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"...if we could even imagine an Austen character with no right to exhibit a ring, earring, broach, bracelet, necklace, chain, cross, seal, miniature, or any of the other ornaments and trinkets that flood the represented social field, this unfortunate would be suffering as radical a deprivation as our own bourgeoisie fears for children whose parents haven't videotaped them." — D.A. Miller
*snip*
Out of the blue my thesis advisor wrote this morning to offer me a paid summer research assistantship. How cool is that!? The only wrinkle is that the application deadline for funding has passed, but she thinks there may still be some money left. If so, I'll get to spend my summer doing research for her next novel (!) I'm trying to be reservedly optimistic, but I'm having a hard time with reserved part. Since paid internships for English majors are virtually non-existent, and I can't afford to work for free this summer, I've been dreading the prospect of having to temp in some corporate hell hole à la my last paying job.
The salary is meager, of course, but being able to make ends meet doing work I enjoy—at home, and on my own schedule no less!—will be quite a luxury if it works out.
* * * * *
Busy weekend ahead. Seth's family is coming over for dinner tonight. I have tons of coursework and writing to do. I'm wrestling with an inverted sestina for my poetry workshop—i.e. one in which the initial rather than end words of each line repeat. My words are subject, object, inside, skin, beauty and the root uni-. On Sunday I'll be drinking tea and stuffing envelopes with my local chapter of NARAL (read: trying to stay sane in an insane political climate). And hopefully I'll find time squeeze in a few more chapters of Lerner's book, plus Mark Bibbins's Sky Lounge, which I've just started reading.
"As I write this, over these past four years the number of people who have died at the hands of terrorists is less than one-fortieth of the number of Americans who die in car accidents and less than one-third of the number of people around the globe who died on 9/11 from starvation and preventable diseases. All the same, since that day our social and political energies have to a large degree been devoted to preparing for a repeat of this kind of attack." -- Rabbi Michael Lerner, 2006
More quotes will surely follow given my excitement by and about this book....stay tuned!
Too busy to write a real post, so bullet points instead:
Despite the appearance of a very few proto-buds on the local trees and 50˚ temperatures earlier in the week, winter's not ready to quit yet—not in New England. It's been just above or below freezing for the past few days, and according to the forecast we'll be ball-and-chained to our wool coats for at least the next ten.
"But today marks the 3rd anniversary of the invasion of Iraq!" you say.
Exactly. And that's why I began this post by talking about the weather. Because what I really want to talk about is Jorie Graham's reading in Cambridge on Tuesday evening.
Simultaneity she called it—the bloody war overseas and the slow approach of spring. How do we accommodate both our very human desire to enjoy the earth's renewal and our grief over the human tragedy unfolding around us? For myself, how do I joyfully look forward to entering the institution of marriage while so many same-sex couples are barred from the doing the same? This is what it's like to be a person in our times. These are our confusions.
One of the most important things we can do is pay attention, she suggested. Witness. The mainstream media isn't reporting the half of it. Not the war; not government spying. Keep your books. When they dig it all up ages hence, our books will give them some sense of who we were. Those who disagree with Graham's politics might have called her opening remarks a rant, but I found them incredibly refreshing. It was invigorating to hear a poet whose work I admire engaging the issues that matter so deeply to me.
That's why, her alleged difficulty aside, I called Overlord a Sincere book several months back. In poem after poem, Graham is out of the cloister and in the world, fully present with both mind and heart. The first poem she read was "PRAYING (Attempt of June 6 '03)" [excerpt below in the extended post]. The transition from page to voice, for this reader/listener, was nearly seamless. She spoke the voice I'd mentally heard reading the book—a voice highly charged, and highly invested.
Regarding difficulty, she remarked that academics are the only ones who seem to have any trouble with it. Those who let the logic of the poems wash over them like the logic of daydreams do just fine. Intuition, I'd call it—a method which does not readily lend itself to pseudo-scientific examination and explication. That's not to say Graham is somehow less in control than her more scrutable contemporaries. Not at all. What it means is that she's thinking and writing on a different plane, one that's entirely accessible if we just relax and go with it. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir for the most part here...
In addition to the poems from Overlord, Graham read a number of new poems by which I was equally impressed. In fact, the only thing that bothered me about the reading was not having the opportunity to express my enthusiasm. I wanted to shout Yes! or clap or do something between poems, but the audience was so sedate I would have accomplished little more than calling undue attention to myself. So I sat there quietly with the rest of the (mostly older) crowd, and waited until after the reading to humiliate myself.
