—that blogging is hard work

I have a new respect for people who blog every day. I’m a regular reviewer of art and literature for a variety of publications, and during busy periods I sometimes have a deadline a week. Yet even this doesn’t compare to the rigors of having something intelligent and coherent (not that I always succeeded) to post to Harriet circa every three days—during the easily distracting summer months, no less.

Mark’s post about the Republican National Convention site being 2.68 miles from his house reminds me—in a non-self-congratulatory way—of the various political protests I’ve attended over the past decade, many of them with poets, some with non-poets, and a few alone. I say “non-self-congratulatory” because what I’ve mostly come away from them with is a head-scratching reconsideration of the role of political protest—and of the connection between poetry and politics (an ongoing theme of this summer’s run of Harriet). In this sense, the protests that most perplexed me were the ones leading up to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. How could the largest series of protests in world history not fail to stop the war?

Blogging for Harriet this summer has felt a little bit like a slow striptease—never knowing how many personal details to reveal, or which parts to keep covered up. It’s my sense that readers enjoy a little bit of personal information (I definitely do), but too much—for me, at least—and I begin to think, Who cares? . . . or worse, if the information seems particularly self-indulgent. But it’s also a question of style. I could read Kevin Killian discussing just about anything, and those who’ve spent time with any of his nearly 2,000 [!] reviews for Amazon.com might agree. Don’t believe me?

Alan: In “Four Ground-breaking Things In Five Issues of Civil Lines or, Ways to Get Your Head Out of the Postcolonial Sand,” you make equations between particular historical moments in India and its literature. Here in the United States, writers and artists have worked for eight years under the cloud of the Bush administration, and, to a certain extent, the lingering effects of September 11. While some might argue that this has led to a renewed politicization among writers and artists, in fact it’s also been accompanied by an increased interest in the fantastical, the grotesque, and the nihilistic. Are there political conditions in India informing current poetic and artistic practice?

I first met Vivek Narayanan here in New York City at the Beats in India: A Soul of Asia Symposium hosted by the Asia Society, which I blogged about back in June. I really enjoyed talking with him, and he agreed to being interviewed via email once he returned to India in August. Because it’s a bit long, I’ve divided the interview into two parts.

In mid-August of 2004, I visited the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams with poets Kristin Prevallet, Roberto Tejada, Tonya Foster, David Buuck, Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, and my then 1 1/2-year-old daughter Sophie (all of whom have gone on to big things, including Sophie). We were there to check out the various exhibitions, including a great show of political art called The Interventionists, an installation set up as part of William Pope.L’s Black Factory tour, and a small exhibition of work by Matthew Ritchie, an artist I somewhat inexplicably really like. We then stayed for a concert later that evening with the “afro-baroque cabaret” band Stew.

The release in paperback this month of If I Were Writing This, the final book of poems Robert Creeley saw into print before his death in 2005, provides a good opportunity to think about his late work.

I know that a primary root of hip-hop is Jamaican toasters delivering rhymes and declamations over portable sound systems in the 1960s, and that a version of this was introduced to the Bronx by the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, an early pioneer of hip-hop. I also realize that the Last Poets are important figures in the genre’s birth. More generally, hip-hop is part of the African-diaspora derived “signifyin’” practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so famously wrote about. This is all very true. But I’d like to make the case that Sylvia Plath is one of the original hip-hop poets.

Martin Wong, King of Pain, 1997–98

Dean Daderko is an imaginative and adventurous independent curator working in New York City. A few years back, he turned the living room of his ground-floor Brooklyn apartment into one of the more interesting alternative art spaces in the city.

In the second of his “Vast Eternity” posts, D.A. Powell quotes an extended excerpt from an interview with Philip Levine; in her most recent post, Daisy Fried links to an LA Times profile of August Kleinzahler. This prompts me to post a link (at the bottom of this entry) to my favorite poet interview so far this year: it’s one that CAConrad conducted via email with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and featured on the PhillySound collective blog (always an interesting source of information for political and poetry news that extends far beyond Philadelphia).

Dreams are corrosive agents. Although dreams are usually imagined as expressions of unconscious desires or fears, it’s their form that’s most important: a fluid attack on the least secure parts of the psyche’s structures. That this happens while a person is sleeping doesn’t qualify this action but amplifies it. Dream imagery and narrative are secondary to their flow through trembles and tremors.

I want a poetry that’s as corrosive as dreams. I want a poetry that finds vulnerable spots in the facades, and that seeps around or beneath what it can’t confront directly. Poetry is to presumption as sappers are to a castle, as love is to need. Its content is for each constituency to decide; what gets shared is its yearning for freedom.

Dreams have a morality in which no one is right. Their logic comes after the fact. They seek to discover the hidden, without ever finding anything except their own fierce and tender movements. This makes them impervious to categories though not to interpretation. A dream can never be paranoid, but neither does it heal. Like a poem it’s always in between.

Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.

I just spent two late evenings at Matthew Barney’s massive studio in Long Island City watching grindcore and death metal bands play, along with a bizarre and hilarious “diarrhea humiliation” performance. (Not sure if coverage of this might turn up, though I don’t have a sense Artforum.com was there.) I also had to write two short reviews over the weekend: of Takahsi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut for The Believer and Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman for Modern Painters.

The question Mark Nowak has raised a couple times concerning the devaluing of politically progressive poetry in comparison with work that appears less socially engaged would take a book, not a blog entry, to fully answer. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the frame of the discussion keeps slipping within and between Mark’s two posts and the numerous reader responses to them. His sets of examples are dissimilar; so, too, are the cultural historians he cites. For instance, in his June 29 post on Linton Kwesi Johnson he wonders whether Johnson’s work might “speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, [Tom] Raworth or [Bernadette] Mayer or W. S. Merwin.” In his July 15 post, he asks why a poem such as Kenneth Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” has completely disappeared—to the point that even Patchen’s biographer wasn’t aware of it—while James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” is widely anthologized.

It’s interesting that the posts which have generated the most discussion during the past couple months—Lucia Perillo’s “Why are poets aligned with the left?” from June 23 and Mark Nowak’s “Cannon fodder” from a few days ago—both deal with the relationship between poetry and politics. I can’t tell if this is the result of people being deeply engaged by the topic (certainly, that’s part of it), or if a rhetorically charged statement—regarding poetry and war, or the racism and sexism of a particular poem—is what in fact springs the dialogical trap in these kinds of forums. I’m guessing it may be more the latter.

So my second favorite poetry reading is one I never would have predicted: Clayton Eshleman reading the entirety of his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. There was a reading series in the late ’90s held in a gallery in New York City at the corner of Broadway and Houston that was dedicated to a single poet reading from her or his work for an hour or more. The series lasted for a couple years, although I can’t remember who ran it, and the only other poet I recall reading in it was Bernadette Mayer.

It’s hard to estimate how many poetry readings I’ve attended in my life, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds. If I’ve been going to poetry readings regularly for eighteen years, and I’ve averaged about fifteen to twenty a year, that would put the total at around 300. That doesn’t sound right, especially since I have very little recall of at least 200 of these, but it’s a reasonable ballpark estimate. (I’m guessing I’ve seen double that many gallery and museum shows. Music concerts might be closer to 100.)

So it’s probably ridiculous to try to list my top three (plus a few more) poetry readings ever (and my apologies in advance to any sensitive friends), but here goes (in order of most memorable):

Each of the four weeks at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program is organized around a theme. Invited faculty and the workshops they teach, the panels they sit on, and the talks some of them give are loosely grouped according to these themes. The one for this summer’s fourth week is “Performance. Community: Policies of the USA in the Larger World.” Monday’s panel focused on the performance side of the equation, and included Dodie Bellamy, Bob Holman, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, and Steven Taylor.

Saturday night’s reading concluding week three of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program traced a large arc. It featured Eileen Myles, Daisy Zamora, and Anne Waldman. Myles read from a forthcoming work entitled The Inferno: A Poet’s Novel. Much more than a novel, the manuscript is part ars poetica, part memoir, and part underground cultural history, rescuing from oblivion poets such as Rene Ricard and Bill Knott, along with Myles’s own wild, East Village bohemian past. “The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste,” she read at one point, invoking both a pre-gentrified New York City and the way in which some of the best personal poetry is a version of time shaking out its detritus through the mind. It’s also a reference to the fact that despite being “of all the art forms . . . the most economical” (to quote Audre Lorde), poetry seems strangely dependent on lots of unproductive free time.

I’ve never attended summer writing programs at Bread Loaf, Squaw Valley, Iowa, Juniper, Aspen, etc., but I feel confident in saying that the one held each year at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado is the most progressive—aesthetically, intellectually, politically. Perhaps Cave Canem’s Summer Retreat approximates it, although it’s only a week long and includes a half-dozen faculty, compared to Naropa’s sixty or so who rotate in during the course of a month.

In a near impossible coincidence of good fortune, two of my very favorite djs/sound artists/musicians—two of my very favorite artists in general—played in New York City this past weekend: DJ /rupture and Moodymann. Their work has significantly influenced both my poetry and my thinking about poetry, specifically, how to create a moving and directly engaging poetry that also contains a built-in meta-/conceptual component allowing for lots of emotional and intellectual wiggle room. Let’s face it, much of the work lumped under the “conceptual poetics” rubric leaves me—and lots of other people—cold. As a grad-school educated person who participated in a world-renowned Poetics Program during the 1990s, I don’t think it’s a matter of me not “getting it” or not being sympathetic. It probably has more to do with not attending the correct dinner parties.

