prose passage in my notebook about Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The next two lines are quotations from a political news show. The next three lines are a rewriting of a passage from something I was reading (I didn't keep a record of these texts). The next four lines are a poetry excerpt taken from my notebook, a poem written on a drive across Montana to visit family in Wisconsin. For the next five lines I again drew an Ace and excerpted from a poem based on a dream. The last two stanzas are direct quotations from my reading (direct quotations of text are marked by italics).
In short, the procedures were deployed to create discontinuities, to disrupt the recursiveness of my writing process. I wanted the language material around me to construct its own meanings with as little "supervision" from me as possible. As a teenager I was struck by Lautreamont's chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table. Though much of surrealism has been rendered cliché, there's still much to be gained from these unintentional juxtapositions. Since, I have endeavored to make possible as many impossible encounters as I can, making volatile neighbors of Fox News and MSNBC, of fiction and poetry, philosophy and trivia.
I'd argue that this isn't random randomness, chance for chance's sake. The world's quick and immense, impossible to encompass or comprehend; chance procedures can bring order to chaos (and chaos to order), although it may not always appear to be so on the surface.
3. How does the italics work with and against the standard font?
The italics, as I mentioned above, mark quotations from books I was reading. In a future edition, I'd like to take this marking a step further, making the font uniform for each of the seven sources, e.g. Cambria for quoted poetry from my notebook, Arial for prose, Times New Roman for quotations taken from my reading, etc. That would add texture to the poems and enhance the intertextual readings between the poems, between sections (the collection could be read through selections of my notebook, poetry and prose, excerpts from my reading rather than beginning of poem to end-the series of poems then becomes one poem with many interconnected strands).
4. Are there chance operations or collage elements in the poems other than the deck of cards?
Answered in #2?
5. Do you consider George W. Bush a work of randomness itself, and is this an ode to his Presidency and his time in office?
I wish George W. was a work of randomness. Alas, George had too many people pulling his strings to be random, the ultimate puppet, a wooden creature with no original thought. There are many painful things about 9/11, one of them being that that event reassured his re-election (as a 16 year old student I had in Republican-swarmed Idaho predicted that very same day). The U.S. would have backed any sitting President at that time; patriotic fervor comes with its own peculiar blinders. Bush was in the right place at the time but was he the right person to respond to such a cataclysm? Time-7 x 7 as an anti-ode-answers in the negative.
1. Is this the first time the whole collection has been published? I had no idea when I read this book that it was written in 2003. I thought that it was written recently and it was looking back on the past decade. I find this impressive: Your commentary on a specific political moment has some staying power beyond that time. What strikes you when looking back at them now? Do you see them as a type of political poem?
Yes, this is the first time this series of poems, composed in 2003, has been published in its entirety. I had been holding out, looking for a publisher who could print them on 8 1/2 x 11 playing cards in an 8 1/2 x 11 box (with rounded corners no less). As they appear in this book from Otoliths, they are in the order of composition, the year 2003 unfolding chronologically as it were. I'd like for the reader to be able to shuffle that chronology, seeing what happens, for example, when all the Kings and Jacks are juxtaposed. I'd like to subvert the notion of chronology itself-as if any present can be experienced without the past or future breaking into/through its chronic/logic.
The poems in 7 x 7 are first and foremost political poems, even if they may not have started out that way. I knew that in 2003 Cheney-Bush would invade Iraq (many of us knew that on 9/11); Colin Powell had already given his bogus presentation to the U.N. to gain international support (which never materialized the way it had for Afghanistan). Simply put, the 7 x 7 project was designed to keep me writing everyday (difficult to do then as a classroom teacher), envisioned as a daybook with Oulipian constraints (each stanza constitutes a day in a week in the year), cutting across what I was reading, seeing/hearing on radio and television, what I was thinking and writing in prose and poetry, the poems as documentation of what was happening within/without the spheres of my attention/s.
I'm gratified you find that the political moments have staying power; I worried that not getting 7 x 7 out while Cheney-Bush was in office would diminish the impact of the poems, our short public memory disappearing the references (the risk all political poetry takes, events receding into cultural obsolescence). Alas, our continued involvement in two wars keeps the poems pumped up with relevance.
