Gillian Conoley CORTE MADERA, CA Gillian Conoley grew up in Taylor, Texas where her dad ran a two-room radio station where she got to see Wilson Pickett, the late, great James Brown, and Joe Tex perform at a very young age, and Elvis came, too, but before she was born. Friday: 01.12.07 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Bush’s new Iraq strategy, which appears to be in slow leak mode in our country’s news organizations (Friday in Wall Street Journal, yesterday in Sunday’s NY Times) is most likely to be unveiled in a speech he will give to the country on Wednesday, tentatively titled “A New Way Forward.” What the leaks say we have in store: 20,000 more American combat soldiers, $1 billion in aid to be used as a jobs program, with a kind of “matching grant” from Iraq’s Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has agreed to add as many new Iraqi soldiers as Americans into the mix. The pitch is that we will be rebuilding as much as we are destroying—a kind of build ‘em up/tear ‘em down reconstruction . . . and a big expansion of what U.S. military calls “Commander’s Emergency Response Program,” which employs civilians as a way to lessen resistance to American presence in Iraqi neighborhoods. Who knows if we will be able to build more quickly than warring factions within Iraq can destroy. As “a senior White House official” says, “You’d go into a neighborhood, clear it, try to hold it, and come back later and discover it’s all been shattered.” So we’ll have more troops to fight the fighters who are battling for control of neighborhoods, who are most likely going to be more interested in their own sectarian control than Bush’s “Let’s Rebuild Your Neighborhood and Repaint Your Schools” employment program, and U.S. money will go to building up neighborhoods which will more than likely soon be destroyed.

Too Bad Bush isn’t also unveiling a little rebuilding of our own neighborhoods. Many of us are fortunate enough to live in OK neighborhoods, but many more of us are not, and many mid-size cities, Milwaukee, for example, are experiencing unprecedented leaps in crime due to huge cuts in police forces, coupled with a high lack of programs for criminals released from prison, not to mention dwindling National Guard. Don’t even try to talk to anyone in New Orleans, which has always had a grizzly crime rate, but now . . .

Not to go to far adrift, but lately I have been re-reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude has taken quite a beating lately in the press herself—it looks like she will definitely not go down in literary history as someone who helped with the Resistance––what with she and Alice living fairly comfortably throughout WWII in France, while Nazis carted off entire nearby orphanages. It’s WWI that is discussed in what we will hereby call Alice B.—and it’s fascinating, from the current cultural perspective of despair and numbed awe at the stupidity of our situation—to read Stein’s representation of WWI, especially with representation and its impossibility being her thing. I do not mean to disparage Gertrude Stein, whose writing I admire and whose writing has been so important to so many. I am however fascinated by the remove at which she wrote the following description of the battle of the Marne:

Nellie described the battle of the Marne to us. You know, she said, I always come to town once a week to shop and I always bring my maid. We come in in the street-car because it is difficult to get a taxi in Boulogne and we go back in a taxi. Well we came in as usual and didn’t notice anything and when we had finished our shopping and had had our tea we stood on a corner to get a taxi. We stopped several and when they heard where we wanted to go they drove on. I know that sometimes taxi-drivers don’t like to go out to Boulogne so I said to Marie tell them we will give them a big tip if they will go. So she stopped another taxi with an old driver and I said to him, “I will give you a very big tip to take us out to Boulogne. Ah, said he laying his finger on his nose, to my great regret madame it is impossible, no taxi can leave the city limits today. Why, I asked. He winked in answer and drove off. We had to go back to Boulogne in a street car. Of course we understood later, when we heard about Gallieni and the taxis, said Nellie and added, and that was the battle of the Marne.

The emphasis on the difficulty of getting the taxi, the “I always bring my maid,” “the shopping,” the tea, make strange bedfellows and metaphor to those of us reading the Times sipping our lattes. Even the name “Nellie,” as in “nervous Nellies.” There are pages and pages of such writing in the section called “The War” in Alice B. And Stein is up to much, it seems. But now it is late and I must find my daughter’s P.E. clothes. And that was the war in Iraq.

