rhubarb is susan

Patrick Durgin : from Four Craft Ballads

2008-03-31T17:08:00.008-04:00

(read at Myopic Books, 30 March 2008)

I and Granks us, self is livice hells the mindent-up.
Prote: chair when, and to how turally. Buffalogy,
Palaw art Plastion how the currecompropenienas
sure to ress -- that ware place in thenous on the might

Evile skirthe raphy, P & for rain the shampathen
wood fromic pixes taxistions confishion,
shoes is at sensiderious condingerspect
rattes who wise and in self for body cute. No

consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness"
Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar
cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a
splack to you arter cyclips. And my of his

channot jukebop-a-lulatnutal relief. And our we wing to safe.
it's bration from do was of the mity on thalf good-liter
to strudesistor no largentice -- Emparter it's lamaic at withs
negan in that whic "sing" Self him, shad and betwer,

@

Patrick and Tim Yu read yesterday evening at Larry Sawyer's Myopic Books series. Larry should be congratulated on keeping things swift; it was a good reading from the pair in part because they hit some high-notes and left the audience wanting more. One of the highlights of the high-notes, to be synesthesic about things, was Patrick's readings from Four Craft Ballads (FCB), which I've excerpted here and Patrick tells me are forthcoming in print.

Patrick is a scholar -- he just finished editing Hannah Weiner for his own Kenning Editions -- and, here in a reasonably quiet net-fight with Joyelle McSweeney about her Boston Review review, can produce prose like this,

Furthermore, the poem as a whole cleaves between two complex, apostrophic pieces in the context of Fascicle 29 -- two ruminations on aesthesis itself, which seem to figure sense-making as always-already transcending any analytical/intuitive binary by which to gauge sanity -- it is a transcendence by way of perpetual oscillation, rather than syllogistic synthesis, marking this series of poems some of the most unabashedly Emersonian in [Emily Dickinson's] oeuvre.

Whether you find this sinuous prose fun and provocative, or whether you want to strip down the allusiveness and break it up into simple, meaningful chunks, I think it's clear that on the sense-sensibility continuum it's pushing towards the what Patrick hits in the above section of FCB. And FCB is really at a limit point, somewhere at that crowded North pole of civilization.

From here, in the temperate latitudes, it's reasonably indistinguishable from Finnegans Wake. I won't go so far as to analogize the two -- this kind of stuff is well above my paygrade -- but it's hard not to mention it, especially given Patrick's reading of the piece, which had a kind of cod-Chaucerian rise and fall I remember from an abortive intro-Eng-lit class. But perhaps the only FW in FCB is the intonation and once you head North for a closer look things diverge. Here's a clip from the former:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven.

It's a burst of clarity compared to FCB, which in addition to the etymology-smashing coinages, has the kind of arbitrary juxtaposing of the 21st century poem-itch Ron calls the post-avant. You can decipher some of the underlying syntax of Joyce's prose here, even line up some putative subjects, but what to do with moments like this in FCB?

No consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness" Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a splack to you arter cyclips.

There are moments when sense crests above the surge of syllables, but things do not cohere. To say this material is difficult to read is, well, almost a category mistake, like calling dust patterns hard to read, or clouds. On the page, I think, you need to have a lot of trust in the author to slog through the consonental thickets (trust me, it's worth it); in the reading hall of Myopic, however, the effect is immediate.

You can accumulate a number of other points of reference, of course, in addition to FW. You could call it the poetic equivalent of scat singing, but despite the promixity, it's not right; it means something that "Buffalogy" is "Buffalogy" and not some rhythmically, even quasi-phonically ("Posh", instead of "Buff"? Linguists please suggest better) equivalent set.

Here's another point of reference: the aggressively political Rachel Zolf, who formed the centerpiece of my recent (and hopefully forthcoming) review of the North American avant garde. Here's Rachel (the numbers are, yes, in the text itself):

Jabès the atheist says Jews can't help writing about God. Nor can we help writing about being JewishQ709 homemaker retard from e spam of ruth toe. Even if it's just one drop or half your blood. Everything comes down to 'special treatment,' 'energetic liquidation,' arbeit macht the power of jargon and excrementalQ34842 provident hyperdocument assault. Perfect dehumanization then nothingG11 aye crosshairs + true vision without end. Except the word 'Jew.' Say it sixty sixty sixt six ty million million i'm the million mazda man six million mazda times will not exhaust meaning.

I analogized Rachel to a kind of linguistic guerilla action, a sort of inhabiting of the "debased" -- because, if not meaning-less, then somehow meaning-waylaying -- language of the spam e-mail and marketing slogan. To a certain extent, I think you can read Patrick as taking some of these strategies on -- there are just too many sounds and configurations that remind me of some of Rachel's primary sources -- but again, the analogy is imperfect.