I am struck by how much of my attention was consumed by the war that should never have been (which, of course, could never compare to the time and energy and turmoil of those who served in Iraq or those who lost loved ones). I wish I could have found something to do about it but fume and fester and write. If this is a daybook, I'm struck by how little of my domestic life entered these poems-my family, my travel, my job teaching high school English, my own study working toward another degree. Yet my reading-news, fiction, poetry, lit crit, my own notebooks-glares through.
2. [Please refer to these poems as they were published in the net journal "Hamilton Stone" throughout the rest of the interview.] All the poems in 7x7 take their name from a card from a standard playing deck. How does this randomness fit with the formal discontinuities in other parts of the poems?
I cannot recall if I chose playing cards to title the poems before or after other aspects of the project in place (ultimately each title corresponded to the card I slid from the diminishing deck). One of the 7s in 7 x 7 represents the number of days in a week. Thus the first day of the week has one line, the second day two lines, etc. (I have used the seven days of the week before-see The Week, The Runaway Spoon Press, 1991-to structure a writing project). The other 7 denotes the number of different sources I worked with to write the content of each stanza. I used seven playing cards to select each source for the day. If I pulled an Ace from the short stack, I selected from poetry in my notebook. For a 2, I selected prose from my notebook. With a 3, I chose a quote from a book I was reading. With a 4, I rewrote a passage from a book I was reading, changing the sense while retaining as much of the sound as I could. Drawing a 5, I quoted news from the internet or magazines (primarily Newsweek). With a 6, I quoted from a newspaper (most commonly The Moscow-Pullman Daily News, circulation 8000). Pulling out a 7, I quoted-or slightly misquoted/misheard-television and radio programs. For instance, in "Queen of Hearts," the first line is a taken from a prose passage in my notebook about Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The next two lines are quotations from a political news show. The next three lines are a rewriting of a passage from something I was reading (I didn't keep a record of these texts). The next four lines are a poetry excerpt taken from my notebook, a poem written on a drive across Montana to visit family in Wisconsin. For the next five lines I again drew an Ace and excerpted from a poem based on a dream. The last two stanzas are direct quotations from my reading (direct quotations of text are marked by italics).
In short, the procedures were deployed to create discontinuities, to disrupt the recursiveness of my writing process. I wanted the language material around me to construct its own meanings with as little "supervision" from me as possible. As a teenager I was struck by Lautreamont's chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table. Though much of surrealism has been rendered cliché, there's still much to be gained from these unintentional juxtapositions. Since, I have endeavored to make possible as many impossible encounters as I can, making volatile neighbors of Fox News and MSNBC, of fiction and poetry, philosophy and trivia.
I'd argue that this isn't random randomness, chance for chance's sake. The world's quick and immense, impossible to encompass or comprehend; chance procedures can bring order to chaos (and chaos to order), although it may not always appear to be so on the surface.
3. How does the italics work with and against the standard font?
The italics, as I mentioned above, mark quotations from books I was reading. In a future edition, I'd like to take this marking a step further, making the font uniform for each of the seven sources, e.g. Cambria for quoted poetry from my notebook, Arial for prose, Times New Roman for quotations taken from my reading, etc. That would add texture to the poems and enhance the intertextual readings between the poems, between sections (the collection could be read through selections of my notebook, poetry and prose, excerpts from my reading rather than beginning of poem to end-the series of poems then becomes one poem with many interconnected strands).
4. Are there chance operations or collage elements in the poems other than the deck of cards?
Answered in #2?
5. Do you consider George W. Bush a work of randomness itself, and is this an ode to his Presidency and his time in office?
I wish George W. was a work of randomness. Alas, George had too many people pulling his strings to be random, the ultimate puppet, a wooden creature with no original thought. There are many painful things about 9/11, one of them being that that event reassured his re-election (as a 16 year old student I had in Republican-swarmed Idaho predicted that very same day). The U.S. would have backed any sitting President at that time; patriotic fervor comes with its own peculiar blinders. Bush was in the right place at the time but was he the right person to respond to such a cataclysm? Time-7 x 7 as an anti-ode-answers in the negative.
Raymond Federman, SHHH (starcherone books), part 4
[This is the final in a four-part series of blogs on Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, The Story of a Childhood.]
