Live From Prairie Lights

I'll be reading at Prairie Lights this Thursday, 10/13, at 7 PM, with Wayne Miller. Looking forward to this homecoming of sorts!

Occupied

Occupy Chicago, October 7

More on the malady of the visual...

Follow up to x and y:

And wasn’t language given to us to free things from their images, to carry to appearance appearance itself, to lead it to glory?

-Agamben, The Idea of Prose

astral homunculi in cooking pots

Follow up to my post on Artaud's idea of poetry as a magnetic innervation of the heart: Artaud also has this choice bit from the March 7, 1946 letter to Georges Le Breton:

"For Gérard de Nerval would not have suffered from life if life had not been put in symbols, had not been typified in symbols, cut up into astral homunculi in cooking pots, and if these symbols and allegories of beings, made desperate and repressed by the rituals of alchemy, had not moreover been put outside semen, outside that seed of tumors and semen which in real life leads to syphilis or plague, to suicide or madness. -- What is madness? A transplantation out of essence but into the abyss of the exterior interior. What is essence? A hole or a body? Essence is this hole of a body that the abyss of the circular mouth of the cooking pot has never truly made signify facing the impatiences of alchemy." (Trans. Clayton Eshleman, in Watchfiends and Rackscreams)

This description of essence just floors me. I understand this "hole of a body" as a simultaneous interior/exterior: a kind of undifferentiated plane (in the Deleuzean sense, obviously), but maybe something like a catenoid becoming a helicoid--a surface wrapping around itself to create a temporary interior; then dissolving it at will:

from http://www.math.hmc.edu/~gu/curves_and_surfaces/surfaces/catenoid.html

I'm also curious about these astral homunculi. What a weird, terrifying, and kind of funny image. My son some times puts little toy dolls in his toy cooking pots. Symbols of being?

a dentist may indeed need a mop

I love epigrams and aphorisms, especially about poetry. I love them in two ways: 

Way 1: if they're good, they give you a whole field to ruminate on. They shut you up and make you masticate a bit. 

Way 2: they're fun to grapple with--to explore how they might play out in concrete terms, to quarrel with, to figure out whether I agree with them or not (usually back and forth in an interior monologue), etc. 

Way 1 and Way 2 may be nearly identical. Not sure.

Anyhow, I was please to recently read Mark Yakich's "Yakking Points" which he wrote for his students & published in the Boston Review. I generally admire Yakich's work and admire poets who have the guts to throw general statements out there to the wolves. Being part wolf myself, I've copied some of Yakich's epigrams (in blue italics) and interspersed them with my inane commentary (I did a similar post on a piece by Jennifer Moxley last summer.)

*

Written language, especially poetry, is inherently a flawed translation of lived life. This sentence included. 

I'm inclined to disagree with the premise here. I don't believe language translates life at all--this model of thinking necessarily incurs the "flawed copy" syndrome (i.e. Platonism). Rather, language intersects with life as a kind of force (of will, expression, enthusiasm, sorrow, etc). In its intersections it both influences life and is influenced by life.

*

Whenever you read a poem, read it out loud. Your ear will pick up more than your head will allow. That said, poetry had better be more than a medium for saying things in a pretty way. Poetry is more than ear candy.


I agree and I agree sort of. I mean, there's nothing wrong with ear candy. I'm waiting for the human so evolved that she can find her sustenance  on candy alone. The underlying metaphor here is that poetry should be more "substantial," or provide better "sustenance" than candy. Well, I don't mind the emotional or spiritual sustenance that certain kinds of poems can supply, but I'm not ready to write off other more sugary delights. 

But I agree in this regard:  I can't stand "kiss me I'm poetical" work, poetry too in love with its own rhetoric, its own voice, its trills and riffs.

*  

There is no hidden meaning, only “meanings” you’ve not yet realized are right in front of you because you’re not practiced in reading poems. Poetry is a convention like anything else. And you learn the rules of it like anything else—e.g., driving a car, baking a cake, fondling a lover.