More on Stein and problems of representation and past wars and present wars and The War Issue I am editing for Volt, well, we will all just have to think about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile let me know your thoughts. Any and all of them, and on anything.

Gorgeous brilliant sunny California day, big black Van Gogh crows crossing cornflower blue sky, direct shadow fallen on damp gritty sidewalk giving off just a little steam. If it’s snowing where you are, or worse yet, not snowing, cold and gray, just scooch a little closer to the heater and imagine.

Ok, back to Gertrude Stein. And to reading someone’s respresentation of another war as we are thinking about how to represent ours, or how all sorts of others are already respresenting it. Perhaps represent is the wrong word here. Perhaps being alive to the war in writing would be another way to put it.

Alice B. as a war-torn love story, which it is, while at the same time a lasting document of Stein’s methods, in which she tells us very straightforwardly what she’s up to, with an only mildly jumbled syntax, so she’d make sure we got it (she’s so patient and understanding and only mildly hurt when Life magazine makes fun of her writing and publishes others examples of it as jokes, and so shrewd is her idea to write Life to express her appreciation of the spoofs but they weren’t really Gertrude Stein’s writing only imitations of Gertrude Stein, so would you like to print some real ones, which they did). Among Alice B.’s many brilliances, never mind the most brilliant, the broadest stroke at quandaries of representation––writing an autobiography that is not of Toklas but of herself as written by Toklas—so that she enacts one of her writing’s deepest convictions: “that after all the human being essentially is not paintable”–– are all the little breadcrumbs she drops for readers of the future and present, acts of generosity, really, such as “She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she first felt a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world.” And many many pages later, “Hitherto she had been concerned with seriousness and the inside of things, in these studies she began to describe the inside as seen from the outside.” And my favorite: “All of which of course may seem strange because it has been so often said that the appeal of her work is to the ear and to the subconscious. Actually it is her eyes and mind that are active and important and concerned in choosing.” And listen to this final buoyant love song for Alice—the kind of call and response these last two paragraphs of the book make:

I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I find it difficult to add being a pretty good author.

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

That passage plays the musical back-and-forth banter of a love song. How does she get that tonally clear bell of mild derision and grand affection in “You know what I am going to do”–– how does she make us hear it so strongly and fully and brightly?

Thank you Rennie Stores for writing in. I will answer your questions about Volt’s war issue later in the week, but for right now I’d rather stick with Stein and your comment about Stein’s remove being deceptive and being a shield—interesting also to think of your choice of word in shield as war object. Yes it’s a remove a veil so that we may see—but reading this again at this point in my life (I like the idea of reading the books I love most every 10 or 15 years; it would have to be books one loved for one to meet them fully) it’s the act of piercing through the veil that Stein does—and the clear shots of the war that come through—that I notice the most. For example this:

Well I too said when she woke me, is it a revolution and are there soldiers. No, she said, not exactly. Well what is it, said I impatiently. I don’t quite know, she answered, but there has been an alarm. Anyway you had better come. I started to turn on the light. No, she said, you had better not. Give me your hand and I will get you down and you can go to sleep down stairs on the couch. I came. It was very dark. I sat down on the couch and then I said, I’m sure I don’t know what is the matter with me but my knees are knocking together. Gertrude Stein burst out laughing, wait a minute, I will get you a blanket, she said. No don’t leave me, I said. She managed to find something to cover me and then there was a loud boom, then several more. It was a soft noise and then there was the sound of horns blowing in the streets and then we knew it was all over. We lighted the lights and went to bed.

I must say I would not have believed it was true that knees knocked together as described in poetry and prose if it had not happened to me.

And the piercing of the veil makes the veil even more palpably present and real. We get to watch it open and close, like an eye.

Ok—

write again Rennie Store, and others,

what writing about war is/can do/past or present, or feel free to change the subject entirely-- Good talking to you,

Good night to all.

      How now return to lecture halls:
O we who thought to cultivate this land
Have crouched like cattle in a freight;
Have scented death and lived too late;
Have whimpered as we fell between the cars;
And chance we live our sight is dull without the scars.