Finnegans Wake, Louis Armstrong, guerilla anti-captial interventions: it's getting crowded at ultima thule. But I think Patrick's work here deserves its own slice of longitude; as an aural experience it's incredible enough, and perhaps one day we'll figure out what he's after.

Update. You can access audio of the reading — highly encouraged — at PennSound, run by the wonderful Al Filreis.

rhubarb-ery elsewhere on the web

2008-03-22T15:29:00.003-04:00

Elsewhere on the web, you can check out my review of Iain M. Banks' latest "space opera". If you want to hear my advice on talking to the public and media, or, better, advice from science journalists on the question, mouse over to Sean Carroll's discussion at Cosmic Variance. Finally, you can read my "open letter" to independent bookstores, published on The Nation's website.

a poem without intention

2008-03-20T14:51:00.004-04:00

Reginald is blogging about how the intentional fallacy is for fools. My response: "Where would the end of Blade Runner be without the Pathetic Fallacy? I like the Intentional Fallacy for similar reasons." Michael Robbins, whom I don't know, says interesting things about Michaels & Knapp.

But seriously, it's interesting to come up with a poem that can not induce one to the intentional fallacy. Below the fold, I present.

First, some definitions, sufficiently complicated that lazy-I can't figure out the results without computation.

#DEFINE "A" [A]"light"[,][.] #DEFINE "B" [A][B]"water"[,][.] #DEFINE "1" [X,Y] -> [Y,X] #DEFINE "2" [X,Y] -> [X,Y,[1,X,Y]]

Now the poem.

a poem without intention

[2,A,[1,A,B]]

That's a bit hard to read, so we'll expand it making the necessary (and aleatory) choices, linebreak it every five words, and change the title. We'll have to pass some randomly-chosen arguments to the main loop.

A -> "mackrel" B -> "crimson"

a poem

Mackrel light, mackrel light crimson
water, mackrel light, mackrel light
mackrel light, mackrel light. Mackrel
light. Light crimson water. Light.

der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

2008-03-19T14:36:00.009-04:00

One of the consequences of poetry's absolutely marginal position in the culture (a marginality that I've suggested elsewhere would make it ripe for cultural inventiveness) is that we, firstly, all end up in poetry for idiosyncratic reasons and, secondly, are usually convinced that the path we took is, because of its accidental and twisty nature, the only one available.

The description of one's "sentimental education" in poetry, though, is rarely interesting; I mention it only because of the way it can blind us to the experiences of fellow-travellers. For me, my introduction to poetry came at the hands of two teachers, Rex McGuinn and Helen Vendler. Both were what you might call "close readers of the cheerful school": eager for contact with the poet (and, as critics, with the reader as well.) We're all too Jane Dark to consider a lack of ideology a necessary good; both Rex and Helen seem, rather, to have inhabited the conventional wisdom in idiosyncratic ways, to have made peace with it.

That's where I've come from; if I had to pick someone from the blogs that I most sympathise with, it would be (perhaps surprisingly) John Latta.

rhubarb, however, puts me in contact with people who have arrived at the same poems from completely different quarters. Where I consider poetry a rather baroque art, others are here because they desire a kind of emotional immediacy that I find far easier to recover in dramatic forms (Lear through Battlestar Galactica.) To pick another blogger out of the hat, that might be Bill Knott.

Others, I think, are fascinated with poetry-as-system: the research-academics in to interlocking interpretations, taxonomies, relations to the canon deposed and reigning (I would put Kasey at lime-tree, and Josh Corey, in this category.) Finally, just to round out the quartet, there are the social-buffs, people for whom poetry provides the insect-like glue that binds together communities, and for whom that role is of primary interest. It's pretty clear that that's what brings Ron to the table.

There are others and others; less represented in the blogosphere (but still definitely out there) are those drawn to poetry because its marginal status gives them room to say and think things that are deeply unpopular in any other form: the folks I've encountered in this camp are often breaking taboos on gender, class, sexuality and race.

Interestingly, the Asian-American experience is a top contender in this field from where I'm sitting. Perhaps because poetry has gained, in places, a status as an art both brainy and shy, and thus being an Asian-American poet allows one to basically hijack the standard stereotypes at the source. Or perhaps because the Asian-American experience can seem at times like a taboo within a taboo, and that kind of nesting is well-tackled by the grammars of poetry.

Yet if we're completely honest, we usually have many separate selves that travel these various routes and meet only in the poems. Ron can be a close reader at times, although it often feels as if his heart's not in it; Kasey can chat about the social signs of book covers; John can pull a theory together, if only through juxtaposition; and, if only to be heard and taken seriously, the taboo breakers usually need to cultivate a second field of endeavour (most commonly, the social-buff.)

