Just returned home (Portland? Still weird) from a week in Maine blissfully absent of most human contact. I feel better about everything, or, at the very least, like I have a better perspective on what I need to be doing with myself from here on out. I think staying in one place for an extended period of time can give you an unhealthy tunnel vision and I’m glad to say I feel that’s dissipated.

Got a satifsying amount of reading done – we had a lot of rain which prevented too much adventuring. I decided poetry and I needed to “take a break” and see other people for a week. I don’t know if that happens with other poets, but before I left I started to feel like a sponge completely saturated and dripping everything all over the floor whenever I would read, and everything sounded the same and felt the same. In Maine I read (the hilariously titled) One Man’s Meat by E.B. White – a series of his essays written 1938-1942 when he moved from NYC to a saltwater farm in Maine. He ranges all over the place in topics; novice farming concerns, rural life, writing, movies, and politics – all against the backdrop of WW2 conflict in Europe and America’s eventual involvement. He writes unpretentiously with the perfect blend of curmudgeon and optimist to be thoroughly enjoyable. Refreshing, for me, like the outdoor showering and outhouse pooping I did that week.

What really struck me was the total faith in democracy and freedom for every individual that’s pervasive throughout all of White’s writing, and made me realize by the contrast exactly how cynical about those things I’ve become. Smoking cigars and watching the constellations with my dad the one night he surmised that soon we’ll need to start colonizing other planets in order to sustain and propagate the species. He was somewhat appalled when I countered that the species probably wasn’t worth sustaining or propagating at this point. I think it made us both deeply sad, for me especially after reading White.

I also got a raging mega-boner for John Steinbeck, of all people. I’ve liked most of his work more or less, excluding The Grapes of Wrath, but when I picked up The Log from the Sea of Cortez I was hooked. Steinbeck ships out with his friend, Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist (“Doc” in the thinly-veiled nonfiction novel Cannery Row) to collect any and all manner of marine life specimens in the Bay of California. It is one of those wonderful multi-hybrids; part ship’s log, part memoir, part philosophical treatise. In the section “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck explains:

We had a game which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport consisting of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and busy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality.

That quote was found in the introductory “About Ed Ricketts” section in the book I originally started reading in Maine. It was old, thick and smelled the way all excellent old books should smell.  I borrowed it from the library in the church on the island and was sure to return it before leaving in fear more of the wrath of gossip-mongering New England old heads than Jesus, picking up a new one at Powell’s upon my return. The new one is a Penguin Classics brand, and is altogether entirely too floppy (flaccid) and the spine thin and unbroken. Honestly it just isn’t as satisfying to read. And that’s why I will never own a Kindle, folks, because books are a total experience.

In other news – finally joined the Independent Publishing Resource Center and signed up for the Intro to Letterpress class. Needless to say, …!!!

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.

When someone says the poetry scene today consists of \”a lot of brilliant people with serious boundary issues\”(taken wildly out of context here) the first poet I think of is Dorothea Lasky. The images in her poems melt into one another and re-form, filling the reader with a sense of transformation innate to her writing. The created sense of urgency and earnestness strikes the reader with its wholesome sincerity, even when the voice is sulky and petulant. Much has been said about the “refreshing honesty” etc. of her voice and I don’t want to belabor that point too much, but it’s true that these are poems of a different color – a color that Lasky and only Lasky can pull off.

