"The Discursive Situation of Poetry" by Robert Archambeau

In this essay, "The Discursive Situation of Poetry"in The Monkey and The Wrench, edited by Bissinger and Gallaher, Robert Archambeau  comes to the somewhat startling conclusion that "historically, the conditions under which poetry becomes widely popular are not conditions we should seek out." The two conditions Archambeau identifies are Victorianism and the expression of oppressed peoples toward their government.

In the former case, Victorians used poetry as a sort of moral guide. With an insecure rising middle class who needed instruction on the values and expectations of people of stature, poetry played an invaluable role. Perhaps Tennyson is the perfect example of this poet.

As far as the latter condition goes, Archambeau goes into little detail other than to reference the Celtic Revival in Ireland. However, it is not difficult for us to extrapolate. In many movements for liberation, from China to Africa, poetry has played various roles in the fight for human dignity, from agit-prop to the creation of counter-traditions such as the Francophone Négritude poets.

How does Archambeau see poetry working within U.S. culture at the present time? Primarily as academically credentialed professors writing for others with such credentials. He views this as a rather dry and less colorful extension of Bohemia artistry, where the market could not handle all the art being produced so groups of artists began to produce it for themselves.

How might this situation change? Archambeau seems particularly skeptical about boosterism and publicity. Instead, we need to look at wider social/historical forces impinging on the academy. And the most important one right now is "the encroachment of market values on the previously semi-autonomous academic system." (He takes this idea from Frank Donoghue.) The humanities may be the least well placed educational arenas to defend their utilitarian benefit.

Archambeau says that these changes will bring about a new historical condition for poetry, and we can hardly predict the form it will take. He also seems pessimistic about our ability to direct this movement in any significant manner. (I personally do not want to see poetry lose its foothold in the universities and colleges.)

This provocative article seems convincing on a number of levels. Of course we would not want to live in a society as cruel as Victorian England or as repressive as those suffering under a dictator or one party rule. Having poetry being popular is too big a cost to pay.

But I wonder at the dichotomy that Archambeau sets up:
poetry in a free society is unpopular as poetry in an unfree society is popular.

I profoundly disagree with Archambeau. Poetry is hardly unpopular in the U.S. today. The form of poetry that involves sophisticated words placed on a page, usually with line breaks, to be read quietly alone or to a quiet crowd, that form of poetry is not popular.

But song lyrics are wildly popular. And they are poetry: "lyric" poetry and song "lyrics" come from the same root. The fact that there are a lot of bad pop, rock, rap, country, and blues lyrics does not mean the poetry is bad. Any type of poetry needs to be judged by its finest examples. And there can be no doubt that some of the finest lyrics today serve as good performance poetry. This argument is not even out of the mainstream. The Anthology of Rap recently came out with Henry Louis Gates giving his imprimatur in the form of an afterword.

So the issue is not that we have stopped liking poetry. We have just stopped liking the type of poetry that is read silently or unaccompanied. Why is that? One is because technology has allowed us to. We now have stereos to play the lyrics accompanied by the spectacle of song. In Bryon's day, would his poetry have been sung over synthesizers, beats, and guitars if recording were available?

Old technologies rarely leave when new ones arrive. They just adapt. Wagon rides, after the advent of tractors and cars, switched from a simple necessity to a special celebratory activity, usually during the winter. Scrolls also are still around, centuries after Gutenberg, but they serve an ornamental rather than a utilitarian purpose. Newspapers will still be around for years, in spite of the internet.

What poetry represents, then, is a backwater technology, a nostalgia. The question becomes, if we feel compelled to write poetry, what can we do with this nostalgia? And here is where things get interesting. We could give in to just using it as tradition and allowing the nostalgia to completely overcome us, to become the poetic equivalent of gleeful wagon rides. Or, because poetry is nostalgia, it is not tethered to markets, nor is much expected of it, allowing it to become a sort of free-floating entity if we develop it in that direction,

This, then, becomes a paradoxical argument for experimental poetry, saying that its very nostalgic uselessness is what gives it its most power. What is this power? Here I come back to Archambeau. It is a Bohemian power where people who have, for whatever reason (academia, friends, curiosity, having come across a book in a bookstore or a poem on the internet), been drawn to this free-floating nostalgia and accept its marginalization, while at the same time taking the writing quite seriously.Why take it seriously? Because it is freeing to write and to read. It loosens assumptions and causes beliefs to dance before our eyes, making us ask if we want to continue believing them.