I myself love systems, at times, and of course I seek out the immediate sob-maker (I have a terrible memory, which means my abilities as a social-buff are poor at best.) I have my own hobby-horses that I sometimes like to ride through the reading room: anarchism, mathematics. I also have my own desire to smash-up taboos that strike too close to my bones, but you'll have to read my creative work to learn more on that.

We do, I think, carry as readers, writers, and critics, a kind of fingerprint we leave behind on our works; perhaps the whorls in this one are more pronounced than the loops in that. Grokking the essential plurality of the people "in the game" — there's nowt so queer as folk — and the way those groups shifted and altered from the past (are there any authentically religious poets left?) is something that enriches one as a reader and friend, if not necessarily a scribe.

Updates. If you are in Chicago and want some very clever people reading poetry in a nice room with hardwood floors and a good bar nearby, join me to come hear Patrick Durgin and Tim Yu reading at Myopic Books (1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Damen stop on the blue line) two Sundays from now, 30 March 2008 at 7 p.m.

Aleksandr Skidan : Breakfast on the Grass

2008-03-18T17:42:00.001-04:00

(Red Shifting, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, trans. Eugene Ostashevsky and Genya Turovskaya)

1.

Strappado wax on goaty geisha joints
without a name without a shroud
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate. now write
     the end
on Georgian hills blade in an alien sheath
the tender dead curl twists
the cloven-footed songvoice
     no matter how it's called won't answer
Philostratus the fourth with courtly eyes
was fasting with spiritual thirst
although the saturnalian hortus
grew hollow-cheeked and the meter altered

2.

Where is the augean hauteur of Petersburg
it's all in yellowmouthed angina
and Vaginov's pneumatic song
a cingle clap inside the doorway
The Song by Song reflected... Look
upon the Kedron Valley's fallen banks
their plaster sneakers in felt boots of tar
the vacant lots of manuscripts
     yawn
it is now an asiatic
teptelkinresort — tally-ho!
where's the breakfast on the grass, the odalisque
the sermon on the mount dissolving in her mouth?
     ...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain

3.

The same Philostrates with rabbit eyes
writing "the end" under an ether mask
     walks out onto en ether tract
and there the dark lady from the tavern
on goaty joints. Strappado wax of geishas
the costly execution of cocaine
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate to Faina
ache tablet acheron under the heart
ambivalent as palimpsest
     and double-sinewed
a mouth as if torn open, as if stiched shut
     the pleated and funereal scar
...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain
and why tap tap tap on the walls

@

A second translation from UDP in the mail; you can read some more global thoughts on these matters in the review of Fredrik and Jennifer's work. To say Eugene and Genya (E/G hereafter) make different decisions from Jennifer is to put it mildly. Where Jennifer puts a mild torque on a neutral diction, E/G flip the coin.

Their grammar is strictly neutral-English, tied together paratactically (this, then this, then this; or variations with prepositions instead of conjunctions.) Their diction, on the other hand, cranks distortion to a maximal level — enough to make your ears bleed. The rattling from all those unfamiliar syllables gives the work an almost beat-box sound. Biz Markie got a graduate degree.

Or did he? I certainly can't process Philostratus the fourth in any sensical fashion; my compiler replaces it inline with >Ancient Greek myth guy<, and my resonant cortex says Philomel.

It's some middle ground between T.S. Eliot ("hang in there, there's some books, you can keep up the second time around") and the standard language poetry line ("here are a bunch of nouns that don't go together"). Do it enough and, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "friends, they may think it's a movement." You might even call it the second coming of hypertext; one of the first things people did on the internet was start filling up the Modernists with URLs, but here such work would be beside the point.

You're not meant to "get" Philostratus, what he's doing in the text. It's just meant to rub you, the way you rub a wine-glass rim, and to set the resonance going for the next interruption (here, for me, that's the modern "meter".) All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters, indeed.

Call Aleksandr the "New Baroque", or indeed -- call him "New Sincere" (do indeed read Jason's Jacket essay.) It's a performance whose rattlings are those of someone bursting, close to psychotically, with an inadaquate language. There's a pathos here that I think the intellect can appreciate: the powerlessness of history to salve what it can only express. Aleksandr packs his emotional content into a distorted record-scratching sampling of history, but all it does is intensify the hurt.