Yes, I got on line to have my book signed and yes, I was probably too effusive in my admiration. What does one say in under 30 seconds to a writer whose book has struck a very deep chord with one's self. Damned if I know.
It's a shame any of us should feel awkward about expressing appreciation for another.
_______________________________________________
The following excerpt requires some contextualization. The voices in the
hedgerows are of D-Day soldiers. During the summer, Graham lives near
the beaches on which the invasion of Normandy took place. The cat is a
stray she found in the hedgerows, who has AIDS and is beginning to
decline. She's obsessively scratching the floor as though trying to
cover feces that aren't there:
... There are people who need ammunition right now or it will be
too late.
There are people
whose names are being typed onto paper right now. One is on his
hands and knees and cannot find his voice to say please, for which
he might be killed. There is the category of by mistake for just about
everything especially death. There are people who need a driver's license or they
shall not
stay in the country. There are people who if the rent is not paid this month
shall not stay in the country. There are people who if they take something
which their child needs, or does not need, which they shall not have the
money for
shall not stay in the country. A country: I beg You, it is not Your dawn yet
here, tell me
what that is. I cannot make out what borders are. What they express is not clear
to me. Why we needed to cut it up like this. No,
it is not clear. From the hedgerows outside some are still audible.
Every morning like this with the mists on them the wide
impassable hedgerows speaking. I turn the news on only to cover it. To cover
the cat's claws scratching the floor I have now cleaned again. To show her it is
clean. "Clean" I say stroking and pointing. Above or below us it must be all right—
is it just
in our stratum? We have tried to cover it with volume, it is still space. We have
covered it with history, it is still a murder and a forgetting. The dead are still
mixed in with the living. Maybe by mistake. Whose? The battle lines
are setting in. Everyone is in his or her hole or should be. Wherever you have
fallen, stay. Distance is your friend, covet it. Even from God, I think, for
now. Your god might be the wrong one for the circumstances.
Make yourself a kind of silence, don't say what you think.
If you decide I shall say what I please know you are putting
your loved ones at risk. Listen to the hinges, listen hard. If you care to know
what I think, I think they are robbing us blind and we want to stay
blind. Speechless too, even our loved ones will testify against us.
CNN Breaking News: U.S. military launches what it terms the largest air assault in Iraq since 2003 invasion, targeting insurgents north of Baghdad.
We have to keep asking these questions—politics or strategy?—because news outlets like CNN keep giving the government the headlines it wants without question.
The mid-term elections are approaching, and Republican poll numbers are WAY down. 50% of those asked say they want a Democrat-controlled Congress. So up the war? Up the abortion issue? To what lengths will this administration go to help Republicans maintain power on Capitol Hill?
We need to ask—even at the risk of being proved horribly wrong. There's going to be a body count. Right now people are dying, and the main stream media isn't asking. Someone needs to ask.
If I had more time I'd dig out my Foucault. He has some very wise things to say about the constitution and exercise of power. Most importantly, one need not imagine some ghastly figure behind a curtain pulling all the strings in order to imagine that power is oriented toward a particular goal. Power can be diffuse and still aim at something. In other words, you don't need a tin foil hat to suspect you're being lied to.
I couldn't swing Austin, but I can afford the T fare into Cambridge to hear Jorie Graham read for free this evening—and as those of you who read this space regularly know, Overlord was my surprise favorite book of 2005. Now, if only we could get a good poet commune going...!
The info: Cambridge Public Library, Central Square Branch, 45 Pearl Street. 7:00pm.
[Addendum 3/15/06: I really enjoyed the reading and would blog more about it if I weren't so exhausted right now. More later...maybe.]
Airing now through May 27, 2007. We put a deposit down on our reception site yesterday. Narragansett Towers it is.
Every now and then it's nice to remember what women like Louise Brooks were doing back in the 1920s. To keep our minds limber. To keep from falling into the trap of linearity. To guard against the belief that we're more free now than we've ever been. I forget myself sometimes, and stumbling across these photos was a pleasant reminder.
No need to leave this up any longer, I think. I'm not usually big on this kind of sharing, but desperate times and all that. Thanks to those of you who emailed and commented. I'll be getting back to you personally soon. Seth and I have worked through our thing, and I'm really glad to see the dialogue in the comment box. I'm not suggesting we sing Kumbaya or anything, but...you know what I mean.