So people have not drifted away from poetry. The means of production simply allow it to be delivered in a more spectacular manner. This causes the marginalization of what we have traditionally termed poetry, words sitting on the page to be read quietly. This marginalization creates a kind of nostalgia to be associated with this poetry that can free poets from most any tethers when it comes to writing, thereby allowing them to experiment freely.

One word of caution: how do you convince a politician or academic administrator to fund difficult, exploratory poetry that few people read?

The Main Media Outlets

while the main media outlets
looked around and went
beserk
we talked our way through
a night of funky smells
and yellow sounds

a green and red
texture holding us this
morning, warp and woof,
even in the flesh
where there is no going
elsewhere, just forgetting

CHRONOLOGY OF WATER by Lidia Yuknavitch

The central metaphors in this book concern swimming and water: swimming in lakes, rivers, quarries, pools. Swimming for fun, to win, just to stay alive. And water sometimes comforts the body and sometimes threatens it, can lead to ecstasy and to profound degeneration.

"You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain." (99)

You can tell a lot about Lidia when you realize that, based on what she says in other parts of the book, she probably finds all these swimmers beautiful.

The book tracks Lidia as far underwater — in the bad way — as a person can go. Then it tracks her surfacing.

To say more would be to give away too many details.

www.hawthornebooks.com
www.amazon.com
www.powells.com

BURN YOUR BELONGINGS (Jaded Ibis Press) by David Hoenigman

First, a word about the publisher. Debra Di Blasi's new publishing adventure, Jaded Ibis Press, combines visual, textual, and musical art in each of its books. In addition, the press makes four different versions of each of its books: an ebook form, a black and white form, a colored form, and a fine-art form. The colored and fine art go for $49 and $8500 respectively. For this review, I read an ebook copy. The song that accompanies the book can be found on the press's web page. The art work appears in a column on the far right or far left of each page. They are by Yosutoshi Yoshida. First, I will discuss the writing, then go into the ways the artwork and sound contribute to it.

Hoenigman's book is obsessive on a number of levels: The concerns of the characters are obsessive. They are part of a highly dramatic and anxiety ridden love triangle. On another level obsessive groups of images return again and again: trains, umbrellas, rain, insomnia. On a third level is Hoenigman's determination to work this love triangle through about 200 single page, dramatic monologue variations.

And these variations are singular. I've never read anything like them. Their attention to bare concrete emotion and imagery, together with the use of pronouns with no clear antecedents, creates, paradoxically, a rather abstract reading experience. For me, I couldn't tell who was speaking in a given monologue, other than that it was one of the two men in the triangle. A close read is repaid by an experience of the intensity and destructiveness of romantic love at a fever pitch, not by a clear sense of what is "going on" between the characters in any conventional way.:

"I barely know her, someone left her on my doorstep. she appears out of thin air if I say her name. I introduce them. she only speaks when spoken to. always some distraction grabs him by the wrist. leads him to futility. grayness. wedges itself between us. I've never seen her here before. has yet to develop the grace of the others. or is she trying to deceive me. I kissed her bare shoulder. considered returning again alone. he's grown smaller and smaller. it's been months since that morning. the threatening little tremors. soon it''ll be over. a perfect opportunity for her to showcase her newly found distrust. for him to take offense. bite his tongue and await the unavoidable. downward so sharply that his ears pop. it must be warm and cozy there. I alone notice how it changes night to night ..." (101)

In this quotation we begin with the metaphor about being left on the doorway. While tired, it nonetheless works for me. The momentum created by this book allows for such tired constructions. It points to the arbitrariness of their love and, in this instance, "his" patronizing feeling toward her. But this will change. All feelings in this book are subject to radical and instantaneous change. The suggestions that she is a child continue: she only speaks when spoken to. Suddenly, we switch to the other "him" in the love triangle. What we don't get here is what we don't get throughout the book: explanations at the first or second level of abstraction which indicate how the characters are specifically related. Instead, we get these truncated, popping sentences that follow the contours of thought and feeling so closely we never come up for air. It is an extreme approach.

On my ebook, the accompanying pictures are brightly colored and usually depict cityscapes or landscapes out in the country. In addition, many depict what I can only call surrealist scenes. Disparate items are placed side by side. Collages or collage-like works contain objects in two different dimensions, such as a head too small for the body. In general, the art by Yasutoshi Yoshida seems to reflect and refract the way the text draws little distinction between "reality" and "fantasy." In this book, a fantasy has as much power, if not more, in shaping perception as simple facts do.