I attended SUNY-Buffalo during some of the years Raymond Federman taught there. I never got to know him well, but I did attend a number of readings and observed him in passing. He can only be described as a raconteur — to my mind, someone for whom the story, not the facts or memory, takes priority. Usually, the raconteur engages in storytelling just for fun. And, while Federman obviously had a lot of fun, he also turned the raconteur's position into an aesthetic.
At one point in the book he even takes on a belligerent tone about just this issue:
"To remember is to play a mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.
When I write, I don't give a damn about what I owe to memory. Otherwise it would mean that I write to repay what I owe to those who forced me to write. What do I owe them?"
These sentences are uttered by an interlocutor who interrupts Federman's string of vignettes to question what he is writing and how he is doing it. Much of the time, it feels as if it is a version of Federman's voice coming through, even when he seems to divide himself into two voices who go into dialogue. One voice refers to himself in the second person, the other in the first.
Federman's visceral reaction against 'responsible', 'dutiful' writing is, ironically, a call to honesty. He believes that straightforward, realist stories are "responsible" and indefensibly dishonest: "Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a verman." An 'honest' story, it would seem, is self-aware of itself as a story, as a construction. It doesn't pretend to represent in any simple and clear way.
I end by returning to my first post, the one where the interlocutor wonders how Federman can be "so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring...What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery..."
This is a book where Federman risks his raconteur aesthetic in order to tell the heartbreaking story of his early childhood. It is a book where he seems as much interested in history (he even says so at one time) as he is with the story. He seems to risk realism, which he clearly associates with fascism, in order to be true to his vignettes.
But there is a final twist. In his afterword publisher Ted Pelton says that Federman's daughter Simone commented about the closet incident, "if it ever happened." This is astounding: she is questioning the very basis of this entire book. The raconteur could have the last laugh, having created out of thin air the perfect Holocaust, rags to riches story, only to break it up into discontinuous vignettes and the voices of interlocutors.
What did or did not happen becomes indifferent. What we have is the writing. However, this should not be taken as a frivolous postmodernism that claims all human communication/thought/reality is writing. Hardly. Federman came to his aesthetic in part through his painful participation in the Holocaust, whatever his faulty memory might offer us of the particulars of that time.
There is no free play of the signifier when they come for your family. Yes, there might be a lie that keeps the police from searching the closet where Raymond was hiding, but that comes from desperation, not freedom. This book is called "Shhh," not "because of her I can write." Federman emphasizes the closing down of language.
I hope I am not stretching it by saying that this book, in part, shows that the free play of the signifier ends at the point of a bayonet or the barrel of a gun. As Federman worries as early as page 9, perhaps the raconteur cannot tell this story in the face of such devastation, no matter how fast and loose he plays with the facts. Death is absolute. Mass murder is moreso, since it echoes among those yet to be killed. And that echoing is not a sign. It's too deep, too sickening and revolting for such a word. Perhaps the best we can do is use words like "aura," "atmosphere" and so on.
What is Federman's solution in this book? To use ellipses: ...
I attended SUNY-Buffalo during some of the years Raymond Federman taught there. I never got to know him well, but I did attend a number of readings and observed him in passing. He can only be described as a raconteur — to my mind, someone for whom the story, not the facts or memory, takes priority. Usually, the raconteur engages in storytelling just for fun. And, while Federman obviously had a lot of fun, he also turned the raconteur's position into an aesthetic.
At one point in the book he even takes on a belligerent tone about just this issue:
"To remember is to play a mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.
When I write, I don't give a damn about what I owe to memory. Otherwise it would mean that I write to repay what I owe to those who forced me to write. What do I owe them?"
These sentences are uttered by an interlocutor who interrupts Federman's string of vignettes to question what he is writing and how he is doing it. Much of the time, it feels as if it is a version of Federman's voice coming through, even when he seems to divide himself into two voices who go into dialogue. One voice refers to himself in the second person, the other in the first.
Federman's visceral reaction against 'responsible', 'dutiful' writing is, ironically, a call to honesty. He believes that straightforward, realist stories are "responsible" and indefensibly dishonest: "Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a verman." An 'honest' story, it would seem, is self-aware of itself as a story, as a construction. It doesn't pretend to represent in any simple and clear way.
I end by returning to my first post, the one where the interlocutor wonders how Federman can be "so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring...What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery..."