Fredrik Nyberg : from "Crawfish — a poem"

2008-03-18T16:26:00.004-04:00

(A Different Practice, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse 2007, trans. Jennifer Hayashida)

To say

to write without entirely making it resemble the journey
preceded by two or three very small summers

Later also heather waves insanity

Sometimes love actually comes into focus

I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach

*

Try to say poetry
long poems about a mundane and oblivious childhood

about wives' and parents' flowing hairstyles

It is so dumb dusty in the apartments
the snow will surely fall through us

The better part of you though rushes in another space

*

Memory as a method among others

a continent of different states beaches
illnesses to be explained
and transformed into actual consequences for us

@

All the people worth anything are reading and talking about Jason Morris's article on "New Sincerity" in Jacket. It's perhaps the most able discussion of artists like Tao Lin, Joanna Newsom and Fredrick Seidel I've seen in one place.

I just finished and mailed off "Four from the (North) American avant garde" to Poetry Magazine; with some good luck, it should be in the print magazine some time this year. I cover Rachel Zolf, Dan Machlin, Rod Smith and Michael Scharf. I had hoped to include additional writers — Jasper Bernes and Anne Boyer in particular — but space and availability constrained me.

I'm happy that I didn't find Jason's essay until after mailing off the piece, since he is such an excellent reader that I would have found myself inadvertently plagiarising some of his insight. As it stands, we are examining different questions; for me in that essay, it's an attempt to make sense of whether or not there is some cohesive "avant garde" in contemporary poetry, and what value that distinction might have.

On to Fredrik and Jennifer's work, kindly sent to me by the folks at Ugly Duckling Presse, who favor a low-key, heavy-paper aesthetic in their design.

Since Fredrik's work is translated from the Swedish (the UDP here provides facing-page text on the off chance one does indeed read this rather musical-glottal language), the natural place I leap is to Ingmar Bergman. And Fredrik's work does, indeed, seem to recall some of the pacing of a work like Wild Strawberries: pensive, silence-filled, retrospective.

Perhaps it's unfair (would I want a Swedish reader to split-screen me with Woody Allen? — actually, perhaps?) but Fredrik's work does have a kind of black-and-white feel, as if things aren't quite vivid except in remembered language. Fredrik is not painting with images; what is visual is sidelined in favor of a cognitive-heavy kind of work: it's not the hair that's "flowing", it's the hairstyle.

I've thought a lot about translation recently — a lot of the best work arriving in my box is translation, including material from Action Books — and the question of what happens when you try to get something from the experimental to the American experimental.

It's a balancing act. You need a template, a way to translate sound and sense concerns into English; you can take disjunction in the source language to represent a huge number of things in the target. Perhaps you want your disjunction to be aggressive? — choose hard syllables, switch up diction. Perhaps you want it to be meditative? — soften the sound edges, focus on opportunities for parallelism. Of course the source text itself will cue you — but aggression in Swedish is not aggression in English, and in my limited experience with translation (French and Ancient Greek) there's more room and "underdeterminism" in poetry than anyone's comfortable to admit.

I am going to go out on a limb here — a limb prepared for me by my naievely-Jingoistic Latin teachers of years past — and say that English is diction-fertile and grammar-poor. Perhaps only the Japanese have more class-weighted ways to denote the same thing. A translation is then, in general, going to find it hard to replicate grammatical structures with any exactitude or even similar complexity, while at the same time finding it necessary to make a great number of decisions about word-choice.

[You can, of course, push towards a more formal grammar — we do have ways to get the aorist or the ablative absolute — but such a choice carries with it a lot of baggage. In particular, it drastically restricts your emotional range and rules out some — the erotic, for example — all together [1]. It also is going to expand your lines and you may end up sounding like a crib for Caesar's Commentaries.]

Jennifer I think really walks a fine line in this excerpted passage. What, I think, is thrilling, is that she makes things strange but not awkward; that we are undeniably confronted with an alien language but not an alien speaker. She makes the choice to go with a uniform diction, a kind of neutrality that handles the tone well, and when it comes to something unusual, she coins instead of approximating ("dumb dusty" — I think it's "dumt dammigt" in the original, and the phrase appears more than once in the book.) I think that's a legitimate choice.

What we get out the other end is an experience very different from a Swede's. We get a Fredrik who is "uncomfortable" in English — who says things like "I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach" — come again? But not a pidgin speaker by a long-shot. And in the context of contemporary American poetry, heavy on the question of estrangement, a provocative one.

[1]. I wrote this and then immediately recalled John Donne as a counterexample — any others? But even Donne heads towards parataxis when the breathing gets sufficiently heavy.