Finally, the song on the website, also by Yoshida, begins with an acoustic piano and a recitation of a part of the book. Then there is crashing noise. I won't spoil the end for you.

This book presents a field of perception defined by fantasy, obsessiveness, and, because of the pronouns without antecedents, a lack of clarity when it comes to fact. The music, text, and pictures combine to form an unsettling, relentless investigation into some of the least explored and most feared aspects of the perceptual and emotive world. It is a courageous book.

Interview with Bruce Holsapple

Poet Bruce Holsapple's latest book, Vanishing Act, (soon to be available from Small Press Distribution and currently available at La Alameda Press) contains the wit, irony, and attention to detail we have come to expect from him. The first half of the interview involves general questions about the book. It ends with a short discussion of Bruce's recording company, Vox Audio ( PO Box 594 Magdalena NM 87825), which puts out cd recordings of poets reading their work.

The second half of the interview focuses on a specific poem, namely, the first one in Vanishing Act, "title?." I will let Bruce introduce himself his own way, but I should say that he and I knew each other when we were both students at SUNY-Buffalo in the late 80's and early 90's.

Could you give us a few biographical markers that will help us better understand you as a writer?

I grew up in rural Maine in the 1950s, edited a small press in Portland, Maine in the 70s, then wandered off (Washington, Vermont, Texas, New York), working a proverbial variety of jobs, before finding my way into central New Mexico, where I now work as a Speech-Language Pathologist.  As you know (because we met there), I earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo in 1991, studying with Robert Creeley, Joseph Conte and Charles Bernstein.  I taught briefly at New Mexico Tech and UTPB in Odessa, Texas.  I’ve got six books of poetry in print, Air-Rose (1973), Total Eclipse (1977), Sweet Nothings (1984), Tourist (1994), Observations (1994), and now Vanishing Act, plus a couple new books in manuscript.  An essay on Philip Whalen recently appeared in Paideuma, and one on the verse line in William Carlos Williams appeared last fall in a special edition of English Studies in Canada.  I’m working on a book on Williams.

The title, "Vanishing Act," I find myself quite drawn to. Why did you choose it?

Well, because it works several ways, like in the ironic sense of all of us vanishing, being erased at various speeds—not an act at all, really—& there’s a lot of recognizing that limitation in the book, but also as a kind of self-parody, with the speaker as some dopey magician doing vanishing acts, presto!  Or my vanishing into New Mexico; I live out in the country, no phone service, etc.  But more importantly the sense of becoming “indivisible,” seeing thru yourself, becoming “the view looking.”   I mean, there’s a great concern with subjectivity, lyric voice.

Most of the poems are in the first person singular. It seems to be a version of your self, or your self in the making, that you refer to. Am I correct? When you use the 2nd person "you," you seem to be addressing yourself. Could you tell us what lies behind your choices concerning voice?

The poems are basically lyric, & concerned with voice, but as I say, the lyric subject is more or less under watch, tho who is watching is up for grabs.  As you say, whatever we are, we’re in the process of remaking ourselves, & the poems involve self-transformation.  The pronouns do drift off-base, shift in reference, as perspectives shift.  I think of self as dialogic, emerging from an outside conversation we learn to engage, “oneself as other,” as Ricoeur puts it (& of course Rimbaud before him).  

Vox Audio — You seem to be making an effort to get on record NM poets who might otherwise be lost. Is this accurate? I am wondering what you think of the notion of the "minor" poet as a positive marker. What can a minor poet accomplish that the major ones, in the Norton anthologies, cannot?

Vox has two missions.  One is to preserve poets reading who wouldn’t otherwise get recorded, like Gene Frumkin or Jim Bishop, and two, to build community.  The physical facts of voice are instrumental to how the poems mean, so important to the poetry community.  I don’t think of major and minor, but I do think in terms of cultural change, poetry’s work, and of the people I actually know— who’s in front of me; that’s what’s local,.  But the Vox project extends from Maine (Wright, Wilde, Sharkey), thru Buffalo (Sylvester, Clarke), Toronto (Boughn), Indiana (Kalamaras), Texas (Huffstickler, Bird, Welsh), into New Mexico (Higgins, Tarn, Rodney, Moore, Goodell, Tritica, etc.), where I live.  

                        Title?

