The dichotomy people in the literary world frequently make between mainstream and experimental poetry, conservative and “progressive” poetry, is very similar in form and tone (the attribution of sin to one and virtue to the other) to the dichotomy people (some of them the same people) make in the field of popular music between disco and punk. Disco bears the burden of inauthenticity and ideological mystification, complicity and social complacency—bodily pleasure as the opiate of the masses. I find this still-too-common characterization curious, since disco’s main producers and audiences were black people and gay men. Punk, on the other hand, bears the banner of authenticity and critique, transgression and rebellion, a revolt against the body and enjoyment (see the Sex Pistols song "Bodies"). Rebels of all stripes tend to be rather puritanical.

Australia's leading poet Les Murray is one of the globe's finest, and he knows it. So much so, a request to blurb a collection of poems by the poet J.K. Murphy becomes an opportunity for him to flaunt his clout. Apparently, Les Murray's wife is an aspiring author, a social historian to be precise. Like a good husband, Murray thought he'd lend a hand to his wife's publishing career. Nothing shameful about that, I guess.

The Blog has been my companion for six months, padding after me in the house, wanting his daily rations of nourishment and attention. His tail thumps on the bed when I wake up in the morning, and he happily guides me to my desk, where I feed him and give him a scratch behind the ears. Good Blog.

La reina se va de descanso en su trono…

I have almost never made a new year's resolution, but online events of the past month (I think we all know what I'm referring to) have prompted me, belatedly, to make some for this year, plus a couple more just for good measure. Instead of nine muses, I have nine resolutions. This post is partly humorous, but fundamentally, I'm quite serious.

In my younger and thinner days, I used to go out dancing all the time. In Boston, in Providence (whenever I could get a ride), in Buffalo, in Chicago, I had what might be called “every night fever.” In Boston, where last call was at two, I rarely got to bed before two or three; in Buffalo and Chicago, where last call was at four, I rarely got to bed before four or five.

I went out all the time because I love to dance and I love music, as the O’Jays sang oh so long ago, though unlike them I don’t like just any kind of music, even if it is groovin’. I also went out because I was bored and lonely and I wanted to get laid, or at least to feel wanted. Though I had more sex than I felt that I was having (does anyone ever have “enough” sex?), I rarely got to have the sex I wanted with the men I wanted to have it with. But I had the music, and I could spend a good night in a musical trance, almost forgetting that I wanted to have sex. Almost. There were also the nights when I felt so lonely that a sad song would make me sit on the edge of the dance floor and cry. At first I accidentally typed “fly.” That works too.

For most of my life I have felt very awkward and uncomfortable in my body and in my social presence. I feel better about both now, but still hardly at ease. But when I dance, which is rarely these days, I feel at one with my body. I was a great dancer (no boast, just fact—I rocked the dance floor, and still can) and, a little heavier and out of practice, I’m still damned good. When I’m dancing my movements are graceful and smooth. When I’m dancing I feel attractive, I experience my body as admirable, even masterful, just like Madonna sang in "Vogue." In the days of my constant clubbing, men who would never have slept with me would compliment me on my dancing, buy me drinks (I always chose soda or orange juice), befriend me, even. Sometimes a man would sleep with me because I danced well (as the old saying goes, if a man can dance that well, imagine how well he can fuck), though the dance floor brought me more friends than lovers.

I'm very gratified by the strong response my recent posts, especially "AWP, Communazis, and Me" and "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'," have received. It's wonderful to know that people are reading and that they care enough to comment.

However, I have been disturbed by the tenor of many (by no means all) of the responses, which have been hostile and sometimes vitriolic, even descending to the level of personal attack, either direct or implied, including all kinds of baseless negative assumptions about me (including insinuations that I am some kind of conservative or even reactionary). Many of them have also engaged in what felt to me like willful misreadings of what I had actually written.

I shouldn't have been surprised that my post on AWP and its discontents should have received some rather negative responses, since in that post I criticized Charles Bernstein's hyperbolic parody of AWP as Nazi, Stalinist, and MCarthyite. I would remind everyone, though, that criticism is not attack. But I was shocked that my post on post-avant poetry received so many such responses, as I considered it an innocuous description of a phenomenon that is much mentioned but not much defined.

More below the virtual fold.

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.

Here’s a quirky and interesting movement taking flight in the Northwest—Seattle, to be exact, one of the most literary cities I have ever lived in and continue to visit (I’ll be there for the duration of Chompipe Days—that’s Turkey Days for y’all pilgrims).

Does Dana Gioia matter? Obviously more than we know...

An alert Cave Canem alum spotted this in the big man's bio--

"An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 book 'Can Poetry
Matter?', which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award, is credited with reinvigorating the role of poetry in
contemporary American culture and giving rise to popular poetry
movements such as poetry slams and cowboy poetry."