*

I have a massive backlog of books received, but many rhubarb readers are probably more interested in where absent is. The answer is that a lot of things have piled up for the staff, including changing jobs and seeing doctors, and that we are still in holding patterns. Again, if this is a problem for you, I strongly suggest you write to glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw your submission. I promise there will be no hard feelings, and I hope you will accept my apologies.

academic with fame

2008-03-17T15:30:00.001-04:00

submitted, respectfully, for consideration to the Black Eyed Peas

rocking the department like you rocked bronx science
jewish hardcore or prep school defiance
or working class you got some self-reliance
now you're coining terms like you've got an appliance
making clever works of art or nailing up your theses
martin luther got an ivy prosthesis
yale press sees your name and stamps you release-it
people give you jobs like you've got psychokinesis

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

got a little black dress and a bibliography
annie leibovitz is calling for photography
freelancers taking notes for your new yorker story
you're riding like you've never seen memento mori
steal some ideas that's how the crazy salad goes
students outside your office in rows
terry eagleton's on the horn and raving on your prose
got subaltern ideas like a roomful of hos

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

bigger than mcwseeney's, more credible than might
cocktail parties with the new fulbrights
floppy-haired geeks get you higher than a kite
meet them in the stacks and get freaky on-site
blog it on your gig for the new york times
flying business class on a state university's dime
you've got starpower the way this M.C.'s[1] got rhyme
sexual harrassment? just pay the fine.

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

[1]. Master of ceremonies.

The Überbrief Guide to Cycling New Zealand for Wimps

2008-02-20T23:41:00.008-05:00

Disclaimer

This überbrief guide does not cover everything. You must seek alternate sources of advice (see "books", below) and when in the land itself seek out and follow official advice. All prices below are listed in New Zealand dollars, which are worth about 80 US cents.

Who am I?

I'm writing this in a café in Christchurch after a three week tour of South Island (drop the definite article, it's a shibboleth.) Previously I had ridden 80 miles two or three times in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside, and felt comfortable doing a 15 or 20 mile ride in the Chicago area. When I started the trip I had done no training, and, it being Winter, was rather out of shape.

I did 14 days of riding, and took three rest days, covering a total of about 1150 km. I rode the Crown Range, Haast Pass, and Arthur's Pass -- the last a serious undertaking -- and saw some of the most amazing scenery of my life. Most wonderfully, I rode through it, around every curve and switchback, and felt like I had truly experienced the country. If you are looking for an active vacation that you can undertake on your own speed, I think this is one to consider. The land sometimes looks like Puerto Rico, sometimes like Colorado, and I never had a "boring" day except coming in and out of the Canterbury Plains around Christchurch.

I use the word "town" here very liberally -- especially on the West Coast, a town is often no more than three or four buildings, and sometimes just two farmhouses slightly closer together than normal. Once, for example, you leave Wanaka heading North to Haast Pass, you are basically in the wilderness. The Kiwis take excellent care of the land (at least in an aesthetic sense) and you will be absolutely spoiled by the landscape.

Bring Your Bike or Rent?

Rent. I can attest -- from a Chicago-Santa Fe trip -- that bringing your own bicycle on the airplane is a misery. Expect a $50-$100 one-way charge by the airline straight off the bat, plus $40-$100 for a solid box (Dr. Thomas says you can buy one at the airport -- good luck, brother.) Further factor in that you probably can't haul that guy on public transport -- you'll have to hire a cab. When you get to the airport, your box may not fit in the X-ray machine (mine didn't, at 70 cm tall or so) -- in which case you will have to unpack the whole thing for a hand-search. You will have to recheck bags -- possibly lugging them to a different terminal -- before crossing the Pacific. Once you get to the other end, expect your derauiler to be out of alignment and for the whole thing to be in general need of a tune-up. Oh, and youth hostels won't store things for you, so you'll have to lug that pedal wrench all over the island, and buy a new box when you ship out.

Much better is to hire a bicycle in Christchurch. I hired a touring bicycle from Hedley at "Natural High Cycling", and it was perfect for the job: triple chainring, dropped bars, solid racks, cycle computer, well-sized, and in excellent condition -- just as nice as my fancy bicycle at home. Not only is it far more convenient, and barely more expensive than bringing-along, but you will also be patronizing local business instead of tossing your money down the throat of United Airlines.

Hedley will also supply you with a multi-tool, so in fact you don't have to check any baggage at all. Very nice, since with at least three flights to get to Christchurch, along with the strong possibility of an overnight weather delay in the Winter, your luggage might get lost (mine did!)

To Camp or Not to Camp

I originally planned to do the tour with a tent and sleeping bag, staying in campgrounds. I pulled my gear for the first three days, and decided it was for the birds; I mailed it poste restante back to Christchurch.

There are three reasons I would recommend against doing New Zealand with a tent on your bicycle. The first is that the gear is very heavy; when I mailed it the total was 10 kilograms, and compared to others I met on the road I was travelling light. The days lugging the tent and bag were unpleasant. It seemed romantic at home planning, but on the road I felt less like a cowboy with his saddlebags and more like an ox under the lash. Once I dumped the gear -- leaving only a change of clothes -- my bicycle felt nimble and responsive, and hills were a challenge, not a grueling misery.

