I'm on a poetry listserve where some members object to posts having to do with politics. Many of us think that trying to separate poetry from politics is like trying to separate the yolk from the egg white with a fork without breaking the yolk. But eventually we reached a truce where those who wanted to post political messages would put the letters POL in the subject line so others could delete those messages unread.

POL

Certain members of my household (not Maisie) were jokily contemplating a Jeremiah Wright write-in vote, until this weekend. Now I just think Wright's a jerk.

I'm not mad at him for what he says. What's not pretty good politics is mere dumbass conspiracy stuff, who cares? Wright gets criticized as an extremist and for crazy paranoid theories, but nobody criticizes the Bush administration for being riddled with people who believe in the Rapture.

And I'm not mad at him for how he says it. Style's insignificant. Actions are significant.

Wright's a jerk for his very public airing of his opinions, including his opinions of Obama, right at this time. He seems to me like a father trying to undermine his son. I don't care whether the father is ideologically right or wrong; if your son is trying to do something he believes in, even if you don't believe in it, you don't ruin it for him. You don't intentionally cast your shadow into his spotlight.

Wright has a lot to answer for if McCain wins the election.

To follow up on Reginald Shepherd's post about technophilia in the artistic avant-garde: it's true that technological advances and artistic innovations went hand in hand through much of the twentieth century, especially its first half, as mankind went through a dizzying series of unprecedented changes affecting every aspect of life. The machine age was also the age of oil, a cheap and flexible source of energy that gave us vain, sometimes eloquent bipeds fantastic, nearly God-like power. Suddenly we could zoom through life, dive deep into the ocean, be fixated by a screen, any screen, endure the same songs over and over, generate and store unspeakable images on our hard drives or fly to Paris to give a poetry reading.

Every scientific and technological invention had to trigger an equivalent social and artistic shift. Poetry could not be the same after the appearance of the pill or ipod. We marvelled at, envied machines, as if we had a choice to remain entirely human. But this lunge forward has also provoked a mostly instinctive, only-half-conscious revulsion and a looking back to previous centuries or millennia for meanings and dignity--caves or ruins inserted here. This sad, outraged yearning could blossom in both a Pol Pot and a Clayton Eshleman.

I’d say that the best avant-garde artists and writers are those who reflect their moment in history while simultaneously rebelling against it. Only lackeys celebrate the status quo. "If there's a single tear on the face of a single child, I protest," to quote Simone Weil from memory. Sometimes this bipolar condition can hatch a poem that’s half great, half awful, with progress chasing down myth and trampling it. I translate Pablo Neruda:

Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I've been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn't know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.

Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.

As an immigrant, I always assume that any observation or insight I happen to chance upon is already old news to the rest of the populace. Hey, have you heard the Eagles’ great new ballad, "Hotel California"? But who doesn’t know that Allen Ginsberg saw himself as a coda to Walt Whitman?

In a recent post, Daisy Fried discussed the deflational aspect of standard journalese, how it flattens all horrors big and small into an efficient monotone. Newspaper lingo as tranquilizer. But there’s also yellow journalism, which is sensationalism for the lower class. (This term originates from the Yellow Kid, the first comics character.)

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.

It's taken me a while to post this piece, as I've been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?

Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy” occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,” much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant” poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,” after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants” have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.

In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry” were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.

I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.

This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call "the New American Poetries" out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between "progressive" art and "progressive" politics. I won't spoil the ending.

Arktoi Books is an exciting new imprint of Red Hen Press. The brainchild of beloved poet Eloise Klein Healey this series, which publishes both prose and poetry, highlights the very best writing by lesbian authors. Officially launching this year, the first title is by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield.

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.

It happened during the meeting of the National Book Award committee that gave the poetry prize to Marianne Moore. While waiting for Peter Viereck, the last of the judges, delayed by a snowstorm, to arrive, the other five (Winfield Townley Scott, Selden Rodman, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, and William Cole) passed the time looking at photographs of previous meetings of National Book Award judges. Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in one of these. On seeing the photo, Stevens remarked, “Who’s the coon?” (The meeting, it should be noted, took place after lunch, which for the poet had probably begun with two healthy martinis and continued with a fine bottle of wine.) Noticing the reaction of the group to his question, he asked, “I know you don’t like to hear people call a lady a coon, but who is it?”

-- Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens – The Later Years (1923-1954). New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988. (Pgs. 388-389)

I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.

I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein's piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).

More follows below the fold.

My fifth month of weekly shout outs comes to a close today (only one more month before I too sign off the PF blog—how I’ll miss thee, Harriet!), so I decided to do something different: instead of reaching over to my personal poetry bookshelf or to the review copies pile, I skipped over to my local neighborhood bookstore to browse the literature stacks and I came across the following volume by a name not unfamiliar to me—I hear he’s one of the illustrious poet graduates from Queens College. My interest was further piqued by the subtitle: “Letters to the Islamic Republic.” As I leafed through the collection, the critical tone against an oppressive religious government and its constant assaults on freedom of expression emanated loud and clear. Ah, politics and poetry: my favorite artistic combination. I offer two pieces, the second an excerpt from a longer poem:

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).

Say what you will about this conference, it’s the one I look forward to every year. And I hope to see you there. I’m on two panels this time around, and I’ll spare you the details. I’d rather promote other happenings, like the annual Con Tinta Pachanga, one of the many off-site events made possible because the Chicano/Latino writers wanted to have a community space of their own during this reunion-at-large of writers. All are welcome.

There’s been plenty of talk and balk on Harriet regarding translations, and as a translator and teacher of literary translation, as someone who’s first language is not English, I’ve decided to finally speak up but through the introduction of one of the best translation projects I have come across to date: Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s collaborative English version of Federico García Lorca’s conflicted love letter to our beloved New York City.

That’s me at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week in Harrisburg doing a woman-and-goat-and-baby version of Picasso’s famous Man-With-a-Lamb sculpture. I love that there’s a road somewhere in Pennsylvania called Lick Run. I’m not sure that I love that I’ve become the kind of person who pays to get pictures taken of her with her human baby and a baby goat. I refuse to admit I also got the same picture put on a tee-shirt. Anyway, that’s Maisie the day before her first birthday in her Baby Loves Disco legwarmers. She does not in fact have a cataract on her left eye; the guy who took the picture simply didn’t fix her red-eye right, despite his perfectly functional digital camera and computer. Good old American don’t-know-how but charge you for it anyway.

This is the kind of blog post in which I try to make everything I mention into a symptom of something called America.

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.

A celebrated scholar of Spanish and Latin American literature, Aurora de Albornoz also published eleven books of poetry during her lifetime. She’s an innovative poet who incorporated prose poems, collage, and other modernistic techniques into her verse. Her writing is situated within the poetry about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and “la Generación de los ’50,” one of many important periods in which the national literature flourished during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Her body of work is an important contribution to world letters because, among other achievements, it gives voice to the experience of los exiliados, or Spanish exiles—one of the prominent women poets in a group dominated by men.

We are now approaching that time of year … when we wish we were elsewhere.

…I am now in the town that time forgot, San Carlos, after a night on a crazy ferry, but on my way to tropical islands presided over by Ernesto Cardenal, known as El Poeta, probably the most famous Nicaraguan, who built his own community of local primitive artists and foreign mystics. Ange should aspire to so rule.

Hasta luego,
David

I had known nothing of Cardenal’s community (described in various places on the web as Marxist-Christian and primitivist) in the Solentiname archipelago until my husband passed his friend’s email to me. It is very difficult to find any information about it on the web, and doesn’t present itself as a place one may visit.

On the other hand, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, in Scotland, is open to the public. The most famous vis-poet/gardener seems worlds apart in sensibility from Cardenal, but he too had a political vision, one that married Arcady and the French Revolution. (I am not yet an expert on Finlay, but visiting Little Sparta is one of my life goals….)

I love year-ending "What's In & What's Out" lists for the upcoming year. They are authoritative, self-generating, biased, and goofy. I thought I'd get a head-start on the pundits. The list kept going, so I'll post over a few days. I hope you enjoy. With consultation from some friends, here is the start of a provocative list, sure to test the province of good taste, augury, and judgment.

If this is not entertaining, check out the Luther Vandross Estate Auction.