WARNING: MAY CAUSE SUGAR SHOCK IN DIABETICS AND CYNICS
Paul Guest and I wanted to go to AWP this year, but neither of us could make it. Nonetheless, our poems should be there. We both have work in the Spring 2006 issue of the Texas-based American Literary Review, and the editors said they planned to take copies along to the conference. I joked to Paul that I hoped our poems were having fun and not drinking too much. If you're in Austin and happen to see my poems, say hello for me.
I know I should play it cool and pretend this is old hat, but I'm not cool and this is my first publication. I checked my mailbox twice today thinking maybe, just maybe, my contributor's copy might have arrived—but no dice. :-( Will I ever stop being the nerdy little girl for whom writers loomed ten times larger than astronauts? Not too soon, I hope.
*snip*
South Dakota just made abortion illegal, and Congress voted to renew the Patriot Act. I don't know if I even want to live here anymore.
[Addendum 3/8/06]: What really scares me is that I saw this coming, but didn't believe it. Roe v. Wade overturned? Not in my lifetime. I bought into some of the rhetoric about abortion being a republican distraction—a polarizing fringe issue that conservatives wanted the Left to focus on so that they wouldn't talk about poverty, healthcare, jobs, etc. That may still be part of the reason South Dakotan republicans pulled this stunt—after all, if I heard correctly, the anti-abortion guy Chris Matthews had on NerfBall last night said there's only one abortion clinic and no abortion doctors in the whole state. If that's true, there's really nothing to outlaw is there? No reason for the government to get involved at all. But this isn't about South Dakotans' right to live according to their own values, which they're apparently already doing. It's about the governor and legislature of South Dakota trying to make national policy at the state level.
I have to admit that even now, there's this nagging rationalist in my head that says the whole thing is just too ludicrous to fly. I have to remember that same rationalist was convinced back in March of 2003 that no one could possibly believe the Bush administration's rhetoric about our needing to invade Iraq like yesterday. I just kept thinking, Everybody sees right through this, right? Right?
By the way, the first Senator who goes on television and says, "I voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because it was politically popular, I was afraid not to, and I regret it now," gets my vote for President in 2008. And if they weep a little during their speech, I'll vote twice.
Jonathan's declared a blog war on anyone who puts forward dumb arguments about poetry. Here's one: poets working in the experimental tradition have chips on their shoulders at least as big as any Dana Gioia and his New Formalists have been hauling around. And though it's all a rather large tempest in an incredibly small teapot, it's a really irritating one.
As far as I'm concerned, one really has to split hairs and think microscopically to find anything NEW that's been done in the last several decades. Flarf is hot right now, but is it substantially different than what William Carlos Williams was doing fifty-odd years ago? I don't think so. Will that stop anyone from running out into the spotlight and claiming to have reinvented the wheel? Nope.
Will the fact that most "experimental" modes now have their own substantial traditions prevent some Lefter-than-thou experimenters from claiming the rest of us are conservative, conformist, hopelessly chauvinist and/or unintelligent? Not by a long shot.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
As I said (somewhat differently) on Jonathan's blog, I think there are a number of valid (read: not merely reactionary) arguments to be made against the overuse of poetic methods such as irony, randomness, collage. One of those arguments concerns the diminishing affective/effectiveness of simply holding the mocking-glass up to the dominant culture. It's one way to interact with it, but it's not necessarily (as one tends to hear ad nauseum) the most authentic one. Another argument is that at some point the chaos may become wholly indistinguishable from the chaos one encounters out in the world—in which case, why Art? And at what point does formal experimentation, like formalism itself, become a distraction from whatever it is we need or want to say? Finally (for now), doesn't anyone worry that the time spent tweaking old experiments might be time better spent thinking up new ones?
So there you have it. Those are my dumbass arguments for not diving face-first in the post-post-avant pool.
*Note: I know Jonathan said dumb and not dumbass. I flarfed the ass part from a piece of flarf in Jacket 30.
*snip*
For those of you who may not be familiar with my modus, I generally snip drafts after about 24 hours so they don't remain on my blog as "published." AJ, Lyle, Kevin: thanks for your kind words! I was toying with the idea of a fourth section, but wasn't really sure. If the ending works for you guys as is, I think maybe I'll leave it alone.
