Today’s dose of perspective

I\’ll be 23 in October.

One hand on the trigger one hand on the hand

Just received in the mail:

from Passages, David Abel’s used/rare bookstore/goldmine.

Also obtained: This in Which by George Oppen. This is my lunch reading. Only a few pages in and I haven’t decided how much I like it or not, but it’s inspired a good amount of research into the Objectivists.

In other news, Robert Creeley gives me morning wood. Every day I wake up, pour coffee into my Morton’s salt girl mug, read Creeley on the FP and giggle. Something about summer.

In Portland news: We participated in the Portland Naked Bike Ride last weekend, supposedly the 2nd-largest in the world after Brazil (but hey, if I was in Brazil I’d probably be naked all the time). Bodypaint, before & after-dance parties, free energy, my boobs somewhere on the innernetz…apparently wind in the pee-hole was a really big problem for the boyz, which never would’ve occurred to me. Pedalpalooza in general has been ridiculous – the Bowie vs. Prince bike ride/dance party somehow ended with us dancing at a random house party and lots of things I don’t remember…This is us (the only picture we have of that night):

In shameless self-promotion news: elimae published one of my pomez. There’s a lot of really awesome shit on there too.

I don’t know what you’re doing tonight…

…but this is what I’m doing tonight:

2 + 2 = 3
Sound Poetry and Paraperformance
mARKO Whens, Tony Christy, Leo Daedalus, and David Abel

(followed by open mic)

Monday, May 4
7:00 pm

Three Friends Coffee House
201 SE 12th Ave.
503-236-6411
In September of 2008, Marko Whens and Tony Christy organized the first
Demagnetic Mutant Cabaret, “an evening of humor-based, conceptual,
nondramatic events informed by traditions such as Dada, Fluxus, and
Situationism.”

Leo Daedalus did John Cage stand-up and Oulipo rap; Tony went on a khaki
parade; Marko found the other side of the frame; and David Abel made tea
under surveillance.

At the Three Friends Coffee house open mic on Monday, May 4, they will
return as the Three Scrapettes, with a variety of non-acts, sound poems,
peripheral pieces, audience impersonations, and wrong solutions.
Biographical fallacies:

Marko Whens is soon to be published by an oppressed press. He falsely
proclaims to be the first poet to misspell every language.

As a child, Tony Christy grew gills and drowned. His father was a scrap
surgeon his mother a mitt mender. Upon graduation from the institute of
technical friction he took a position with the broke bureau.

Leo Daedalus has experienced spatial-sequence, or number form,
synesthesia since his leftmost days. Fittingly, he imagines that the
ideal expression of any particular art form would have to be realized in
a different form.

David Abel studied with Massenet and Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire
(1890-97), then lived uneventfully as a teacher and theorist, producing
an enormous body of music expressing his communist sympathies. Very
little of his work, however, escaped neglect.

Yeahh you’re jealous.

What i learned this weekend

New Jersey makes poems.

I read The Sunlight Dialogues and swore off lengthy realistic fiction forever.

Read The Fall in a daze & rekindled a cautious love for Camus.

Got halfway through The Prince and realized there’s a reason they just tell you about it in history class instead of making you read it.

The best adjective for Paul Celan’s poetry is “spiny” [Pierre Joris]. I’m re-reading his selected poems but by re-reading I mean actually reading. They’re like closely-knit stellar explosions.

“Looking at myself / I see / a plate of carrots & bread / notes / lines / & a radiator / under which no one / has ever swept”