Just a few weeks after the controversy broke (has it died down?), I've now got something to say about the controversy over poetry-in-general, self-consciously experimental poetry in particular, and the gender of particular poets, as articulated by Jennifer Ashton's controversial book review last year, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's even more controversial, statistics-driven response in the current Chicago Review, the CR editors' additional stat-tracking, and Ashton's brief reply. (More blogospheric discussion has followed since, and not only on this site.)

The first thing to say is that Ashton and Spahr/Young are partly talking past one another, since Ashton is first concerned to attack essentialism (the idea that a kind of poetry bears some intrinsic, logically necessary relation to the gender of its author) and Spahr and Young are first concerned to attack the persistence of sexism (it's still harder, they imply, for women to get their experimental poetry noticed than for men who might write the same sort of poem, whatever "the same sort" would here mean). But Ashton repeatedly implies (without quite saying) that we should stop paying attention to the gender of living poets for any reason—that the people most concerned to pay such attention now are all guilty of implicit essentialism—and Spahr and Young are understandably taken aback by that implication: that's why there's an argument at all.

Javier O. Huerta’s debut, Some Clarifications y otros poemas received the Chicano/ Latino Literary Prize from the University of California at Irvine. I’m not sure it could have been a contender in any other competition (except possibly for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) because half the poems in this collection are in Spanish or use Spanish in key moments within the poem in ways that not even the context can illuminate the meaning for non-Spanish speakers. It’s a book without apologies in terms of audience: You have to know Spanish and be familiar with elements of the Chicano/Mexicano culture, no matter who you are, to fully appreciate the book. The following prose poem is a more accessible piece for non-Spanish speakers:

W.H. Auden’s Christianity is the subject of a fascinating article by Edward Mendelson in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. “In apparently secular poems, he kept hidden what was often their religious starting-point.” That Auden kept his religious awakening under wraps at first, so as not to call down the wrath of his rationalist friends, is understandable. But fellow Christians would hardly have been any happier with Auden’s version of Christianity:

Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian.

If I drive 30 minutes north of my home, answer all the correct questions about citizenship, provide all the proper papers, and am cleared to proceed across the border, I will effectively land in another country, Canada! And if, per chance, I have some poems in my brown leather satchel, suddenly, my poems become international. Just that simple, I could shrug off my saline consciousness.

This is for Rigoberto following his Szymborska post.

A few weeks ago, I attended my first town meeting. Somehow, it was nothing like the town meetings of Stars Hollow, with its “lovable curmudgeon” of a mayor and enchanting agendas, motions to rename the streets to reflect their 17th-century heritage, etc. No, it was a town meeting in a toneless courtroom, presided over by a technocrat who wants to put zinc orthophosphate in the otherwise fairly pristine water supply. Zinc orthosphosphate is an anti-corrosive; its sole purpose is to coat the pipes because some villagers on dead-end streets have brown-water problems.

Offhand, I would say, this already sounds like a boring poem.

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska quickly claimed a slot on the one shelf I reserve for my special books. I keep View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (published with Harcourt Brace) right between the selected volumes of Akhmatova and Cavafy. Here you will also find Baudelaire, Célan, Tagore, García Lorca, Vallejo and Neruda. With the exception of these last three (I read them in the original Spanish, my native tongue), I read the rest in translation.

Originally published with Beacon Press in 1995 (with this book cover), Chicana writer and El Paso native Pat Mora’s fourth book of poems was reprinted this fall through the University of Arizona Press. I’m hoping that it will also reprint the follow-up volume, published in 1997, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, which included a handful of glorious color photographs of religious pieces from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just as this second project is an examination of the influence of Catholicism in the colonized Southwest, Agua Santa: Holy Water, is a look at the presence of pre and post-Columbian culture and mythology, which continues to thrive in the literary imagination of Chicana letters.

As the second winner of The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize hits the bookstore shelves (future shout out, y’all) I am reminded of one of Montoya’s early champions, poet Lee Herrick, founder and editor of In the Grove, where Montoya’s first published poems appeared. Sadly, Montoya’s only book the ice worker sings was published posthumously in 1999, a year after his premature death at the age of 31. Since then, a collective effort by writers of all stripes has kept his memory and art alive. Hence the memorial poetry prize spearheaded by Letras Latinas of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, hence the following poem in Herrick’s debut collection of poetry:

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.”