 In AWE, the speaker is capable of becoming anything and everything, and does. Over time the repetition of narrative morphing – whether through transfiguration or birth or consumption – makes it evident that in Lasky’s borderless version of the universe, everything is a part of everything, for better or for worse. It’s an egalitarian universe that way. Here’s an example of what I mean:

In the T-Station

There is a music box playing inside here
And on the wall are tiles by children, painted one day in their art class
See, world, there is art in everything!
You are not so fond of art, you know
The dead woman here thinks she’s in Italy
It is Italy inside here, with this ancient music playing.
The dead, plump rat is on the ground.
Uninterested and blasé, still, it is strange to see a dead, plump rat.
If I were Camus, I would say there is a plague.
Both the dead woman and the rat, as one might say, have slipped
On the cake of soap of the air.
Now I am sitting by the music box player
Now two women are talking and
Their matching gloves are switched between them.
There is a woman here with a tiny baby
She puts shoes on the baby and talks to it like
A little brown bird, with its red beating breast.
She is old
I wonder if I will be that old when I have a baby
Maybe I will never have a baby
No, that can’t be true, out of my womb
The tiny babies of the universe will explode.
Outside the station, I dream and act as if I
Am a Harvard student and everyone around me is impressed!
There is a rat inside the T-station who is dead, and plump.
Inside my heart, there is a rat who
Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap.
In the dead lady, a rat eats its way out of her.
In the stars, a rat eats noxious gases and then the sun.
The constellations all form in the shape of rats
And the world from above is blue and brown and slightly sweet smelling.
And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms.

Here, the rat becomes the agent analogous with both the dead woman, by their pairing early on, and the woman with the tiny baby (“Inside my heart, there is a rat who / Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap”). This poem is filled with the breaking of boundaries; firstly, by the juxtaposition of these two characters and the rat. The boundary of place is broken with “It is Italy inside here.” Perhaps, too, the boundary of time is broken and the different women are all one woman at different points in life (and, if we’re being consistent, they are all a part of the speaker). The rat is inside the speaker’s heart, the rat is eating its way out of the dead woman. The rat is eating the sun and re-forming in the sky as a constellation. This continual progression of zooming out is also a consistent feature of this collection.

God and sex and love and self surface often, all carrying particular baggage that shifts from poem to poem. To be honest the whole God-with-a-capital-G thing kind of freaked me out when I started reading AWE – my instinct is to run in the opposite direction. But after finishing the book a couple times over I think that’s what makes Lasky’s persona so sincere. The genuine belief in something ultimate (although still always fraught: “The truth is…[t]here is no heaven.”) which has sway over our lives is touching to me, and not in the kind of pathetic cute way, in the way that kind of makes me wish I believed in anything that way.

 Throughout AWE, Lasky cultivates a mischievous and tactile surrealist élan, with the funny, bizarre imagery of Eugene Ostashevsky (and a nod to Russian Futurism with the poem “Portrait of Me and Vladimir Mayakovsky”), the free-ranging “talkiness” of Frank O’Hara, and at times, the unifying spirit of Walt Whitman (“We are one thing, bleating a / Somber, scurrying lullaby to / Lapsing pinkish angels.”). In at least one poem, unfortunately, she reminds me of Tao Lin (“Love is the Answer to God’s Question”). These poems are worth the read because they are unpredictable and volatile. And yes, refreshing.

            What is Dorothea Lasky in awe of, you may ask?

            In her words, “All of life.”

Just finished reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity – my interest in the author having been sparked last year after reading parts of The Second Sex and my (very) limited understanding of existentialist philosophy.  Although she referred to Ethics as “a little essay about ethics: how can morals and politics be adjusted to each other nowadays, and things of this kind” – Joan Acocella uses this quote in her essay “The Frog and the Crocodile” on Beauvoir to demonstrate her continual downplaying of her intellectual work in the letters to her lover Nelson Algren – paradoxically at the time she was France’s leading feminist thinker.

Although morals and politics are often the subject matter, Beauvoir focuses a great deal on art and science as well. One image that struck me is that of the “festival” set up as a counterpoint for art and art-making. The festival is an event in which existence is realized through destruction, specifically consumption: feasting, carousing, penis insertion, etc. Thus it can only ever be temporary, fleeting. Art, on the other hand, aims to realize existence in a more lasting way – by accepting the finite nature of life. “[M]an fulfills himself within the transitory or not at all,” as Beauvoir puts it. This gets to the heart of her argument about mankind’s unique problem of “ambiguity” – humans are the only beasts with reason enough to be aware of their inevitable demise.