Agree and disagree. I can't stand the notion that there's a hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered by readers who know how to cut through the rhetoric and wield their hefty analytical tools--the kind high school exercise that drives kids crazy. But on the other hand, suggesting that there are "rules" only begs to one to break them.

*

Although many consider figurative language the essence of poetry, for the life of a poet metaphor will sooner or later become an illness.

Cool point. Sometimes I think poetry itself is a kind of illness, a viral outbreak, a contagion that cannot be contained because it spreads by contaminating others with a kind of magnetic linguistic-musical-spiritual enthusiasm--like cells multiplying, poets divide and proliferate. 

*

Literary theory is just another kind of literature.

Yep. I've been saying that for a long time. 

*

Poetry is a form of prayer. Though most poets don’t know to whom or for what they are praying.

This is the kind of cheesy shit that gives poets a bad name.

* 

The word “honest” in describing a poem is about as useful as a mop is to a dentist.

I don't know, after a particularly intense root canal, a dentist may indeed need a mop. 

*

When reading a poem, try to come to it on its terms, not yours. Don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.

Yes. Good point. 

*

You will gain a greater understanding of a poem by writing a single parody of it than by reading all the literary criticism of it.

Having tried both approaches, I'd say rather that one gains different understandings. But maybe understanding's not even the right term. Really, do we want to understand poems? No I'm not making an argument for hermeticism or obscuritanism -- but I think tuning ourselves to the right feeling of a poem is as important as "understanding" it. And good criticism, too, enhances one's ability to think and feel with a poem, not simply to understand it as a coded message. Rather, I think a part of me becomes the poem, or is becoming-poem x, and find the right way to plug into this model of feeling/becoming is what I want out of reading poems. In becoming-poem a reader follows the poem's trajectory which usually leads to surprises and transformations. Thus, I agree with Yakich's assertion that:

If your main claim to a poem is that you can relate to it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. Poems are not meant to be related to; they are meant to offer you something you didn’t know, experience, or imagine before.

Three Weeks of Christmas Starting Tomorrow!

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reading looking smelling thinking

Currently reading or recently have read:

Sunny Wednesday by Noelle Kocot
Helsinki by Peter Richards
Livingdying by Cid Corman
Poem Stripped of Artifice by Mark Lamoureux
My Body and I by René Crevel

And very much feeling
the vibe of Ursula von Rydingsvard's exhibit at the DeCordova, which I've visited twice to see (each time with toddler in tow, so I need to go again I think).

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bowl with Fingers, 2007–2008
cedar

These sculptures are intoxicating -- the smell of the cedar and the organic forms initially remind me a bit of Bataille's idea of the informe*, which he used to describe the way ideas in the abstract escape formal limits (though it has obvious material & formal reference points). I think in a way scent actually touches the idea of the informe more than the forms of the sculptures themselves, which oddly, through repetition, become rather formal. But the scent of the cedar puts these pieces in a more primitive realm, non-visual, formless, airy, so that I feel myself at an intersection of form and formlessness. They evoke "a life of sensations," formless in that the experience of sensation escapes the rigorous limits of categories.

*". . . un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce qu'il désigne n'a ses droits dans aucun (sic) sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l'univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n'a pas d'autre but: il s'agit de donner un redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirmer que l' univers ne ressemble à rien et n'est qu' informe revient à dire que l'univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat." Georges Bataille: "Informe." Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 382. (Radical Art)

Bashing Surrealism

I'm cross-posting this comment here. It's in response to a post Josef Horáček’s made on Montevidayo, probably the most consistently provocative, weird, hilarious, frustrating, interesting poetry-culture-critique blogs I know of.

Here's the original post.