For a few years after I first moved to New York City I worked for two institutions in service to schoolchildren and to the arts: the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services After School Arts & Education Program, and for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. The first is located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the second (with offices in Manhattan) sent me to work to various neighborhoods in Queens. But both were equally rewarding experiences as I stood in front of mostly immigrant kids of all backgrounds, ages 6 to 10, and communicated in our common language: poetry.

I just received my copy of Priscilla Sneff’s debut poetry collection O Woolly City published with Tupelo Press, the same press that graciously picked up my second collection Other Fugitives and Other Strangers. As many poets know, these two titles were two of about five left in publication limbo after the downfall of our original publisher Zoo Press.

This is my favorite Leroy V. Quintana book. Published in 1996 by Bilingual Press, it includes a flattering introduction by the late Robert Creeley, who says of Quintana: “This deeply gifted poet grasps the common terms of any life we either have or might think to have, shyly, proudly, painfully.”

During his lifetime he produced dozens of poetry collections, novels, plays, and countless essays on everything ranging from religion to literature. He wrote over 2,000 songs, which include the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh. In 1913 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. He was the first laureate in Asia. Have you read his work?

You know, in light of the recent Poetry Society of America ruckus, in which board members Walter Mosley, Rafael Campo, Elizabeth Alexander and Mary Jo Salter resigned after comments made by the now-former board president William Louis-Dreyfus (after the contentious selection of the controversial John Hollander as this year’s recipient of the Frost medal), I had to step in and say something, namely, that expressing discontent, protesting, indeed making noise, is the only way to enact change.

Look at these faces.

These six people allegedly held a West Virginia black woman captive for an entire week, choking, raping and stabbing her while forcefeeding her feces and peppering her with the N-word. They doused her in scalding water, ripped out her hair and made her drink from a toilet.

Meanwhile, we're in the business of poetry.

I’ve written about this a number of times before in other venues, and the story hasn’t changed: when I was straining to learn English as a recent immigrant at a U.S. elementary school, a well-meaning teacher gave me a book of poems to help me “get rid” of my accent. She thought that the shame of my poor pronunciation was the cause of my shyness. I followed her instructions nonetheless and read the pages of poetry out loud each afternoon. I still remember the first one: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile ...

(Baudelaire, "Le Cygne")

The imaginary river that fecundates the flood-plain in the brain-pan belongs to the simulacral Troy, parvam Troiam, that Andromache builds in the Aeneid, in captivity, after her city was destroyed. I too want to build a parvam Troiam, when I write poems. But why I should feel exiled, or what I feel exiled from exactly, I don't know.

I had wistful thoughts today about the first times I saw a Peter Greenaway film, or a Fellini film, or Jacques Demy or Wong Kar Wai or Almodovar. How paradoxical it is that in their infinitely more expensive medium these artists can direct the most wonderfully frivolous fictions, but in the low-rent world of poetry, frivolous fictions bring down the sternest judgments. (It must be plainspoken, it must be true, it must be serious.)

I protest realism.

There are certain songs I cannot listen to anymore because they remind me of someone associated with the pain of loss. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” reminds me of an old heartbreak in college, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” of a more recent heartbreak, and listening to Luther Vandross’ “Dance with My Father” is my quickest trip to tears because it speaks to the emptiness I feel after the death of my own father. Music, it seems, owes its popularity and success to the way it can be absorbed by the listener and given a personal context. We give intimate meaning to a song, responding to the sentiment of it in the same way we will mouth the lyrics—we make it about us.

Kwame's post (below) got me thinking about, of all things, motherhood. Because he brings up our cultural identities as something both constructed (a narrative) and a given (we can't choose it), and because the one aspect of identity I've ever been asked to write about was -- not my race, or my nationality, my parents' immigration, or my gender, but my reproductive status. Will you, I was asked, review some new poetry books about Motherhood?

No, I said. For several reasons.

1) The commodification of pregnancy and motherhood irritates me, and it's unclear how poetry books "about" the subjective experience of mothering aren't merely an offshoot of this.