It seems to me not that she’s saying that people make art to leave something of themselves behind after death necessarily (although that may be the motive of some artists), but moreso to “assert one’s own existence,” to affirm it as it is being lived. And really, how is that not a celebration? A festival of creation rather than consumption. Although she insists that “one can never possess the present,” I think art may well be the closest we can get.

In other news – today in the mail I received a care package from the lovable and sometimes fluorescent Sara Basher which included, among other delights, her chapbook the hour’s wooden waist turns glass. One of my favorites is a series based on collages by John Ashbery (you can find the NYTimes slideshow of them here. Here is one by the title of Mannerist Concern:

When history goes in reverse, the queen sees her own head. She cradles it. She sees straight into her golden throat.

Her asphalt lung blows through smoke through cigarettes that know love is an endeavor of the skin. Sugar lies at the bottom of her glass, a moon. Cigarettes and coffee and art is to accept death in the waking hour coming through the glass waist.

Jupiter sees its rings disintegrate, its spots explode.

Galileo, eye on the glass, peers at the soldier kissing nurse kissing a war’s end.

You pant, and paint, and paint. Ivy walls covered your canvasses, so you wrote. Poet, your fist has knocked against me; your fingers tore the little pieces of gold leaf put over my eyes.

Lastly, if you’re feeling adventurous check out the newborn blog of Ian Nevans: The New American Asceticism.

Haruki Murakami is trying to get into your head.

In a story that muddles over the temporal nature of the mind, the nature of the subconscious and the (im)morality of science, Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a lot of moderately entertaining filler interspersed with meditations on the philosophical. One catches whiffs of Kant amidst Japanese Indiana Jones on amphetamines trying to escape bloodthirsty extraterrestrials with a penchant for polenta (not literally, but you get the idea).

There are definite similarities to B-list action movies which annoyed me for the same reason B-list action movies annoy me. For one, the use of sudden and arbitrary obstacles as plot devices which impose time constraints and thus propel the action while creating suspense; “OMG I had no idea this cavern was filled with bloodthirsty leeches and would quickly flood with an inescapable whirlpool!” (And that is roughly accurate.) It is effective for the foregoing reasons but at the expense of any plot development other than cheap action. One major chink in the story that bugged me a lot were the INKlings – subterranean creepers with a swampy stench that kidnap humans to feed on their corpses after they’ve rotted, and which worship even stranger and more ominous fish-gods. However, we never actually see an INKling, for apparently, “If you set eyes on an INKling, you’ll never look away.” However their presence remains an enormous threat throughout. If Murakami was going to set them up to be the super-scary evildoers he could have at least made his characters confront them more directly. They escaped the INKlings all too conveniently as far as I’m concerned.

Another similarity, not only with action movies but also with mainstream contemporary fiction of the “suspense thriller” breed, is the disaffected and unwilling protagonist. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland he isn’t even endowed with a name, and spends a pretty significant chunk of the book whining “Why me?” over and over again. I guess finding out that your brain was divided into sections for a capital-driven science experiment and that everyone else who’d had the same procedure is dead and your conscious mind was going to surrender to your subconscious (named “The End of the World” – a walled-in town devoid of “mind” of your own making) in a few hours if you made it out of this gross underground lake and past these weird creepy creatures with this knife wound is pretty shitty… However, once the protagonist realizes that it’s the end of the world for him, he adopts an indifferent outlook, unsure how to fill his last day as himself.

Murakami also employs cultural references – name-dropping, basically – to develop the protagonist’s character and to generate sympathy towards him, especially towards the end of the novel. This, to me, is cheap, and kind of pretentious. Maybe Murakami assumes that the entirety of his audience has read Turgenev and listens to Brandenburg, but I sure haven’t, and don’t. That’s the problem with dropping such loaded references – they won’t always achieve their full meaning for a reader unfamiliar with it. And, again, it’s just downright pretentious.