As a first-time reader of Bernadette Mayer, I quickly began to wonder exactly what it was that made me keep reading Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 2008). I divided the subject matter of the poems into some general categories: Food, Weather, Poetry, Politics, Scrabble Words and Nonsense. Not that the poems can be divided so easily, they glide and morph and leap, taking you for a ride.
The book truly begins to cohere with the long (5.5 pages) prose section devoid of capitalization “40-60,” in which Mayer’s persona begins to truly take shape, giving the reader a perspective to latch on to, a lens through which to view the rest of the book. This prose section divulges the stroke she had at 49, debilitating her motor skills & affecting the way she writes. “as a result of the stroke, i am not balanced – i topple & fall easily. if you study how humans walk, it’s by stopping themselves from falling that a step is taken. i write unbalanced poetry, i cannot balance my checkbook, nor do i have one.”
This is pretty exemplary of Mayer’s writing style and persona. Autobiographical minutiae mixed with tangential “fun facts,” overridden by blatant disregard for grammar. The quick interspersing & neck-snapping changes of topic give her writing a careless feeling of whim – though I don’t think it’s fair to assume that the work is as careless as it seems. In the context of the rest of the book it comes to appear expertly calculated – we’ve become familiar with the major characters, locales and obsessions (hating on GWBush, for one) of her life. It also makes the reader read into the silly non-sequiturs as perhaps affectations of a mind altered by stroke or even amicable senility - an intentional locating of persona. The total effect is the accumulation of the everyday mundane, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The end of the book was in large part ruined for me by a section entitled “Old Notebook.” Until then, I was enjoying Mayer’s narrative leaps and embedded social commentary – totally along for the ride. “Old Notebook” (which, by the way, is 20+ pages long) is an actual old notebook (or an amazingly accurate replica of one) reprinted, I don’t know, for the fun of it? Accumulation of everyday minutiae is one thing, subjecting your reader to a barrage without filter – of favorite scrabble words, lists of unpaid bills, disconnected slogans, half-poems, story summaries and bizarre linguistic exercises (to name just a few) is torturous and laughs in the reader’s face – which I suspect is the point. I kept reading hoping something was going to come of all this unmitigated fiddlefaddle, but alas, it was all for naught. About ten pages in I couldn’t resist scrawling “fuck you Bernadette Mayer” in the margin.
There is definitely a diaristic feeling to the book as a whole; a feeling even outside of “Old Notebook” that these words were scribbled down spontaneously. Nada Gordon says in her thesis on Mayer, “The journal form permits the integration of the process of writing into everyday life, using daily experience as the stuff of the writing, but it also permits the inclusion of otherwise ineffable material, and a way out of a repressive world.” Mayer is undoubtedly writing counter-culture simply by virtue of the nontraditional schematics of her writing. The persistent associative leaps and surrealistic flourishes contribute to the feeling of spontaneity. While much can be said for Mayer’s genuine exuberance, shining even through patches of sulky petulance, it doesn’t work when her poems come off so cute as to become precious. This is a good example of a poem that doesn’t work: “Whistle Stop Sleeper”

intermittent incipient nasturtium-snapdragons
climb the fence to the field, knowing we interfere
with their anti-warfare stances as they tumble
like downed trees or alpacas to the green ground
i wish i was an elephant, what would be behind me?
awful coaches or yellow couches tumble too, dusty
all the while like scimitars to regal turrets
ignore the pauses; those caesurae are haughty
my chin’s bleeding, what’s new? who’s late?
i’ll meet you on the other side, I’ll bring
her or him, a blue heron, are you an owl?
fearless? insouciant as an exotic love flower?
have you read The Conquest of Happiness? when?
i just said that to lengthen the line; so there
wish you were here you treelike human or short
imagination’s leaf, soon there’ll be a storm

While I appreciate the irreverence towards politics and “academic” poetry (the haughty caesurae, the spite evident in “i just said that to lengthen the line”), this poem just doesn’t do it for me, despite its hyperactive energy. It’s cute & mildly entertaining but ultimately pointless because it completely lacks an emotional register. Here’s one poem I think works really well, part of a section in which Mayer wrote the bulk of the sonnet at noon and the couplet at midnight every day for a month: “December 23″

Gloomy, unnaturally warmly, still tenebrous
The radiant, invisible dreaming universe,
A year of flowers, see how easy it is
to be a poet, you can say anything
Naming books off the shelf – you have to have
elves and books and leaves and a typewriter

and the lacrymals, once I bought a bookcase
that collapsed when I put books on it
I brought it back, the guy said “you didn’t
put books on it, did you?” This story
has a morose moral: books are insulation

The lights went out here dude
Cars thoughtlessly illuminating us
Same irreverence towards academia, but this time there’s something to latch on to (it happens to be a narrative thread, which I don’t believe it always need be) and though the final couplet is disconnected, it works once you know the constraint she’s using.
The diary form gives Mayer the leeway to play with language and to make it utterly her own, and it normalizes the process of writing as something all-inclusive, something to be done for any reason or no particular reason at all – which is where it begins to border on self-indulgence. It is ultimately an egalitarian form of writing – Mayer is immediately accessible and enjoyable (although I admittedly spent a good portion of the book trying to figure out what the text was hiding and how to unlock it) even if you don’t want to get into close-reading the syntax, her work implies that anyone can (and should) do this. In her words, “But shit man, I don’t know anything, do you?” (”December 31″ sonnet).