As you get to the alps, the riding gets very tough going. I met a German couple that looked as fit as string beans, and they were having a rough time. We were doing the same distances each day, and I'd arrive two hours before they did and watch them roll in while I had an early dinner. Many other camping cyclists who were less fit were planning to cover some of the passes by bus -- which seems a terrible shame, because these are the most beautiful parts.

The second is that you are not going to get to camp anywhere particularly nice for most of the trip. There is gorgeous camping all over New Zealand, but you have to hike out to it for at least an hour or two most of the time; what is available on your bicycle are the "official" campgrounds -- a patch of grass next to a bunch of campervans filled with people watching Sky television on their generators, or, a backyard behind a hostel. I don't doubt that there are some nice places to camp, but if you are thinking you'll pitch your tent in isolation from civilization on a majority of days, you will be disappointed.

The third is that you won't save very much. Campgrounds will charge between $6 and $12.50 (per person) for the night (personal experience.) On the other hand, there are hostels literally everywhere on South Island; they are clean, cosy and dry, and their prices range from $23 to $30, averaging out around $26. There is nothing sadder than watching a couple pitching a tent in the rain, but it is made picturesque when you're watching it from the porch with a cup of tea.

You might think to do "freedom camping" -- pitching a tent in an unobtrusive location for free. This is really not possible on most days. The population density is very low (excepting Christchurch, less than Maine or Colorado and about that of Kansas or Utah), but everything is either a national park, with strict rules, or fenced off for pasture. In many places, especially in the middle and East, there is not much cover and a tent would be seen for miles. I suppose you could camp on a farmer's land if you ask permission, but farmhouses are very far apart and ownership is hard to guess.

Hostels are, as I said, absolutely everywhere. If you're not travelling in the peak of the peak season (late December to mid-January), you will have no trouble getting a bed solo if you book the night before or, very often, before noon the day of. The only stretch without a hostel I rode is between Haast and Franz Josef; I stayed in a Bed & Breakfast which was expensive ($120), but very nice. Do not roll into town at four pm without a booking, because things do fill up.

If you're still set on camping, go for it; you have my great respect -- you can always change your mind and mail the stuff back after a few days; or mail it further along if you have a particularly nice spot you'd like to do.

Books

There are two essential books. One is Pedaller's Paradise, by Nigel, and the other is the Cycline guide, by Nigel and his German friend Dr. Thomas. These are all you need. Nigel's book doesn't have maps, but it has gradient cross-sections and a complete list of facilities on all the routes. The Cycline guide covers exactly the same rides, has less detail on facilities, and comes with maps -- which are very handy to have. You can get both online from amazon, and they're sold cheaply all over Christchurch (try the map store next to the downtown YHA.)

Neither guide gives phone numbers for the hostels to book. Either go on the internet when you check your e-mail, or stop by the "i-site", the tourist information centers, where they will give you the lists (and often have information about who has beds.) They are friendly and eager to help. The i-site numbers are all listed in Nigel's book.

These two guides will give you total freedom to "plan as you go." I can't praise them enough. There are some minor errors, but definitely nothing that will ruin your trip, and it's nice to feel like you're blazing a bit of a trail. There are two errors I'd remark on. One is that they claim hostels require you to bring your own sleeping bag or sheets -- I saw this only once, at the Unwin lodge in Mt. Cook, and everywhere else explicitly forbid the practice. Two is that Dr. Thomas puts little arrows on the maps to show uphills and downhills -- ignore them; they bear very little relation to reality, and can discourage you ("what's this hill? Dr. Thomassssss!")

Don't bother with the usual travel guides. They don't cover half the towns and villages you'll be staying in. There are two other cycling guides, one called "Cape Renga to Bluff" (not useful as it is a "one way" guide with few sidetrip options) and the Lonely Planet guide (apparently ripped off entirely from Nigel!)

Food and Drink

This is the place to save money instead of camping. There aren't really diners here; more restaurants, and you will pay upwards of $17 for a hamburger! Do what the Kiwis do -- go to the grocery store and prepare your own food. Every single place I stayed had magnificent kitchen facilities, fully stocked with pots, pans, dishes, cultery and knives.

Despite all the farms, the beef here is not American quality (although it's better than Britain.) This is not boutique farming country, this is industry, and the beef gets shipped off to your Los Angeles McDonald's. For that reason, beware of buying packaged or canned meats -- it very often tastes very bad to spoiled Yankee palates.

If you do eat out, go for the fish (even unsexy fish like cod.) Very often it's been pulled from a stream that morning and it tastes absolutely wonderful. Sadly, sushi is new here even in Christchurch and folks are unclear on the concept -- expect half the rolls to have meat and mayo!