You clutch too much, friend

try too hard, like there were a pose

you could freeze into place

& it would be there for you

a point of reference,

Me & What I Believe

you feel like falling in love

you feel like mourning the loss

all this melting snow

endless rehearsals

a slippery dance floor

You try figure, arrange, classify

like you could capture events

make the connections

a 3 ring circus & you the master of ceremonies

you pull out the plastic

“Customer Service.  This is Angie

Can I help you?”

My favorite color is beige

My favorite turtle is soup

She talks math, loves algebraic expressions

Substitute zero for x & solve for y

It’s the economy, stupid

your credit is stretched

What pain that attachment brings!

another force inside

speaking thru you  

using your voice            

locked  sick  feet  speed

pray  read  frog  stop

you want to go away & not care

It’s the passion I feel

what she engenders

causes me such loss

What I feel for you

What you produce

a boost into the air

no forwarding address

bee  gift  crowd  stew 

owl  boy  involve

skid  flip  call  crash

Won’t somebody make contact?

the ice is closing in

I’ve broken to new depths!

short green leaf

short eye grass

shot glass

fall short

near high

go between

impossible gap

It’s hopeless

nobody likes you

you need to cut your throat

snow  fire  spoken  star

mobile  tire  goal 

Dear X:  You’ll know I’m invested

by how rigid I get.  If we met

I’d pose, tell a joke, etc. 

I’m not so much making claims

as paying off deficits

I want to see those connections

how the tree lights up

a locus of identity

something reflected back

not exactly “I want”

but “therefore”

this forgetting dust

this insistent sand

this abandon

these babies born every day

in every city

proliferating what?

Mothers

death

dharma

diapers

new shoes

that’s exactly what I want:

to keep walking

1. In this poem the "pronouns," as you call them, switch around a bit. You go from addressing a "you" to a first person stance.

Okay, can I give some of the background?  We regulate behavior by self-talk, private speech, as with commands like “be brave” or say with scolding our “self,” and there’s extensive use of self-talk in the book.  But speech is communal.  There’s not much distance from the imperative “be brave” to second person “you,” hence addressing oneself as other.  In this instance, there’s an emotional shift, right?  A sense of exasperation.

2.  In several places you simply list words: "locked   sick   feet   speed / pray   read   frog   stop," and later "Mothers / death / dharma / diapers / new shoes." This seems to me a quite original technique, and it appears throughout the book. What is it's function?

Well, there are models in Whalen and Duncan, but hey, wait a minute—you use word lists too!  Is this a trick question?  Yes, I use word lists in fairly systematic ways, mostly as a structural device  to keep the notes bouncing, up in the air.  Sometimes it’s a flat surface, sometimes like scratchy noise, sometimes for transitions, sometimes just elliptical speech.

3.  The first stanza seems to be held together, in a tightly wound manner, by rhyme, off-rhyme, and assonance.

Hopefully the sound values ring thru-out, and the rhythm, and voice.  Word lists are often knitted into the text by sound contrasts.  Sound values are key.

4. I love the sly humor: "My favorite turtle is soup," for example.

Thanks, I’m told the humor is pretty dry!  The book is about conflict, impasse, developing flexibility, transformation.  Self-deprecation—or getting distance from oneself (learned from Whalen)— was an important way to unlock from cherished thoughts.

5. The poem seems to shift focus each stanza, although remain united under a certain set of concerns: effort, attachment, loss, passing thoughts. Do you see it this way?

Yes, a trajectory gets established & you’re off to the races, one word to the next, as far as “it” takes you.  Go with the Force, Luke!  Lots of jumping about, drifting off topic, shifting perspective, feints, various forms of address, rhetorical ploys, who knows where you’ll land. Hopefully on your “feet.” That’s exactly right.

6. Anything you would like to add?

It’s physically a beautiful book, thanks to Estelle Roberge’s cover painting, and Jeff Bryan’s design.   We kept the price low so people would take a chance.

The Heart (as muscle) and Poetry

See a recent entry in Trancepoetics by Kistin Prevellet to learn about some fascinating research some German scientists did on the effect of poetry on the heart, and the effect of the heart on the rest of the body, including the brain.

Jaded Ibis Publications

Debra Di Blasi has started an ambitious publishing venture that combines visual art, music, (and sometimes other artforms), and literature in multiple and complex ways. In addition, revenues will be shared with both writers and charities in unique ways. Things are so unusual, that even Forbes magazine took notice. Links to the press catalog and the interview are below.

New Jaded Ibis catalog

Forbes Interview

David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS

David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas  is on a lot of people's lists as one of the best innovative novels of the last decade, and for good reason. So far in my read it is symphonic in its structure and reach, virtuosic in its command of style and texture, and a fantastic, fast read all in one.