It looks as if Lucia Perillo’s post entitled “Why are poets aligned with the left?” will have generated the most extensive and heated comment stream for the month of June (provided no Harriet blogger attacks Language Poetry in the next 72 hours). Though commentators jumped on her statement that memorable war poetry is in short supply, the main concern of her post was the question, “Why do poets coalesce around leftist ideals”? A number of responders usefully delineated the wide spectrum of positions encompassed by the phrase “leftist,” and especially how liberal, leftist, and Democrat aren’t necessarily synonymous. As one respondent pointed out, Mark Nowak probably wouldn’t describe the political organizing he does as in the “liberal” tradition, even if some of the people he works with might.

In my initial post for Harriet, I mentioned a roundup I wrote for the Village Voice back in April of recent notable poetry books. Space constraints and the critical-narrative arc I decided upon for the piece didn’t allow for the mention of other interesting collections (such as one I referenced in another post, Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, or Richard Deming’s Let’s Not Call it Consequence), along with books by Renee Gladman and Wanda Coleman that blur the boundaries between poetry and prose.

There’s one poet I did mention whom I’d like to bring a little more attention to here: Coral Bracho.

Theodore A. Harris, Drowning in Bones and Flames, 2002

In December of 1998, I spent close to a month in India with my partner at the time and an older friend. This friend had lived in India in the ’70s for a couple years, and worked with peasants in small villages and for a brief period with Mother Theresa in Kolkata. She hadn’t been back, and was treating her visit decades later as a spiritual journey. I was approaching it as I had previous trips of this sort: as a way—I hoped—of increasing experience, knowledge, political awareness, empathy.

Philip Guston was a lifelong friend of poets—from his teenage years in Los Angeles, to his time as a member of the New York School of painting, to his move to Woodstock. His famous—for some, infamous—switch in the late ’60s from abstraction to figuration lent itself to collaboration with various writers. The Morgan Library’s current exhibition of Guston’s drawings prominently features a number of works with accompanying text by poets such as Clark Coolidge (that’s one of them above) and Guston’s wife Musa McKim. (A selection of the Guston-Coolidge collaboration was published back in 1991 with the title Baffling Means by Peter Gizzi’s o-blek editions.)

A Public Space is a quarterly literary magazine launched in 2006 by former Paris Review executive editor Bridget Hughes. It features poetry, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and art. Produced in downtown Brooklyn out of a beautiful office that may have once been a garage but with its wide wooden front doors feels more like an old stable, the magazine’s view extends from its Dean Street address outward to the international. Previous issues have contained features on various countries and continents (Antarctica). Unlike many literary magazines, A Public Space is relatively agenda-free, though of course it has its preferred styles and writers—MFAs figure prominently in its authors’ bios. In fact, the magazine as a whole seems less interested in proposing a literary or political program than in seeking to provide a shared space for others to fill.

I’ve been a loyal reader of Bookforum for almost a decade, though my enthusiasm for it has waxed and waned and waxed again. In the late ’90s (during my favorite incarnation of it), Bookforum was full of smart and clever (but not too clever), frequently younger writers (among my favorites was Matthew DeBord; whatever happened to him? . . . I just Googled him, and he appears to write about wine these days—that’s too bad), who together formed, consciously or not, a kind of literary journalism wing of cultural studies—just the synthesis of popular(-ish) criticism and academic theory (no thank you, Lingua Franca) I sought to read and write as a recent PhD grad who didn’t apply for teaching jobs but instead moved to New York City to work as an independent scholar and critic, as well as immerse myself as a poet in the world of contemporary visual art (I don’t have many, or even any, heroes; but if I did, Baudelaire might be one of them).

I always prefer it when the relationship between politics and poetry is approached as a question. Mark Nowak’s June 6th post contains a couple of queries that in turn have generated a stimulating string of comments: “Does contemporary poetry have any desire to open a dialogue with my Denny’s waitress (or my former Wendy’s co-workers)?" and “What is the relationship between contemporary poetry and the working class, the working poor, and the under- and unemployed?" Am I alone in noting the hint of skepticism in Mark’s repetition of the word “contemporary"? As Mark and many of the responders to his post know, poetry has a long history of service to the disenfranchised—even if this history has yet to be fully written and doesn’t exist in conventional archival form.

For now, poetry will be my beach. Since May ’68 is a popular topic these days, I’ll say that one of my favorite slogans from that time is "Under the paving stones, the beach." Having recently published in the Village Voice a roundup of some of the more notable—or at least noteworthy—poetry titles released circa November 1, 2007 to April 1, 2008, I had thought about proposing to the Poetry Foundation website editors (one of whom had invited me to write for the site) a companion piece on poetry books to take to the beach this summer, except that I haven’t been to the beach in years, and I can sympathize with Cam’ron’s jeer at Jay-Z for wearing man sandals in the Hamptons.