Grundle Quiverings

A sign that I am becoming a true Portlandite: last weekend Wes and I took a ten-mile bike ride down to Mount Tabor Park in the southeast and back. His ease at riding in the middle of busy roads and making abrupt left turns was, admittedly, terrifying at first (”If you fuck something up with a motorist, just smile really big and wave, it’ll melt their hearts”). Highlights of the trip included 20 minutes of hail (I swear it has hailed more since I’ve been in Portland than what I’ve seen in the rest of my entire life combined), Trader Joe’s shockingly delicious lager – consumed under a blooming bright pink tree above an empty reservoir, a ten-minute kamikaze hurtling full-speed down Mt Tabor, my grundle going all a-quiver every time I hopped back in the saddle, and the burden of my bike – the two wheel equivalent of a Cadillac. It looks real purty and you feel like a pimp riding it around, but Wes was half a mile ahead of me as I panted pathetically trying to get the heavy, clunky thing up any kind of incline. I needs to get me one of these, which is the bike virtually everyone in Portland owns, especially since I want to ride to work once it’s consistently nice enough. We rode down to the waterfront and up to the bluffs to drink more and enjoy the view of the river and city as well as folks in gold sparkly spandex shorts drinking 40s & playing croquet.

It’s definitely a city full of immigrants and transplants and it’s finally starting to feel kind of like home.

This blog could easily become a laundry list of my literary failings. And blogging failings. But instead here’s a poem that makes me feel good even though it is typographically inaccurate because I can’t figure out formatting very well at all:

Winner of the Bad Poem Contest

Just throw em under the pile

all the bad poems written

never to be seen again

all the poems of

the twentieth century[*]

you know, the sailboat poems,

the narcissistic poems, the ones about

hangovers, the academic poems

about

next to

nothing, the personal poems

about everything, the New York School poems about cruising,

the personal poems

about everything:

the language poems

about

something or other, throw

em all over the pile

& write no more lest

when jail

becomes the only other alternative you’ll

be so famous

or something

those horrible poems’ll’ve been saved

& then

when you die

in jail anyway

everyone will know you

for being

the worst poet of the twentieth century,

or worse,

one of the least good of the worst ones

of the turn

of the century

in which cases

yr high class executors

who know lawyers who

drink Chardonneigh & eat pistonnes

& don’t know love’ll say

you were something

you were not

for the sake of making a killing over sake

in this really huge world in

which I woke up this morning

Thank you very much.

---

[*] PerfPo, RegPo, LangPo, OtherPo, AcaPo, CommPo, PunkPo, ImmortalPo, BeatPo, NYPo, CalifPo (and other states), Internt’lPo. On the other hand, “Noli in Spiritu Combueri” (”refuse to be burnt-out”)-Ed Sanders

- by Bernadette Mayer, thank YOU very much.

Okay seriously

Does anyone know where I can actually buy this purse?

Also you should go here to Ally’s post of love/lust.

Scribble

I really enjoyed reading this clever post from Nada Gordon’s blog. I’ve also been perturbed by “lineated prose” in poetry, mostly because I think it’s boring, more often than not. In my mind it’s the polar opposite of more extreme “out there” experimental poetry – Jackson Mac Lowe, for example. “How is this poetry?” some skeptics may ask of his work and the work of other experimental poets. Although I feel it’s a double standard, I often want to ask that of the so-called “docu-poetry,” bringing me back to that sticky question of what, then, is our criteria for poetry?

In a “Forms of Poetry” class a couple of us did an experiment as a presentation, passing out various poems we thought pushed the limits of what is typically understood to be poetry. A nonsense blurb that we made up with all sorts of vulgar and naughty imagery made the cut, but Chelsey Minnis’ “Anti Vitae” – a poem in the style of a CV – did not. But why?

I think it ultimately comes down to what you believe poetry is (or should be) for and what it should do. Obviously this is something that must be determined at an individual level, which at least in part may explain the great diversity of kinds of poetry found all across the spectrum. I agree with Nada’s trepidation about docu-poetry because I do not believe that poetry should be used for the transfer of information, even if it concerns personal details (and thus, might be loosely termed “lyric”). Mallarme said it best: “I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper.”  Then the question arises, what is poetry for, then, if not the transmission of information? Can its definition only be found in negation? In the words of a Supreme Court Justice explaining the parameters of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Ha.

You got the fever and I am your soup!

Saw the totally adorable and even more badass Lykke Li at the Hawthorne the other night – definitely one of the better live shows I’ve ever been to. She’s an amazing performer and we danced our asses off.

I was also pleasantly surprised by her opening act Wildbirds & Peacedrums (who we referred to all night as Thundercock because I couldn’t remember the name). Check it out: \”There is no light\”

Her voice is strikingly wild & raw. These douchey guys standing next to us I overheard saying “It’s just her and a drum, what the hell” etc but I think they did amazing shit with her voice and the drums. Damn.