This is a book where Federman risks his raconteur aesthetic in order to tell the heartbreaking story of his early childhood. It is a book where he seems as much interested in history (he even says so at one time) as he is with the story. He seems to risk realism, which he clearly associates with fascism, in order to be true to his vignettes.
But there is a final twist. In his afterword publisher Ted Pelton says that Federman's daughter Simone commented about the closet incident, "if it ever happened." This is astounding: she is questioning the very basis of this entire book. The raconteur could have the last laugh, having created out of thin air the perfect Holocaust, rags to riches story, only to break it up into discontinuous vignettes and the voices of interlocutors.
What did or did not happen becomes indifferent. What we have is the writing. However, this should not be taken as a frivolous postmodernism that claims all human communication/thought/reality is writing. Hardly. Federman came to his aesthetic in part through his painful participation in the Holocaust, whatever his faulty memory might offer us of the particulars of that time.
There is no free play of the signifier when they come for your family. Yes, there might be a lie that keeps the police from searching the closet where Raymond was hiding, but that comes from desperation, not freedom. This book is called "Shhh," not "because of her I can write." Federman emphasizes the closing down of language.
I hope I am not stretching it by saying that this book, in part, shows that the free play of the signifier ends at the point of a bayonet or the barrel of a gun. As Federman worries as early as page 9, perhaps the raconteur cannot tell this story in the face of such devastation, no matter how fast and loose he plays with the facts. Death is absolute. Mass murder is moreso, since it echoes among those yet to be killed. And that echoing is not a sign. It's too deep, too sickening and revolting for such a word. Perhaps the best we can do is use words like "aura," "atmosphere" and so on.
What is Federman's solution in this book? To use ellipses: ...
Lance and Andi Olsen, HEAD IN FLAMES video
See 1/20/10 of this blog for my review of Lance Olsen's collage novel Head in Flames. He and his wife Andi have created two films based on both the book and the film that in part inspired it: Head in Flames, Part one and Head in Flames, Part Two.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Federman's SHHH, 3rd post
Federman's prose is relaxed and conversation; it goes down easily. He manages to describe heartbreaking vignettes in such a way that we readers are not overcome emotionally. In part, he does this by unflinchingly describing his emotions. For instance, when he as a young boy, before he was interested in girls, was shown how to masturbate by a young woman in his apartment building, there is no sense of violation on his part because, apparently, there was none. He was just happy to be masturbating.
Federman describes this way of discussing masturbation, along with other topics, honesty. This may seem like a strange word coming from Federman, from a writer so suspicious of verisimilitude, but I don't think he is contradicting himself. Rather, he is being honest to memory, not so much to historical fact. And the two are different. (However, at other times in the book, he describes things as historical, such as the cockroaches and mice and lice they share their apartment and hair with as the "historical" facts of life in 1930's proletarian Paris.) What carries us through this fascinating book is this fidelity to memory. The book moves associatively, from one memory to another, jumping around in time, describing events even Federman cannot remember how old he was when they happened. (The fourth part of this series will deal, in part, with the problematic of memory in this book.)
He describes his childhood as chaotic. His father was a tuberculor chronic gambler, his mother a long-suffering house cleaner for rich people, and his Uncle Leon a tailor always trying to get him to come into his shop to do menial chores such as picking up pins from the floor. And then his cousin Salomon, whose hand-me-downs he received, and who treated him with real disrespect. Federman does not describe his sisters, Sarah and Jaqueline, very much at all.
While Leon and his family escaped, Federman's didn't, and whatever their foibles, especially the father's, none of course deserved what they had coming to them from the Nazis. There is almost an innocence in the way that he relates these vignettes.
I have come to wonder how how he has created this relaxed, associative prose at the sentence level. On page 176 he is describing the little birds who came to the apartment window. He thinks they were sparrows.
"I wanted so much to be able to fly like them. Maybe that's why years later in America, I volunteered for the paratroopers during the Korean war. Just to be in the sky. But that's another story.
"I would have liked to have been a bird. Except that in the winter, when it was very cold outside and it snowed, I could imagine how the poor birds were suffering."