Sunstroke

I found that the guides did not warn sufficiently of the dangers of sunstroke. The light down here is very intense, and the UV is particularly strong. It is very easy to give yourself sunstroke even on a cloudy day and thirst is not a good guide. If you wait until you get thirsty, it may be too late -- your body just doesn't know what's going on. Especially on your first few days, be very strict with yourself: start off the day by drinking two (2) liters of water, and be ruthless about draining and filling up your waterbottles at every tap. Two waterbottles will last you at a maximum of 30 kilometers.

If you do give yourself sunstroke, you'll feel nauseated and like you have a really bad hangover. The only solution is to drink lots of water, stay indoors in the shade, and rest. Don't try to "push through it"!

Unless you've been very very good about hydrating, do not end your day with a pint of beer at the pub. You will feel dizzy and sick. First, seek shade. Second, drink water (or tea if you're getting sick of it.) Then, and only then, have a drink.

Kiwi Culture

To the minor annoyance of the locals, New Zealand tourist officials have been excellent at convincing the world that everyone here is friendly and eager to please. After three weeks, I'd say Kiwis are "New England friendly" -- a bit guarded at first, but easy to warm up -- as opposed to Southern ("More hash browns, honey?") or California ("Let us share our spiritual journeys together") friendly. The culture here is British, so a heavy ladling of please and thank you will get you very far; on the other hand it does mean that if you need something that's against the "rules and regulations" it's very unlikely to happen.

Outside of the tourist towns -- where you'll spend most of your time -- you will find people to be extremely honest and very often trusting. Not once (even in tourist towns) did I encounter someone trying to scam me as a tourist. Relax. If you're in a jam not of your own making you will find help, and this is definitely not a place that will ignore someone in serious trouble. But I would say it's better to plan well, act sensible and be pleasantly surprised than to count on invariable help.

As for culture with a capital-C, there is nothing: the country is mostly younger than the American Civil War, and the Maori built in wood, so there are no historic things to see. There are no old churches or castles, and there's no theater, no opera, and no symphony, except in Christchurch. There is just the land, which is absolutely gorgeous, but it can get a bit oppressive, so bring a book (I suggest Jane Austen.) Culturally, I'd say it's a bit like going to, oh, Montana -- perhaps an amateur theatrical, or a government-sponsored chamber music concert on rare occasion, but nothing like, say, the Santa Fe opera. I found very little evidence of Maori culture, by the way -- just one Marae, for example, behind a fence and looking grotty.

Planning

Plan a few days ahead, but don't plan your whole trip. Remain flexible, and have that feeling of "blowing in to town" -- very nice and relaxing. Unloaded, you will find a 60 km day pretty easy, a 75 km day standard, and a 95 km day hard and long. Do not try to push beyond a hundred kilometers -- the last few ks on a 95 day are really not much fun.

There are two kinds of rest breaks: voluntary and involuntary. The goal is to take enough of the former that you don't need the latter. Time is on your side -- the sun won't set until nine pm! -- and never be in a rush. Every terrain has a natural speed, which can be anything between 6 and 25 kph; find it and stick to it.

Ignore every gradient that doesn't have a name ("Knight's Point", "Mt. Hercules".) The main factor is the wind, which can turn a 5% downgrade into a 5% upgrade, and do not plan to do 110 km because it happens to be a slight downhill according to Nigel's maps. Some days you will feel fit and energetic, others sluggish and slow, and it has little to do with terrain and everything to do with wind. If you cycle "clockwise" -- heading South-West from Christchurch -- you will find the winds on your side, but not always.

These numbers may sound a little crazy to you -- I used to average 18 mph on my rides in the Princeton area, which works out to 27 kph, and an 80 mile ride, which I survived a little worse for wear, is 129 km! But in addition to the terrain and the wind, both of which I've discussed, and the fact that even light loads of a few kilos will affect you, there are the New Zealand roads. Kiwis do not do "blacktop" -- the smooth surfaces you're used to in the States. Instead, the surface, even when paved (or "sealed", as they say), is rather rubbly and at times downright bumpy. After discussion with other cyclists, we ended up agreeing that it was the surface that cut our speed 10 kph or so -- i.e., under weather and terrain conditions that would allow us to go 25 kph in our native lands, we'd be stuck in New Zealand at 15.

Plan for rest days. I would strongly suggest taking one after the first four days of riding -- your body needs to heal after all that work, and you don't want to get sick. You cannot reap the benefits of all that training without giving your muscles time to heal! After that, take days when you want; if you roll into a town that's particularly pleasing, stay an extra night.

Equipment

Hedley will set you up just fine. What you need to fit are fenders (for the rain -- most of which you splash up from the ground.) If you go with a different rental, or bring your own, please be sensible and bring wide (but not too wide) smooth road tyres -- not mountain knobblies -- and dropped (not straight) handlebars.