Despite these major flaws, Murakami does an excellent job weaving and integrating the themes of two parallel, separate storylines together subtly and totally throughout. It is an easy read as well, simple pronouncements of sentences, no frills even when much is said: “What’s lost never perishes.” His wry irony pierces through expertly and without further comment. On the last day before his end of the world: “She made one last pitch. ‘Three classic Hitchcock pictures coming in next week.’” The two plots simultaneously rush towards each other in their own time.

And despite the major flaws, Hard-Boiled Wonderland the End of the World was straight-up weird enough to keep me curious and reading. At the heart of it, the struggle of his subconscious self to leave a perfect, but void, world for the dicey luck-of-the-draw world in which our consciousnesses inhabit rings true, even if it is a well-worn theme. Overall, Murakami could do with taking himself a little less seriously – if I knew that he was poking fun at himself throughout I would have rolled my eyes much less.

I meant to review a lot of the books I read this summer that I never really got around to.  For whatever reason this is weighing heavily on my conscience. In order to move on with my life and purge these books from me, here’s a little ole poetry round-up (i.e. shorter, half-assed reviews) to satisfy both of those needs.

Spell by Dan Beachy-Quick

Despite what Ted Burke thinks, I’m of the opinion that poetry about poetry can be some of the best, and the most ambitious. Dan Beachy-Quick’s Spell is ambitious indeed – a veritable carnivale of narrative experimentation and meditations on the nature of the written word, strung through by intertwining images and ideas, all bound together by a poetic rendering of the classic Moby Dick (Here I’m afraid I must admit that I’ve never actually read Moby Dick – no high school English class tyrant ever forced it into my head & I’ve never been much of a fanatic for the classics on my own. So admittedly I’m at a loss for how Spell plays on the original. I will say, however, that it made me want to go read Moby Dick).
The various kinds of form Beachy-Quick employs range from sprawling, disparate free verse to lists filled with definitions, tight couplets to strange exchanges. The overarching organizational structure is complex: six chapters divided into smaller sections which may represent the voice of a character, a particular topic (“The Head of the Whale (An Epistemology, a Psychology, an Economy, a Flame, Tooth, Bone, a Theology of the Blind, a Murder, a Deaf Ear)” is one of my favorites), or Moby Dick, Moby Dick, Moby Dick. My favorite part of this structure is the gradual revelation of the poem Ishmael intends to tattoo in his back – at the end of each chapter the next stanza appears, blanking out the ones that came before and after; a true threading-through. Another important chapter is one entitled “The Anvil, a (The Author of this Poem, a Character No Longer, Drops His Guise and Responds to His Editor’s Question:
Why?)”. “Why?” was the question that I had at the beginning of this book as well. Although this chapter doesn’t quite answer that question, it gets personal here. The narrator – proclaimed analagous to the author in the chapter’s subtitle – addressing each poem to the “Editor,” venting his obsession the whale, hang-ups on writing and the growing, icy divide between him and his wife. These poems to the editor are where Beachy-Quick is at his best; consolidating form and emotional content, moving from abstraction to individual.
Lyrical, filled with images of contrast (black ink on a white page, white whale in an inky sea etc.) and the negotiation of self, Spell is beautiful if sometimes too obsessive. I have to admit, though, my skepticism when I began that came out pleasantly surprised.

Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel

Frederick Seidel is a dirty old man. The only thing that outweighs the pervasiveness of strange perverted imagery (“China the vagina,” one of my favorites) is the constant, looming presence of death in every poem. They contain neck-snapping transitions between folly and dead (really, really dead) seriousness. They mix brick-faced statements, social/political commentary and allusions, factually-stated anecdotes of everyday life and friends’ obituaries, all pervaded by a morbid sense of fatalism. Much like the world’s current state of affairs, everything is so fucked up it’s funny. Here is a pretty good example of what I mean, from “Drinking in the Daytime”:

Anything is better than this
Bliss.
Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.
I’m sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol
To get a bullet to my brain.
I’m gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain.