Is that true? Did Dana Gioia's lofty 1991 tome miraculously give birth to slams that I participated in four years earlier?

Wow. He's magic.

Believe it or not, it’s a coincidence that this particular book cover made my Shout Out feature on Halloween. This is cult poet Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s fifth volume of poems. Though she was on faculty at Arizona State University while I was attending their MFA program, regretfully I never studied with her, but I read everything she publishes because she’s brilliant, she’s bitchin’, she’s Beckian.

To clarify: I’ve never suffered from it. I don’t mean this as a boast. I’m simply saying that I’ve been too busy writing to not be able to write. I’m always navigating through so many different projects at once—book reviews, essays, poems, and now, blog entries—that I don’t have time to encounter that state of distress I’ve always heard about but have yet to experience. Never. But as a writing teacher, I have my students to contend with, and though in the back of my mind I’m positive that it’s lack of discipline more than anything else, I still have the responsibility to provide some solution by way of advice on how to overcome this “block.”

At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.” He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!” Steadman figures, “Pure shit.”

Let’s take a break from theorizing (or not). Let’s play the J’aime/je n’aime pas game, which I am totally cribbing from the bloggers Jenny Davidson and Ed Park, who cribbed it from Roland Barthes, who said:

...but there's a little wisp of a rumor that somewhere, someday, you may be able to get up close and personal with the bloggers of Harriet. Not only will you be able to gaze upon our actual faces, but there may even be a chance to revel and weep as jewels of poetic wisdom drip from our lips!

OK, who am I kidding? There's only one of us the public's clamoring for, and I'm going to make sure you good people get the access you deserve. So before this rumored appearance, which is rumored to be within a month or so, I am selling armbands that may get you a privileged place in line to buy a ticket to get close enough to share oxygen with Kwame Dawes.

You heard right.

With your valid charge card number, not only can I offer actual access, I can guarantee that our most prolific blogger will write you a paragraph--or a line of his sumptuous poetry--while you wait!

This is a one-time offer, providing the rumored appearance actually becomes a reality, which I assure you it will. This is your all-access pass to the Renaissance man, a chance to be touched by genius, an unparalleled opportunity to someday be able to utter the deception "Kwame Dawes is a friend of mine."

The line starts forming to the right, and as soon as the credit card emblazoning thingie warms up, we can get this party going. If you're gonna be a poet, ya gotta know a poet.

I can introduce you to the best.

Like many other folks, I need a cap to my summer--a day or seminal event that bellows this is it, the dog days are officially over. This year, I actually had--if indeed this is possible--two ways to end the season.

The first one was to be a personal pleasure--Martin Espada's 50th birthday bash at the Bowery. Not only was this a chance to reconnect with dozens of my favorite poets and send them off with a hug and kiss into their respective autumns, but it provided a rare opportunity to heap much due praise upon The Espada, who is everyone's poet whether everyone knows it or not.

The very next day I planned to wave adieu to summer again from the sultry confines of the ATL and the Decatur Book Festival. There, over Labor Day weekend, I was set to read with Sherman Alexie, who I haven't laid eyes on since he flattened me during a People's Poetry Gathering sendup of the Taos Poetry World Heavyweight Championship bout. He beat me about as badly as I beat Jimmy Santiago Baca in....hey, wait a minute.

Anyhoo, not only was our own Kwame Dawes gonna be in the house, but I was all set to shake hands with Kinky Friedman and finally meet Natasha Trethewey so I could bask in her considerable aura and maybe absorb a smidgen of her talent. Best of all, I had plotted and planned with several of my Cave Canem brethren to meet up at Gladys Knight's Chicken & Waffles for what we hope will become an annual pilgrimage. If you think Tabasco and syrup have no business touching each other on a plate, well you, my friend, have a lot to learn.

So it's been a fantastic summer, and it was set to end ultra-fantastically. But since I'm typing this from my couch on Saturday evening, you can assume that something went awry.

My post of the day is a reply to Kwame in the comment box of his post "Rebels." Among other things, I compare Kenny to Alfred Barr!

...and I'm exhausted. But I'm sitting in front of my laptop, bleary-eyed, listening to a muted Lightnin' Hopkins and staring at the 17th line of a poem that I've been working on for four years.

This profession--this writing of measured and meaningful lines--is for crazy people. I can hear the warm, contented snoozing of my husband and granddaughter, and I long to join them in the sleep of the blissfully unaware, but there's this--line. I could forget it for now, sleep on it, but I can't help feeling that I'm on the verge of a breakthrough. And after four years of nada breakthrough, I'm not about to doze off and miss the big moment.