This may seem sentimental to some, but to me it's not. The desire to fly comes at a time in the book when Jewish kids were basically forced to remain in their homes by the German occupiers. So there is a double association between the birds and the paratroopers: one is the explicit statement about flying, the second is a military association. When he is actually flying, he is doing the fighting, not being passively holed up in an apartment.
But Federman chooses to cut off this association. The question then becomes why he chooses to bring it up in the first place. Why not cut it out? Apparently, Federman wants to highlight the pruning process that he is applying to his memories. He begins a new story, perhaps even teasing us with it a little, only to shrug and say, "But that's another story." It's a little silly, kind of conversational, and all Federman.
So, the association carefully packed away, Federman returns to thinking about how he would have liked to fly. But he cannot leave it so simple: he also remembers how when he was a boy he imagined the birds suffering. This is a perfectly formed sentence: he delays the man clasue as long as possible, thereby getting all the necessary information in before introducing it. The delay also creates the necessary drama.
This example is one of the smooth, conversational, associative moves that makes this book go down so smoothly. Somehow, Federman makes this representation of a difficult life, that ended in tragedy for most involved, sing in a terrifically accessible manner.
Federman describes this way of discussing masturbation, along with other topics, honesty. This may seem like a strange word coming from Federman, from a writer so suspicious of verisimilitude, but I don't think he is contradicting himself. Rather, he is being honest to memory, not so much to historical fact. And the two are different. (However, at other times in the book, he describes things as historical, such as the cockroaches and mice and lice they share their apartment and hair with as the "historical" facts of life in 1930's proletarian Paris.) What carries us through this fascinating book is this fidelity to memory. The book moves associatively, from one memory to another, jumping around in time, describing events even Federman cannot remember how old he was when they happened. (The fourth part of this series will deal, in part, with the problematic of memory in this book.)
He describes his childhood as chaotic. His father was a tuberculor chronic gambler, his mother a long-suffering house cleaner for rich people, and his Uncle Leon a tailor always trying to get him to come into his shop to do menial chores such as picking up pins from the floor. And then his cousin Salomon, whose hand-me-downs he received, and who treated him with real disrespect. Federman does not describe his sisters, Sarah and Jaqueline, very much at all.
While Leon and his family escaped, Federman's didn't, and whatever their foibles, especially the father's, none of course deserved what they had coming to them from the Nazis. There is almost an innocence in the way that he relates these vignettes.
I have come to wonder how how he has created this relaxed, associative prose at the sentence level. On page 176 he is describing the little birds who came to the apartment window. He thinks they were sparrows.
"I wanted so much to be able to fly like them. Maybe that's why years later in America, I volunteered for the paratroopers during the Korean war. Just to be in the sky. But that's another story.
"I would have liked to have been a bird. Except that in the winter, when it was very cold outside and it snowed, I could imagine how the poor birds were suffering."
This may seem sentimental to some, but to me it's not. The desire to fly comes at a time in the book when Jewish kids were basically forced to remain in their homes by the German occupiers. So there is a double association between the birds and the paratroopers: one is the explicit statement about flying, the second is a military association. When he is actually flying, he is doing the fighting, not being passively holed up in an apartment.
But Federman chooses to cut off this association. The question then becomes why he chooses to bring it up in the first place. Why not cut it out? Apparently, Federman wants to highlight the pruning process that he is applying to his memories. He begins a new story, perhaps even teasing us with it a little, only to shrug and say, "But that's another story." It's a little silly, kind of conversational, and all Federman.
So, the association carefully packed away, Federman returns to thinking about how he would have liked to fly. But he cannot leave it so simple: he also remembers how when he was a boy he imagined the birds suffering. This is a perfectly formed sentence: he delays the man clasue as long as possible, thereby getting all the necessary information in before introducing it. The delay also creates the necessary drama.
This example is one of the smooth, conversational, associative moves that makes this book go down so smoothly. Somehow, Federman makes this representation of a difficult life, that ended in tragedy for most involved, sing in a terrifically accessible manner.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
its own good offering
katydids' strident
song beneath the
highway traffic —
there is no hurry
left to home —
for its own good
offering only
the last way out
— Jefferson Hansen
song beneath the
highway traffic —
there is no hurry
left to home —
for its own good
offering only
the last way out
— Jefferson Hansen
halls & cylinders
Creatures lumbering &
posturing their
way down halls
& cylinders,
an interloper
offers other
approaches
questionable &
expansive, the
capacity
of alert seedlings,
perhaps the last way
out of the last
way home
like words knocking
at the wrong
door.