With the wedding planning now well under way, I've been thinking about what I'm going to call myself—publicly at least—once we're married. Virginia Heatter Abramson is a mouthful, but of all the possibilities I think it's the one that suits me best. For a nano-second my inner feminist considered not changing my name at all, but Seth and I really do think of ourselves as a team, and I'd like our names to reflect that. To my mind, one of the important differences between marriage and co-habitation is that marriage takes a commitment between two individuals and extends it out into the community. In fact, I just wrote Seth's mom an email in which I said the same thing regarding our ceremony. I'd like it to be a mix of the personal and the communal—to feel like something larger than ourselves.
I'd particularly like to retain whatever aspects of a Jewish ceremony we appropriately can without my being Jewish. I don't want to offend anyone who feels certain traditions are better left to those who are religious, but I'd like, for instance:
To me, these traditions seem perfect for two poets who spend so much time thinking metaphorically. We could, of course, invent symbols of our own, but a private language that's inaccessible to anyone but ourselves is precisely what we try to avoid when we write poems for public consumption. And I think some traditional elements will help give whatever innovations we choose a necessary backbone.
I find myself much more excited about all this than I expected to be. Can you tell?
C. Dale asked for notebook pages yesterday. Here's mine. It's a sketch (or proto-sketch) for a visual arts project I'd like to do, in which a poem is broken into sections, printed on strips of parchment or other decorative paper, then strung on wires placed at different depths within a box. I have a ton of similar ideas, but this one was the easiest to get down on paper. One direction I'd like to take it is to create a room that looks like a museum hall—white walls, hardwood floors, miniature track lights to illuminate each text—and place figures in among the texts. I hope to do a series of more formal sketches over spring break that I can take to the art department in search of a little money to buy the necessary materials.
"The backlash against self-indulgence led to a disavowal of the personal, the needlessly profane, the sensational. But it is important to remember that we learn—nipple in mouth—through sensation and all our ideas are formed from shapes and colors and textures and urgent feelings. Without the personal, without visceral knowledge, without empathy, we are (and I mean this literally) anti-social fundamentalist murderers."
Rachel Zucker, "Confessionalography: A GNAT (Grossly Non-Academic Talk) on "I" in Poetry"
from Rachel Zucker's "What Dark Thing" (The Canary 4):
"People have believed in God so long it must truly be
epidemic, this loneliness
even marriage can't quench and
babies aren't for company
only make you a mother
which is the last savage flower
on earth
not worth
buying.
resist. your happiness."
AND:
"If you think too hard about the # of people aboard the planet
you'll die. Rightfully, by your own hand, and well you should."
AND:
"Tuesday: Therapy.
Wednesday: Mah Jong.
Thursday: we have sex (husband and I) lights on
frantic perhaps to much to wish for but more than nice a bit of avalanche
this time a cliff face along your body you have a body
of course while the computer goes to sleep flashing
pristine beach pics I think about you and a young co-ed
in a graduate carol the girl wears a crisp button-down but her
short short skirt she's over the table now is so short her paisley underwear—
what dark thing have you done to me?"
And it goes on like that, at that level of intensity, for five pages.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I read "What Dark Thing" while I was sitting in the student center at McElroy yesterday, and it broke my poetic consciousness in two. Everything I've been writing is bullshit, I thought. Not dishonest, per se, but way too careful.
Creatively speaking, I've had a strong case of the blues lately. It's partly the accumulated effects of a long, dark winter, partly being too broke to travel or go out locally and do anything, partly the lack of peers, because I'm so much older than all my classmates. I haven't kept up with my friends and acquaintances from NYC/Jersey, because ours was a mini-community predicated on shared experiences—clubs, parties, shows, etc. And though part of it is simply getting older, I haven't found an equivalent community of creative people here in New England—time & money, time & money, time & money.
If I'm being really honest, I might as well say that I saw C. Dale's post about the Legitimate Dangers reading at AWP, and I felt PISSED OFF. Not at anyone in particular, but at circumstances. I wanted to go. Seth wanted me to go, and we crunched numbers as hard as we could, but it just isn't going to happen. There wasn't even anything we could give up in order to save for the trip.
Anyway, the important point is that none of this is making its way into my poems, not obliquely or otherwise. And when I read Zucker, who is married with two children, hacking away at her own lifestyle, I felt crushed beneath the weight of my own cowardice. Life is a fucking compromise, and if I don't feel all zen about it, why am I writing as though it doesn't matter?
I think I have some ideas about that, and I may post them in the near future. Fixing the problem has got to be a major priority going forward.