Here's my response:

I’m three days late to the party and now the discussion seems almost over, but I was really irked by the original post and have to chime in. As I see it, the problem with Josef’s post is that he’s only talking about one strand of surrealism, that of the 1924 manifesto (where Breton defines the movement primarily as psychic automatism). Not only do Breton’s definitions of surrealism mutate with each of his polemics, but the practice itself mutates with each offshoot group that wiggles away from Parisian surrealism. Surrealism is this every evolving freak show that’s hardly limited to automatic writing—by the 1930s Breton even admitted automatic writing was a failure (see his essay “The Automatic Message”). Then, to condemn surrealism as a sexist cult of feminine beauty is simplistic—there is certainly a pervasive hetro-normatively glorification of the female body, but this is only a fraction of the surrealist pursuit (probably the most well known because, well, boobs get publicity). But what about these touch points: collage, juxtapositional imagery, the absurd, black humor, paranoiac critical / frottage imagery, dream narrative, objective chance, convulsive beauty, etc.? All of these practices, along with automatism and the simultaneous valorization and interrogation of love & desire, flow in and out of the ever-mutating nexus of activity called “surrealism.” You’re condemning one rivulet of an unwieldy river.

Or consider this passage from Arcane 17, which, in 1945, seems utterly prophetic: “The time has come to valorize woman’s ideas at the expense of those of man, whose failure has come to a rather stormy consummation in our time. In particular, it is the artist’s task… to give the greatest priority to everything that comes from the feminine system of the world, as opposed to the masculine, and, even better, to appropriate to his own jealousy defended use everything which distinguishes woman from man with respect to appreciation and volition.” Okay, we can condemn Breton for operating on a simple masculine-feminine duality, but at least he’s tipping the scale in another direction.

Josef also calls Surrealism’s relationship to Marxism arbitrary. I’d say it was ambivalent, but Breton was attracted to Marxism because of the dialectic. One of the most consistent aims of Breton’s notion of surrealism was to overcome the constraints of binary thinking. “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” (2nd manifesto) It’s Marx through the Hegelian dialectic that interested Breton – not to mention an utter scorn for the social order of his day (thus the flirtation with communism & anarchy). This “opposition to opposites” fits very well with Johannes emphasis on the kitsch problem—surrealism constantly and emphatically overwhelms the tidy distinctions between high and low art (not to mention genres, etc).

As for Perloff’s new book, I haven’t read it yet. But I think that if she really does expel surrealism from venerable canon of the historical avant-garde, a surrealist would say “splendid–get us out of here, away from these stinking artists!”– the last thing surrealism wanted (and this is sad in the end) was to be academically historicized and locked up in museums and libraries along with all the other literary and art movements. Art was only a means to an end for surrealism.

Sorry to be all long-winded and quote-happy, but I think there’s been too much thoughtless (or at least groundless) bashing here.

Bookshelf

I've got my nose in too many books right now. These are them:

Andrew Motion's Keats
Brad Leining's We Are Doomed: Dispatches from the City of the Future
Dean Young's Fall Higher
Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor
John Yau's Paradiso Diaspora

that inn(en)ervation of the heart

"Poetry is a magnetic innervation of the heart, which the being of Gérard Nerval kept all his life a cavern, one of the principle transmitting caverns of a void where all poetry is remade."

I have always loved this sentence which comes from a letter Artaud drafted but never sent to Georges LeBreton. I realized recently, however, that I've always misread "innervation" as "enervation."

Briefly, the OED tells us that innervation is "The action or process of innervating; the fact of being innervated; supply of nerve-force from a nerve-centre to some organ or part by means of nerves; stimulation of some organ by its nerves. Also, the supply of nerve fibres to, or disposition of nerve fibres within, an organ or part."

Meanwhile, a search for the the verb "enervate" pulls up several meanings--including obsolete usages to describe the literal cutting of tendons from animals. Here's the more common meaning, though, and one that plays nicely off Artaud's line: " To weaken mentally or morally; to destroy the capacity of (a person, a community, etc.) for vigorous effort of intellect or will. Said esp. of the effects of luxury or sloth. Also, to destroy or impair the vigour of (sentiments, expressions, etc.)."

If Artaud had meant enervate, would he have been channeling Baudelaire? Or rather, am I channeling Baudelaire in my misreading?

Reading at Outpost 186

Tomorrow night (3/24) I'll be reading at Outpost 186 in Cambridge (Inman Square) with James Shea and Sandra Lim as part of the Small Animal Project series. YOU SHOULD COME.

Urban Downhill Bike Race

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.