— Jefferson Hansen
posturing their
way down halls
& cylinders,
an interloper
offers other
approaches
questionable &
expansive, the
capacity
of alert seedlings,
perhaps the last way
out of the last
way home
like words knocking
at the wrong
door.
— Jefferson Hansen
Friday, July 9, 2010
AACM Saxophonist Fred Anderson Dead at 81 years of age
One of the leaders of Chicago's 45-year-old avant-garde jazz artist collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Fred Anderson, died last month. This article gives a good rundown of his life. Here are a few of his albums that I own and like. I am sure there are others, such as the highly touted "The Missing Link," which are equally interesting:
On the Run: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)
Back Together Again: Hamid Drake and Fred Anderson (thrill jockey)
The Milwaukee Tapes (atavistic)
Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)
On the Run: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)
Back Together Again: Hamid Drake and Fred Anderson (thrill jockey)
The Milwaukee Tapes (atavistic)
Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (delmark)
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Federman's "Shhh", part 2 — the poem "Before That"
[This is the second of a number of entries that trace my thoughts as I read Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, which is about his early life with his family before, at age 13, his mother pushed him into a closet, telling him "shhh," when the Nazis were coming and saved him from the fate of the rest of the family, Aushwitz.]
Throughout his fine prose — and the word is "fine," — Federman intersperses poems. The poems often surprise me at how old-fashioned they seem in their thematics. This is not a put down, it is just an observation. Perhaps the poem that affects me the most is also the most old-fashioned, "Before That." On the surface, it is a simple longing for a long, rooted family occupation, as farmers, builders, or sailors.
The first stanza reads:
Some say, can say: my father was a farmer,
and his father before him, and his father
before that. We are of the earth.
The poem goes on to say that a family of builders is "of the stone" and a family of sailors is "of the water." Then he says that "I have no antecedent" because nobody in his family has been a writer. He claims to write to establish an "antecedent for my children."
The last two stanzas are devastating. Federman wonders if he can say anything of his father given his "erasure from history." In the next stanza, the answer is "yes." He can say his father is "a wanderer" from "nowhere" to nowhere. "He came without earth, stone, water, and he went wordless."
What I find so devastating here is the intense longing for family that comes through. The desire for stone, earth, and water, for the elemental, to touch and become one with the elemental, is almost overwhelming. It is what he sees others have that he cannot because his family was taken from him.
In the prose of the book, where he comments on the poem, Federman suggests that it is about his family's historical tendency toward failure and poverty. And I believe him, but only on one level. The "that" in the title could refer to familial antecedents or to his family being taken away Aushwitz. In the latter case, the earth stone water are the fundamentals of life being stripped from him.
Throughout his fine prose — and the word is "fine," — Federman intersperses poems. The poems often surprise me at how old-fashioned they seem in their thematics. This is not a put down, it is just an observation. Perhaps the poem that affects me the most is also the most old-fashioned, "Before That." On the surface, it is a simple longing for a long, rooted family occupation, as farmers, builders, or sailors.
The first stanza reads:
Some say, can say: my father was a farmer,
and his father before him, and his father
before that. We are of the earth.
The poem goes on to say that a family of builders is "of the stone" and a family of sailors is "of the water." Then he says that "I have no antecedent" because nobody in his family has been a writer. He claims to write to establish an "antecedent for my children."
The last two stanzas are devastating. Federman wonders if he can say anything of his father given his "erasure from history." In the next stanza, the answer is "yes." He can say his father is "a wanderer" from "nowhere" to nowhere. "He came without earth, stone, water, and he went wordless."
What I find so devastating here is the intense longing for family that comes through. The desire for stone, earth, and water, for the elemental, to touch and become one with the elemental, is almost overwhelming. It is what he sees others have that he cannot because his family was taken from him.
In the prose of the book, where he comments on the poem, Federman suggests that it is about his family's historical tendency toward failure and poverty. And I believe him, but only on one level. The "that" in the title could refer to familial antecedents or to his family being taken away Aushwitz. In the latter case, the earth stone water are the fundamentals of life being stripped from him.
