The former Cotton Exchange in Memphis has been transformed into a loving tribute to the fiber that shaped the South: King Cotton.

The museum is a fine combination of multi-media presentations and preserved artifacts. One of the display cases features a compendium of products made from cotton, including hair curl activator, disposable diapers and Laffy Taffy. Another display illustrates the various grades of cotton, from the “fair” to the “middling” to the ordinary.

In the interstices of being horribly sick (this was another chemotherapy week, with the usual panoply of crushing exhaustion, constant diarrhea, intermittent attacks of abdominal pain, continual nausea, and serial vomiting), I have been thinking about Lin Dinh’s fascinating recent Harriet post “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” which begins by juxtaposing my recent litany of my various physical ailments with Kenneth Goldsmith’s claims that an undefined “we” no longer have coherent selves, that “We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute.” Lin Dinh’s response to Goldsmith begins with these words: “Could someone with even a single serious illness believe that he can be ‘everyone and no one at all’? That's he’s ‘infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute’? I don't think so. Hell, even a simple headache brings me back to my senses, reminds me of the limitations of my body and mind.” I think that everyone is at least a somewhat different person in different situations, but I don’t believe that people are wholly malleable. Nor do I think that anything is infinite, not even the universe: the most decentered self still has boundaries. But I can see the truth in both viewpoints.

I’m sure this isn’t a novel observation, but I am often struck by how differently people interact online and in person. Though people are capable of both shocking cruelty and viciousness and amazing generosity and kindness, in general face-to-face interactions are guided and moderated by social norms and mores, some of which are purely arbitrary, but many of which make such interactions go more smoothly and painlessly. While America is in general the land of instant intimacy, this phenomenon seems even more pronounced in the online world.

Once again illness has kept me away from blogging for a bit. I had surgery on Friday on the tumors on my liver, which the surgeon believes he has gotten (yay!), but I had to go the emergency room on Saturday in intense pain that turned out to be caused by pneumonia in my right lung. As Frank Sinatra sang, everything happens to me. Yeesh.

I’m sure that every writer remembers his or her first review. I’m even more sure that every writer remembers his or her first bad review. To be honest, I don’t remember the first review of my first book, where it appeared or who wrote it, what it said or where I was when I first read it. But I remember exactly where I was when I saw my first bad review, of my second book, Angel, Interrupted. I was at Borders in Chicago, in my old hipster/gayboy/yuppie neighborhood of Lakeview. I haven’t been to that Borders in many years, but ten years ago they had an excellent selection of literary journals. I picked up a copy of Chelsea, in which my work had appeared several times, and there it was.

That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.

Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book's gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger's first book wasn't published until 1965, and Anne Waldman's (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don't think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive” or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative” anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

I say this without the least bit of exaggeration: keep your eye on these two literary ventures because they’re going to impress you with the journeys they have embarked on and with the heights they’ll inevitably reach.

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the "New American Poets"'s political commitments, or lack of same.

Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me” (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.

John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions” (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

Those who have enjoyed Poets House’s old venue on Spring Street (I have yet to make it to the new location down by Battery Park—but I’ll get there!) understand the overwhelming energy that comes from being surrounded by books and books of poetry. At any bookstore (except at Open Books, of course) poetry gets a slim reception, almost as an afterthought, with little attention to range, certainly none to content. Poetry is tucked away like the ugly cousin to the more glamorous Fiction category. At Poets House, poetry haters need not enter. This is our space, our comfort zone, where verse—from the weak to the brilliant, from the esoteric to the populist—can claim a slot on the bookcase without apology or explanation. It is poetry. I’m thrilled that such sites are also thriving elsewhere, as in outside of New York City, like the Poetry Center down in Tucson, Arizona.

This post is in two parts. The first is a simple announcement of my participation in the upcoming AWP Conference in New York City.

I am chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 at from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging” poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, written by moi:

What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.

I hope that all interested parties will try to make it. Let’s make this panel a party!

The second part of this post is about my impression of the role that some phantasmatic nightmare image of AWP plays in the imaginations of many participants in the various online poetry worlds. To read more, look below the fold.

As a young gay man growing up closeted in a Mexican household, I had to find my queer role models in books. In high school I heard that Federico García Lorca was gay, and that so was Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, and Walt Whitman. Though their works weren’t necessarily queer—I really had to read into them sometimes—knowing that the literature was the artistry of a gay man was enough. I had yet to discover John Rechy, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Arturo Islas (my gay Chicano role models, none of them taught at my high school) but I did come across during my senior year, the verse by the Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933).

I’m in San Francisco for the National Book Critics Circle board meeting, and the award finalists for the six categories will be announced tonight at City Lights Bookstore (I’ll post the poetry finalists as soon as the party’s over), so it seemed appropriate that I highlight a title from City Lights Press.

Additionally, the media has been inundated with snapshots and portraits (flattering and unflattering) of the potential presidential candidates, all of whom have been fielding questions and criticisms regarding certain charged topics such as the economy, the war, and, yet again, “illegal immigration.” How fitting that this book by Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera take its position, politically and poetically, fiercely and unapologetically, with its collection of “undocuments.”

I’m trying to get my blog momentum back, but it’s not going to be easy: I’m currently in residence at Vermont College of Fine Arts up in snowy Montpelier. Yesterday it was ten degrees below zero, this morning it felt warmer: three below. And while I was up here I finished editing my forthcoming book of stories, Men without Bliss, and reading nominated books for the National Book Critics Circle (finalists for the award will be announced next week in San Francisco!), and of course, my teaching duties: poetry workshop, poetry lecture, poetry chit-chat.

I’ve been a bit swamped at the end of the semester with a number of academic obligations that it’s been tough to keep up with this one, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. A few years ago I made up my mind that I was going to be what some so pejoratively referred to as “an academic poet.”