The book is divided into six very distinct narratives, taking place decades and even centuries apart, with different plots and characters in each. Five of the six narratives appear twice. If the narratives are represented by letters, they go as follows — a,b,c,d,e,f,e,d,c,b,a.

Right now, I have completed the first three narratives, a,b, and c. a is entitled "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing." It concerns a man who begged his way on board a Dutch ship as it went east across the Pacific to San Francisco in the1830's.

This is an example of a few typical sentences: "Torgny the Swede knocked on my coffin (i.e. cabin) door. Surprized and intrigued by his fertive manner, I bade him enter. He seated himself upon a 'pyramid' of hawser and whispered that he bore a proposal from a ring of shipmates. 'Tell us where the best veins are, the secret ones you locals are keeping for yourselves. Me 'n' my fellows'll do the pack work. You'll just sit pretty and we'll cut you in a tenth share."

Torgny was referring to California mining fields, which he assumed Ewing was aware of. What's of interest in this passage is the pompous and melodramatic word choices: "bade" rather than "asked." "pyramid" instead of "pile." "Whispered" instead of "spoke quietly." "Ring" instead of "group." In this little paragraph we learn a lot about Ewing and, since he is the narrator, a lot about the narrative as well. It is pompous, overblown, and not particularly observant. Why should Ewing trust Torgny?

The next section is also in first person. It is entitled "Letters From Zedelghem" and is set in Belgium in the early 1930's. A young musician and composer, Robert Frobisher, is serving as an aid to Ayrs, a great, but elderly musician. Together, the two of them begin to excite the music world once again. Frobisher's writing is tighter, more direct, often leaves out the assumed subject, and is cynical and skeptical. In other words, miles from that of Ewing.

"Cause for minor celebrations. Two days ago. Ayrs and I completed our first collaboration, a short tone poem, "Der Todtenvogel." When I unearthed the piece, it was a tame arrangement of an old Teutonic anthem, left high and very dry by Ayrs's retreating eyesight. Our new version is an intriguing animal. It borrows resonances form Wagner's Ring, then disintegrates the theme into a Stravinskyesque nightmare policed by Sibelian wraiths. Horrible, delectable, wish you could hear it. Ends in a flute solo, no flutterbying flautism this, but the death-bird of the title, cursing the first-born and last-born alike."

All of Frobisher's writings are letters to his friend Sixsmith. We may question his behavior: he apparently sends over a valuable book he had no right to to Frobisher so that he could have some money. Frobisher's sense of himself is quite high. He punches out verbs with no subjects, banging away at the idea that he had perhaps more to do with the creation of these pieces than he is given credit for. It's a fascinating juxtaposition -- the dry, worldly Frobisher versus the foolish, melodramatic Ewing.

There is one explicit connection between the two. While in Belgium, Frobisher comes across a copy of Ewing's diary and reads it. Other than that the connection is nebulous.

Not so with the next narrative, "Half-Lives: The First Luis Rey Mystery." Here, the Sixsmith of the previous narrative is in his 60's, it is now the 1970's, and he is a scientist working for an energy company building nuclear power plants. He has found out compromising information, and they may want to kill him for it. The 39 pieces tend to be straightforward, third-person vignettes told from the perspective of more or less one character. They are a page-turning mystery.

I don't want to go into it any deep other than to say it's a genre piece: it is a mystery, filled with the sort of clichéd talk and clichéd characters you might expect there. What rescues it? Well, that it is in the middle of a novel with such interesting stuff going on around it. I am not yet sure why it is here and what it is doing. But it was fun to read. More later as I move through this important work.

5 Short Poems

exhaustion marks

  the beginning of thinking,

     not the end:

  what of the sentence

that lingers and languors

        picking up

    whatever hangs around

                until it means itself

          and opposites too

 

and then the misstepping

dancer fakes it

just right

very few catch it

and those that do

admire her

for it

before the wish

   before the thought

before the wild

      and the tamed

   there is the wave

  the rhythm

     the pulse

   to ride

 

to be bare and lost

        to stand before the blankness

    to wonder into a void

to stand with no feet

     to breathe with no lungs

   to hear with no ears

         to smell with no nose

      to touch with no skin —

     fear and possibility 

scent-encing my way

                across a prairie

        hoping to find

    the lit house

it could be

      around the bend

   straight forward

  but I don't know

         what is a bend

     or what is straight

    just now