Singers from "As the Rhythm Changes"
I wrote a blog response to Mankwe Ndosi's "As the Rhythm Changes," a fascinating performance piece sung, danced and acted by her and four other women and staged in St. Paul. It was dated May 16, 2010.
Mankwe has announced that she and some of the others in the performance will appear on Twin Cities television over the next couple days. You can also see them over the internet.
Mankwe has announced that she and some of the others in the performance will appear on Twin Cities television over the next couple days. You can also see them over the internet.
"Prior to working on As the Rhyhtm Changes - I got together with my friends and outstanding singer/artists, Aimee K. Bryant and Libby Turner-Opanga, to record for Twin Cities Public Television’s new weekly arts series, MN Original.
Our segment is scheduled to air on TONITE's MN Original Thursday, July 8th at 7:30pm, on tpt2. It will repeat Saturday, July 10th at 6:30pm on the statewide MN Channel, and Sunday, July 11th at 6pm on tptLIFE. (all times listed are Central Time.)
If you're outside the Twin Cities, or miss it the full episode will also be posted on TPT's companion website www.mnoriginal.org. Visitors to the site will find additional content,web exclusive videos, more background and links to MN Original artists."
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Poe Poe
we've been
here before and
no science
can explain
the treachery and
trajectories we
will travel -
what is it
when the bottom
falls out
and we find
no footholds
no landings
awakened by a
perpendicular
appeal
and we give no
ground
except the toe
that digs back
to hold
us steady
against
what we fear
will materialize:
an onslaught
that has
never happened -
wrapped together
like fence
and vine,
studying faces
for the wobbling
'facts':
just guesses
plus their
probabilities
if there weren't
an evil demon
behind human
perception we
wouldn't have to
invent one -
tangling
together our
hunches in
elaborate
evident
contradictions
a knocking
came to our door
today
announcing
itself as 'Poe, Poe'
and we gave
ourselves over
to the crack
crack
and we've been
here before
and nothing
looked right
again
here before and
no science
can explain
the treachery and
trajectories we
will travel -
what is it
when the bottom
falls out
and we find
no footholds
no landings
awakened by a
perpendicular
appeal
and we give no
ground
except the toe
that digs back
to hold
us steady
against
what we fear
will materialize:
an onslaught
that has
never happened -
wrapped together
like fence
and vine,
studying faces
for the wobbling
'facts':
just guesses
plus their
probabilities
if there weren't
an evil demon
behind human
perception we
wouldn't have to
invent one -
tangling
together our
hunches in
elaborate
evident
contradictions
a knocking
came to our door
today
announcing
itself as 'Poe, Poe'
and we gave
ourselves over
to the crack
crack
and we've been
here before
and nothing
looked right
again
Friday, July 2, 2010
SHHH (starcherone books) by Raymond Federman, Pt. 1
This was Raymond Federman's last book. While there is a temptation to write a review that is also a sort of elegy, especially given that the book is to a great degree autobiographical, I will leave the elegies to those who knew Raymond Federman better than I. Here and in a couple subsequent entries I will focus on the writing.
I am about a third of the way through the book so far, and here is what I am noticing.
The book begins with autobiography, by telling how Federman escaped the Nazi purges in France. He did so because his mother pushed him into the closet when the French collaborators came for the family and said, "Chut," French for "Shh." His family then when on to die in the camps.
Federman pours his heart out in existential anguish: why did my mother pick me and not my older sister? Then, at least for nonreaders of Federman, he makes a startling turn. He says, to himself, not so serious, Federman . This all happens within the space of eight pages
This is serious, indeed. Here is a man confessing the most harrowing moment of his life, one that few of us will ever come close to experiencing, only to question the way he tells it. Is he saying that even at our most emotionally vulnerable we wear a mask, even at 13 years old, completely alone, completely silence?
But isn't the French collaborators' violence a bottom-line reality? People behave in certain ways because of the threat of violence. Or, does the Nazi story, with its masks, masques, and dramas make the violence occur? In other words, was Nazi power rooted in violence or in propaganda?
The answer is probably both, depending on the situation. But each was necessary. This means that violence alone could not do it.
Could it fairly be said that the collaborators' came to the Federman house in part because of propaganda, because of stories, because of a presentation of 'reality'? If so, wouldn't any presentation of 'reality' be suspect, even that of a little boy, who stayed in a closet as the police marched his family away?