I’m in such a state of Haut-Brion I can’t resist.
A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist.
You’re wondering why I talk this way, so daintily!
I’ll tell you after I take a pee.
Now I’m back.
Oilcoholics love the breast they attack.

I’m talking about the way poetry made me free.
It’s treated me very well, you see.
I climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty
In the days when you could still go up in the torch, and that was me.
I mean every part I play.
I’m drinking my lunch at Montrachet.

The rhyme thing almost scared me away at first. He does it a bunch. But I think the sing-songy feeling of it adds to the absurdity and stark contrast between the silly and the deadly. Nothing is sacred here – Seidel begins the book with “Kill Poem,” where the heads of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. are mounted on the walls as trophies. His sense of humor is fucked, his sexual appetite is fucked, his political opinions are fucked. So what does all this amount to? I think it comes to a brutal sense of the futility of everything. Not only that, I think this book accomplishes what so-called “Terror Art” sets out to accomplish but never does.

The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

This might be one of the most amazing books I have ever read. Anyone who cares about language NEEDS to read it. Immediately. This is the epitome of what language is supposed to do. I closed the last page and looked out the window of the train I was on to a world suddenly more beautiful for its cruelty and brevity.

The cover advertises itself as “A Novel in Verse” which is probably the most accurate way it can be described. The form is mostly prosaic but the language is undoubtedly poetic. The book is based on a Greek myth in which Herakles comes to a red place and kills Geryon – the many-armed, red-winged monster – and his cattle and little dog. What’s the most “postmodern” thing possible you could do with these two characters? Make them contemporary gay lovers, obviously! To be honest, I don’t know how she pulls it off so successfully – a huge part of it is due to the language she uses. I want to include quotes but the book is in Kate’s car so I will add in some quotes later.

Spar by Karen Volkman

Pretty & well-written but boring.

Hagiography by Jen Currin

Hagiography reads like a collection of fairy tales. As dark as the Brothers Grimm and by far more image than narrative, the fragments of Hagiography carry us through pungent neighborhoods filled with things to taste and everything becomes personified. Everything is a character, everything has a part of the action. Here’s one I really liked called “Constellations, Creatures With Two Legs:

Bluish in the whiskered face of dawn,
I lift my cloak to the sky -
face after farce – April’s marriage
to August. My love who was
the size of a thumb. Bottled
and given to idle phrase-making.
A phantom in a noisy place
before her army slowed its place.

Now a mermaid tattoo, a blue monkey, a bird
frightened by change,
seeing a black squirrel
in the car’s shadow. Dogs on film
and no one wants to hold her hand
in exile.

Inscrutably involved, your hands are basil.
You fall into a fugue that could be a garden.
Once upon a forest I cut myself
and claimed I was the knife.
My love who knew the taste of mountains.
Red clover tea. Kiss on the knee.

Sickness was the star sitting too close
on the divan. Vanity sipping the baffled waters.
The dead and living waters
we pour over our heads. Our shoulders
brush. Our spirits will not
marry us.

You can see lots of things are happening but they’re happening more in the way that you think of things happening rather than the way they actually do. It is more the memory-recollecting than story-telling. Currin has a lot of recurring images as well, colors come up and signify particulars – blue, for one, is the color of death’s boat. Salt, leaves, blood, spices, fish, ghosts, water, family members, astrology & fortune-telling all drop into the poems repeatedly like debutantes to a party. They become something for the read to latch onto and look for, acquiring the aura of holy objects as the book progresses.

One other thing that really interested me was the gender ambiguity throughout Hagiography. One poem addresses “My dear husband/wife,” in another X and Y (chromosomes being inferred) act as characters. A definite parallel can be drawn between the ambiguity of gender identity and that of self-identity, which I really enjoyed.

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