2) The commodification of poetry books -- which includes, among the more "experimental" players, organizing collections around a theme: it's good marketing.

"But we live in the real world," you say. "We package the experience, but there's real value inside."

Warning: There is poetry somewhere in this blog, but you are going to have to dig deep to find it…

The things I am reading and the things I am writing and the things I am doing are all making me think about America and Americanness. Recently I was asked in a public forum what were my thoughts on Barak Obama’s dilemma with African Americans. The person quoted the often used statement (not sure who came up with it, and I am not entirely convinced that black folks did) that Obama is not “black enough.” The implication being that Obama is not black enough to have automatic access to the black vote. It reminded me of Steve Harvey’s retort to another often used phrase: “You musn’t vote for Obama just because he is black.” Harvey’s question: “So what, I must vote for you just because you are white?” Think about it. It is actually a profoundly insightful and clever retort, as that has to be the only available conclusion one could reach. In other words, it is going to be about race if you bring it up, and since you have brought it up, you have to be saying that you want me to vote for a white person because that person is not black. But I did not use Harvey’s retort to answer the question. Instead I offered a statement that sounded on the surface counter-intuitive and wrong. Obama’s problem is not that people suspect he is not black enough, but that people fear he is not American enough. And by people, I mean first and foremost, black people. In other words, the reticence that some blacks feel about Obama is actually a kind of xenophobia, the worst form of patriotism that seems unlikely for a people who have fought so hard to be accepted as Americans in their own country. Still, it is a peculiar brand of xenophobia because it is one that emerges out of a myth of African America survival and triumph that has very clear dimensions—a distinctive narrative that is perhaps one of the most admired features of the American Dream. African Americans are uncertain about Obama because he represents a breach of one strain of the American Dream.

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

The best book-publishing story of the year is from Open City in New York.

My sons' pediatrician is keenly interested in temperament. Observing my chest-beating, bellowing, early-walker of a one-year-old this morning, he suggested a book that might help me negotiate the difference in temperament he perceived between mother and son. Little does he know the general consensus in the family is that this baby bull is a Mlinko. His placid father and brother look on in amusement as Mom wrangles with genetic payback.

I mention this -- the fact of temperament and its ability to mask itself, to go undercover, like that demur mother in the doctor's office -- because of an interesting exchange between two poetry blogs this week. Musing on the brilliant work of Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988), Jack Kimball i.d.'d the great American poet as eccentric by temperament. Gary Sullivan pointedly disagreed. He took the stock avant-garde position that art is social and that great art -- art that advances its genre -- is a group effort. He accused Kimball of perpetuating that old bourgeois-individualist cliche of the loner artist.

Everybody's sayin' it: "PhDs are the new MFAs."

Say it ain't so. I'm out of money.

Anybody out there got a PhD in creative writing? Why? Is it sexier? Do you get more dates? Does it make you smarter? Whaaat?

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....."

Yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, Bush was quoting as saying, “We don’t believe in timetables.” This made a tree of questions grow in my mind.

Your question about African American writing is a fascinating one: “Will we ever be able to consider the works of African-American writers sans the reminder that they are in fact African-American?” In 1926, Langston Hughes dealt with something like this question in his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”.You should find it fascinating. It is easily found on-line through a Google. Langston Hughes, I am sure, would wonder with me why you want African American literature to be spoken of without a reminder or an awareness that it is African American. What is the instinct that makes you or anyone ask that question? It is an instinct to achieve this quite seemingly idealistic goal of “universality”—a universality that is in fact a false one.

[Solzhenitsyn] must have vividly remembered how in 1958, a few years before he himself was embraced by the Soviet literary establishment, a crowd of 14,000 was bused by the authorities to Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow to denounce Pasternak as an enemy of the people after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One could describe this event as a paranoid manifestation of totalitarianism; but it also demonstrated how important the role of the writer was in the eyes of the ruling elite at that time. In the same year 14,000 had gathered (this time voluntarily) at a New England stadium to listen to T.S. Eliot. Poets ruled the world.
          —Zinovy Zinik, “The Old Days,” TLS (March 9, 2007)