                         —Kenneth Patchen

Was that the veil shifting a little today, turning its glaucomic corners slightly in the breeze, was that Ted Kennedy piercing through? Do we still have a Constitution? Is this a day one could call new? Were these the voices heard as in a chorus?

Ted Kennedy: “Today . . . I am introducing legislation to reclaim the rightful role of Congress and the people’s right to a full voice in the President’s plan to send more troops to Iraq. My bill will say that no additional troops can be sent and no additional dollars can be spent on such an escalation, unless and until Congress approves the President’s plan.

“My proposal is a straightforward exercise of the power granted to Congress by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution. There can be no doubt that the Constitution gives Congress the authority to decide whether to fund military action. And Congress can demand a justification from the President for such action before it appropriates the funds to carry it out.

“This bill will give all Americans an opportunity to hold the President accountable for his actions . . . Congress must have a genuine debate over the wisdom of the President’s plan. Let us hear the arguments for it and against it. Then let us vote on it in the light of day. Let the American people hear––yes or no––where their elected representatives stand on one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

Tennyson as heard through the mouth of Ted Kennedy: “Come, my friends. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’”

Nancy Pelosi: “We must have the most honest and open Congress in history.”

Joseph Lieberman: “The president has the authority under the Constitution as commander-in-chief during wartime to take decisive action. Any steps by Congress to stop Bush from sending more troops would be an extreme action in a time of war.”

Tony Snow: “Nobody is satisfied with the status quo in Iraq, including the president.”

Incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer: “On Thursday and Friday, we’re going to adopt rules that will change the way the people’s House operates to ensure its integrity, to ensure its openness and to ensure its transparency.”

Can we be brave enough to be even guardedly optimistic and let our shoulders inch down a little from our ears as we climb the morn into our cars and drive the hard uniform or cracked and crumbly asphalt depending upon where we live?

For some of us the measure of our love is hate…
This is our history: quivering laurels, unsown…
We plumb a rattling grave
And follow rain into the hungry drift…unknown.

Your Sophocles and Spengler please, we must rehearse
Perhaps an orchestra or words will soar the brakeman’s curse…

Then let us praise this heritage, this humble lot
Revere this God, this flag, this tommyrot.

                         —Kenneth Patchen

Thanks so very much for writing Stacy Davis and Jen X—and most especially with such great questions—I just now saw your comments—But Stevens will have to wait until tomorrow—it’s late, my daughter needs shuttling off to bed—We will see the Noble Rider in the morn.

And please do keep comments and questions coming, I am depending on them—

Thanks, Serpent, for your comment. I don’t expect representation to DO anything. I don’t think art necessarily does anything, but perhaps add its little piece of texture to the cultural ephemera, which is probably nothing to discount. What I’m most interested in is seeing, and representation has a lot to do with seeing, both on the part of the writer and the reader, hence my (at least current) obsession with representation.

What you describe as many poems being—as you so well put it—“underlined by the fact of the war” seems a very apt description of a kind of heavy thick blanket-like atmospheric condition the war expels, a part of what you phrase as “the larger eternal war of empire and culture.” The sense of it’s all war now, total war all the time. A highly palpable quality, abstract, and it makes sense that it would be manifested in the work that way—as permeating everything.

Another thing about representation, though, is how quickly it turns into style—which most often passes down from other traditions or previous generations whose poetics are still getting worked out—say the Objectivists, or the Surrealists, or The New York School, or The Language Poets, or a hybrid, or whatever . . . how do other windows open? How does one stay alive to one’s moment in every possible way—which would mean finding new modes of representation as well––I know these are impossible questions. And what interests me the most in looking back at Stein is the glimpse of the place/time/atmospheric condition we get from her work as she is providing us with a portrait of the war because she did precisely that—pushed the modes of representation––

Which brings us to Stacy Davis’s comment in which she brings up Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and the enormous question of how one may respond to what she terms “Stevens’ notion of ethical resistance to the political as a kind of, well, politics.” I like thinking about Serpent’s description of an atmosphere “underlined by the fact of the war” and Steven’s notions of what he called the pressure of reality:

What I have said up to this point amounts to this: that the idea of nobility exists in art today only in degenerate forms or in a much diminished state, if, in fact, it exists at all or otherwise than on sufferance; that this is due to failure in the relation between the imagination and reality. I should now like to add that this failure is due, in turn, to the pressure of reality. . . . A variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another age is an instance of the pressure of reality.