When Federman breaks into the story and questions how he is telling it, he creates a dialogue with himself. One side of his persona asks why he has allowed himself to slide so far from his usual literary fare. The second voice often answers that risking realism is the price of writing the story of childhood, "one is always on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality that makes you crumble into whining realism" (9).
But Federman decides to "go on anyway" (9). I take it that Federman feels impelled to tell this story just as he is suspicious of stories that claim too much authority for themselves. How will this work itself out?
I am about a third of the way through the book so far, and here is what I am noticing.
The book begins with autobiography, by telling how Federman escaped the Nazi purges in France. He did so because his mother pushed him into the closet when the French collaborators came for the family and said, "Chut," French for "Shh." His family then when on to die in the camps.
Federman pours his heart out in existential anguish: why did my mother pick me and not my older sister? Then, at least for nonreaders of Federman, he makes a startling turn. He says, to himself, not so serious, Federman . This all happens within the space of eight pages
This is serious, indeed. Here is a man confessing the most harrowing moment of his life, one that few of us will ever come close to experiencing, only to question the way he tells it. Is he saying that even at our most emotionally vulnerable we wear a mask, even at 13 years old, completely alone, completely silence?
But isn't the French collaborators' violence a bottom-line reality? People behave in certain ways because of the threat of violence. Or, does the Nazi story, with its masks, masques, and dramas make the violence occur? In other words, was Nazi power rooted in violence or in propaganda?
The answer is probably both, depending on the situation. But each was necessary. This means that violence alone could not do it.
Could it fairly be said that the collaborators' came to the Federman house in part because of propaganda, because of stories, because of a presentation of 'reality'? If so, wouldn't any presentation of 'reality' be suspect, even that of a little boy, who stayed in a closet as the police marched his family away?
When Federman breaks into the story and questions how he is telling it, he creates a dialogue with himself. One side of his persona asks why he has allowed himself to slide so far from his usual literary fare. The second voice often answers that risking realism is the price of writing the story of childhood, "one is always on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality that makes you crumble into whining realism" (9).
But Federman decides to "go on anyway" (9). I take it that Federman feels impelled to tell this story just as he is suspicious of stories that claim too much authority for themselves. How will this work itself out?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
birds are these things
a bird arrived in time
for your unscheduled
investiture
your rude
graciousness
your silly formality
and it was just right
because birds are
these things —
at least little birds
like sparrows
raptors are something
else they are like
your sadness
sailing alone in
a vast sky
searching for
rodents
my sadness
is this also
for now though
we are on the ground
where some sparrows
apparently found
something to eat
— jolly & jostling
stretching their
way on,
—— Jefferson Hansen
for your unscheduled
investiture
your rude
graciousness
your silly formality
and it was just right
because birds are
these things —
at least little birds
like sparrows
raptors are something
else they are like
your sadness
sailing alone in
a vast sky
searching for
rodents
my sadness
is this also
for now though
we are on the ground
where some sparrows
apparently found
something to eat
— jolly & jostling
stretching their
way on,
—— Jefferson Hansen
the pivot of yesterday
there is no point
no portion
or partiality
to hold this flat
together —
we weather numb
as asthma
and the creatures parade
in the night
for reasons even
they apparently
forgot
or am I speculating
again and
again
the pollens come at
us again today
with a sullen
violence like
the moon slivered
and red behind clouds
that I like to think
are stupid but are
probably just themselves
as we are as
we are I guess
supposed to be
— Jefferson Hansen
no portion
or partiality
to hold this flat
together —
we weather numb
as asthma
and the creatures parade
in the night
for reasons even
they apparently
forgot
or am I speculating
again and
again
the pollens come at
us again today
with a sullen
violence like
the moon slivered
and red behind clouds
that I like to think
are stupid but are
probably just themselves
as we are as
we are I guess
supposed to be
— Jefferson Hansen
no future other
no future other
than the one
you forget yourself into
maybe with me
maybe with her
each step an excuse
a rationalization
explanation
a thank you like
the rest of them
— Jefferson Hansen
than the one
you forget yourself into
maybe with me
maybe with her
each step an excuse
a rationalization
explanation
a thank you like
the rest of them
— Jefferson Hansen
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