I know that this line will complete the poem--finally--and that the poem has the potential to be a soul-shaker, a disturbance, a ripple in the cosmos. It's like being on the verge of childbirth. It's just that I've been in labor so long everyone's lost interest. Before giving up on me an hour or so ago, the 12-year-old dismissed my delirium with an exasperated roll of her eyes and this oft-repeated phrase: "Oh, that poem. Grandma, it's just a line."

Just a line? They really don't get it, do they? There's absolutely no way to explain that nine words, tweaked mercilessly at least once a week for the past 1460 days, can feel so vital, so damned necessary, and not tomorrow, but right now. It's like childbirth. You struggle and sweat to bring something into being. And once it's there, out in the open air, you should feel relieved--but damned if you don't miss the pain.

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL (YAB) is my favorite public art collective based in Chicago.

How much would you pay for a first-edition, one-of-500, Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot of your very own?

Whew.

Last week, I was on the faculty of one of the most challenging, groundbreaking creative retreats in the country, surrounded by students whose work was so good it made me shudder.

This week, I'm up at midnight in a sweltering dorm room, staring at a scanned version of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and wondering if I can spit out a joint mimicking his style before exhaustion pulls me under. This is--I can't believe it either--HOMEWORK.

Welcome to the world of the poet/teacher/student known as me, doggedly pursuing a graduate degree in being creative. With very little turnaround time, I have morphed from respected teacher to the marginal superhero known as MFA Girl. I don't wear a mask, because my eyes are bloodshot anyway. My cape is the scratchy little towel I wear to scoot across the hall to the bathroom. I can't fly. I can barely even walk. Right now, MFA stands for Must Fall Asleep.

How, oh how, did I get here?

In a review of my book "Teahouse of the Almighty" in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of Gulf Coast, in the best review I've ever received of anything I've ever written, in a strikingly glowing review, in one of those reviews that makes me wanna kiss the reviewer's toes, in one of those reviews that makes me wanna--as the Godfather of Soul James Brown might say--jump back and kiss m'self, I was called...

wait for it...

here it comes....

"a speech pathologist's wet dream."

You may now talk among yourselves.

So the other night I did one of those trademark New York things that everyone else in the world imagines they want to do. It was an unsettling mingling of glamor and grit--women in gowns with actual trains, men who'd paid their stylists for grunge, ivory business cards, heply tossed expletives, white-jacketed waiters, d**k in a box, asparagus and prosciutto, pounding music, crystal chandeliers, the YouTube guys, a barricaded avenue, lots of cameras and--last but not least--approximately two minutes of David Bowie, looking less like an cutting-edge rock pioneer than your foppish high school English teacher. (If you wanna see what a rock star should look like nowadays, check out the icy dismissive chic of our very own Nick Twemlow.)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Webby Awards, a strange, loosely structured event that can't decide if its gleefully thumbing its nose at the Internet or fervently praying at its altar. I was there because the Poetry Foundation and the website you are now enjoying won an award. It's the coolest of the cool when it comes to what the Web has to offer. That's right---you are now wiling away the hours on an award-winning site.

Consider yourself blessed. Then, just for the hell of it, drop a few Mentos in a bottle of Coke, shake vigorously, and watch the fun. As I headed for the subway after the hoopla (no matter how I wished for a limo, it never materialized), merely a million cameras were trained on that jubilant chemical eruption, performed under the stars on a barricaded Wall St.

If I learned anything at all from my night on the red carpet side of the velvet rope, it's that even edgy achievers never ever grow up.

I have partied with Emily Warn. I can die now.

...if we were paid by the word. The following is one sentence in Michael Wolff’s story in the April issue of Vanity Fair:

"Sitting in Judge Reggie Walton's court for a front-page trial, it was oddly underattended, as if the world has moved on from the Bush administration - trying to keep track of who spoke to whom (and wondering how the jury was keeping track of this), of who had his call returned when (returning calls was the leitmotif of the trial: when Robert Grenier, the cool C.I.A. operative, fails to promptly return Scooter's call, he's summarily pulled out of a meeting - Oh, dear, he recalls thinking), of the persistent telephone tag, of the game of telephone (the message morphs, degrades, gets forgotten), and of who might actually be more truthful than not (given that many of the witnesses are either P.R. people or C.I.A. agents, truth seems especially transient), I was stuck trying to figure out if anybody really knew what they were doing."

What? What editor let that fly by?

This may come as a surprise to those who’ve called her flash in the pan, imposer, imposter, Johnny-come-lately, distraction, travesty, novelty, temporary nuisance, joke, jokester, blatant, blasphemous, irrelevant, irreverent, harmful, hostile, theatrical, arrogant, nefarious, evil, needy, dramatic, unpredictable, irascible, irritating, elitist, mind-numbing, passionless, dumb, boring, boorish, whiny, brash, impetuous and destructive. Like the harlot bedding the reverend, she’s been incessantly discussed. She has taken your derisive jabs, your dismissive insults, and turned them into strength.