The sounds of words in one age: isn’t that what Stein gave us? Was she alive to the pressure of reality?

Davis’ question of how I would think of Marianne Moore’s lines about a grasshopper: “As I unfolded its wings / In examining it for the first time / I forgot the war—” The close examination followed by a forgetting or an escaping is where I’m guessing your questions of the ethical or the responsible come in—but it’s interesting to note that Moore is not forgetting about the war in the line, the war is mentioned, it’s up front, in fact it’s foregrounded—what’s seen is different because of the war and though the actual words may be saying “I forgot the war” the poetry is not forgetting the war—

Jen X’s comment wondering if the war came up often in the Poetry Bus: I remember hearing in the nightly readings what Serpent described as poems “underlined by the fact of the war”—and I remember being struck by all the variations of how the war became manifest in the poems—and on the bus the war was always there, like it always is everywhere—and discussed as much as it is anywhere—no more or no less—

Let’s talk more about Stevens tomorrow because that’s a big one and Bush is getting ready to give his speech and I have to turn on the radio.

Rennie Stores—to find out more about the Volt war issue go to voltpoetry.com—there is a description of the issue there—out in spring.

So nice talking to everyone. Please do keep the comments coming—I really appreciate them.

“The situation in Iraq is difficult, no question about it,” George Bush, Thursday, January 11, 2007.

Wallace Stevens, who did not gain recognition for his poetry until four of his poems appeared in a special 1914 wartime issue of Poetry, wrote his famous essay “The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words” in 1942, just one year after the United States joined the Allies following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Stevens’s description of the reality around him, which he portrayed as coming down from the turn of the 19th century and into 1942, portentously describes our current moment 85 years later:

The Russians followed the Victorians, and the Germans, in their way, followed the Russians. The British Empire, directly or indirectly, was what was left and as to that one could not be sure whether it was a shield or a target. Reality then became violent and so remains. This much ought to be said to make it a little clearer that in speaking of the pressure of reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive.

A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree, with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow. There is, however, no point to dramatizing the future in advance of the fact.

Perhaps we possible poets have reached a point where what Stevens called “the pressure of reality” so permeates existence that there isn’t even a question of resisting or evading it. It just is. A few pages further into the essay, one finds this, still as fresh as the morning news hitting our front doors, complete with ghoulish headlines:

No politician can command the imagination, directing it to do this or that. Stalin might grind his teeth the whole of a Russian winter and yet all the poets in the Soviets might remain silent the following spring. He might excite their imaginations by something he said or did. He would not command them. He is singularly free from that “cult of pomp,” which is the comic side of the European disaster; and that means as much as anything to us. The truth is that the social obligation so closely urged is a phase of the pressure of reality which a poet (in the absence of dramatic poets) is but to resist or evade today. Dante in Purgatory and Paradise was still the voice of the Middle Ages but not through fulfilling any social obligation. Since that is the role most frequently urged, if that role is eliminated, and if a possible poet is left facing life without any categorical exactions upon him, what then? What is his function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their readers to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people live their lives.

“I am recommending to (the president) a total increase in the two services of 92,000 soldiers and Marines over the next five years––65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines. The emphasis will be on increasing combat capability,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday.

And also yesterday, over 1,000 New Orleans citizens marched on City Hall seeking an end to the violence that has besieged their under-funded and under-policed city—with nine murders just since New Years’ Day. Referring to a situation in which most witnesses of crimes fear for their lives and so remain silent, many marchers’ signs and placards read, “Silence is Violence.”

Leading the march was the Hot 8 Brass Band, whose drummer Dinerral Shavers was shot and murdered in front of his family on December 28. The band carried a banner that read “March for Survival, Walk With Us,” and chanted “We Shall Overcome.”

Martin Luther King Day is Monday, may his spirit haunt the nation.

Thanks to everyone who sent in comments—