Ladies and gentlemen, the poetry slam is now 21 years old.

While working sporadically on a longer post, this question came up. Suddenly it hit me---Hey, I'm a blogger! Figured I might as well toss this quandary into your formidable laps.

Let's say that I've been doing a theoretical poetry residency in a rather tony high school in a rather tony theoretical suburb just past, theoretically, Manhattan. The 11th-graders are theoretically typical--tethered to their cell phones, swathed in spandex, sporting tattoos, gleefully potty-mouthed, indulging in quick, furtive blowjobs in the back stairwells. You know, the usual.

I'm teaching persona poems, which I love to teach because kids nowadays have no boundaries. No one's told them yet that their imaginations will grow numb then wither into further numbness. They still got dreams, dammit.

So after I explain the concept of stepping into other shoes and writing from other perspectives, after I assure them that they can take on the persona of absolutely anything, one of the cagey little imps comes up with a poem in the voice of a penis.

This story came to our attention via the NYU listserv. Kazim thought it was a good idea to post it here, too.

"On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me....."

.
…I’ve found your poster boy.

This week I began a middle school residency, slinging a poem or two toward the impressionable young’uns, hoping to make a dent. Along with poets Roger Bonair-Agard and Fish Vargas, we bounced between 7th grade (delightful) and 8th grade (mega-surly) classrooms. At the end of the day, I headed for my car with Roger, a stellar wordsmith and, shall we say, manly man. He’s pumped, ripped, cut, tattooed, and he’s got a sweeeet Trinidadian accent to top things off. I have to keep reminding myself that he can write.

Fish is manfully manly also. You need to know this.

Rockin’ that off-kilter swagger typical of the nearly four-footer, a young man fell into step beside us. Wearing 7th grade like loud cologne, he beamed at Roger and said, “You inspired me a lot today.”

How cute. It had been a demanding day, and this lil’ darling was about to make it all worthwhile. Or so I thought.

A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Madness, A Tribe Called Quest People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest The Low End Theory, Abba Greatest Hits, Ragaa Ragaa Abdou, Peter Abelard Monastic Song, Absinthe Radio Trio Absinthe Radio Trio, AC DC Back in Black, AC DC Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC DC Flick of the Switch, AC DC For Those About to Rock, AC DC Highway to Hell, AC DC Let There Be Rock, Johnny Ace Again... Johnny Sings, Daniel Adams Caged Heat 3000, John Adams Harmonium, John Adams Shaker Loops / Phrygian Gates, John Luther Adams Luther Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, King Ade Sunny Juju Music, Admiral Bailey Ram Up You Party, Adventures in Negro History, Aerosmith Toys in the Attic, After Dinner Editions, Spiro T. Agnew Speaks Out, Spiro Agnew The Great Comedy Album, Faiza Ahmed Besaraha, Mahmoud Ahmed Ere Mela Mela, Akita, Azuma and Haswell Sakaibara Ich Schnitt Mich In Den Finger, Masami Akita & Zbigniew Karkowski Sound Pressure Level, Isaac Albéniz Piano Music Volume II, Isaac Albéniz Iberia, Willy Alberti Marina, Dennis Alcapone Forever Version, Alive Alive!, Lee Allen Walkin' with Mr. Lee, Steve Allen How to Think, Steve Allen On The Air, Terry Allen Lubbock (on everything), Mose Allison The Best of Mose Allison, The Allman Brothers Beginnings, The Allman Brothers Eat A Peach, The Allman Brothers Idlewild South, The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East , The Allman Brothers Live at Ludlow Garage, Duane Allman An Anthology,

Name is about as close as one can get to a "novel" that was written by a machine and for a machine: it seems especially primed to attract and repel spam-blockers with its pseudo-porn opening, and yet it also tosses a distracting bone to the bots with its stream of seemingly random verbiage after its first paragraphs. But far as we can tell, Name is the exorbitant creation of a single human being who is known only by the name of "Toadex Hobogrammathon," the same person who created the Jarry-esque, day-glo colored website Dagmars Chili Pitas, the only "poetry" blog that renders even the marginal trappings of the format itself—such as the date, tables, fonts, colors, etc.—fodder for its neo-Dada somersaults.

Surprisingly, Name turns out to be a good read, perhaps more along the line of the current crop of procedural projects or Peter Manson's aggregation of junk phrases, Adjunct, than anything from Toni Morrison or Alan Davies, but nonetheless something to keep the retina fused to the screen, with a furious, decidedly No Wave soundtrack to boot. This is the perfect novel to run your computer's voice emulator on in the background while you while away precious life at the office.

Read Name in its entirety after the jump...