In terms of clothing, Kiwis have a magical fabric: Merino wool. It is light, soft, and works wonderfully in the sun. Get a long sleeved t-shirt and longjohns, and you're set for riding. The solution to the sun is cover, not sunscreen. You can get all of this cheaply in Christchurch (indeed, at the Sydney airport) -- a good quality long-sleeved t-shirt ran me $60. Merino wool is amazing: it doesn't stink after a long day of sweating (hang it up to air), and doesn't soak up water in the rain. Merino socks are more comfy than cotton!

I think the rain here is overestimated. You do not need to spend $300 on wacky GoreTex raingear, as I saw plenty of people doing. I found merino wool just fine to wear in a light downpour -- you won't get chilly or cold, it holds its heat -- and brought a poncho ("rain cape") for heavier rain. Along with fenders, it's an excellent solution to keep you dry and happy at 15 kph, and you just don't want to be riding in heaver stuff.

Miscellaneous

Traffic can get heavy at times, and there are rarely shoudlers. Ride a foot and a half to the right of the white line. This is enough to convince drivers behind you to slow down, cross into the oncoming lane, and pass you -- and for the rare times they don't, you have extra room for emergencies. I got a lot of thumbs-up and "good onyer mate" toot-toots, and was never honked at in anger.

Psychologically, the first days can be hard. Bring your iPod (the one thing I missed -- music to psych yourself up in the morning, and to relax to at night), and steer clear of watching television (if you don't own one, like me, you will learn that it is an addictive depressant -- you will feel worse after watching it.) Go outside, and gaze at the views or the stars (Orion upside-down!), or have a cup of tea, or read a book.

Sandflies on the West Coast are horrible: their bites will keep you up night after night. The only solution is to cover up completely (which you should be doing anyway because of the sun.) Aloe Vera does nothing to soothe the bites longer than a few minutes, but Tiger Balm helps a little. Speaking of heavily-marketed hippie cures, I can attest that Bees Wax Lip Balm does nothing for your lips, and Lanolin does not heal sunburn any faster.

"Kiwi" (as an adjective or noun) is considered neither cutsey nor offensive, and it's a lot easier than saying "New Zealander."

There is no tipping in New Zealand -- none at all, and everyone's quite happy about it. Attempting to tip (even just twenty cents loose change on the table) will cause either confusion or offense. There is no coin smaller than 10 cents, and prices are rounded, so don't stick around waiting for your five cents back.

If you are buying a lot of equipment, go to the same place and let them know ahead of time -- you'll often be offered at 10-20% discount. If you rent your bike from Hedley, do your bicycle shopping at "Bicycle Business" and let them know -- they may cut you a 10% break as well. MacPac is a New Zealand camping brand, and -- I am told by the experienced -- is very good value for the money.

Get travel insurance. I went with Southern Cross, $150 for a month. It will cover $500 worth of travel delays -- very likely because you are flying in Northern Winter and it's easy to miss the last/only plane to New Zealand that day -- and medical, which can be expensive and will not be covered on your health plan unless you are very special or travelling for work.

I have tried to steer clear of specific advice on where to go and where to stay, because the fun is in making your own choices and discoveries. That said, I will suggest you spend a night at the Old Church Backpackers in Kakapotahi. It's a gorgeous hostel, Frank puts on a driftwood fire every night, there's no television, an excellent record collection, and folks are quiet and friendly. Kakapotahi is 6 km North of some serious weirdos in Pukekura; the number there is 03-755-4000 and when I was there it was $23 for a bunk, $56 for a private double.

You will remember more what happens off your bicycle. Get off at every lookout point and rest stop and soak in the scenery. Don't power through the day -- you will always have plenty of time. Amble along, take it easy. This is a vacation! For that reason, I would advise against going to New Zealand to "get fit" -- you will unavoidably, but if you are planning on it, you might push yourself to hard and find the last 20 ks a misery. The golden rule is don't kick your own ass; let New Zealand do it for you. And it will, in spades, but you will survive! Nobody had to heli-evacuate me, at least.

the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg

2008-01-30T18:47:00.000-05:00

The Fashions, the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg, is now live on The Continental Review, Nicholas Manning's Paris-based journal of videopoetics. If you haven't been to TCR yet, you should: Nicholas has pulled together some amazing material from familiar gurus (Joshua Clover, Linh Dinh, Susanah Gardener) and voices new to me (Scott Glassman, Jean-Michel Espitallier.) It's like T.V., but awesome.

I'm very happy about how this turned out — I've been a bit of a Drama Queen with Nicholas, previously sending him a triptych, The Violence Apostrophes of Cate Blanchett to Thomas Jefferson, Joan of Arc to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Queen Boudica to Jacques Lacan, intercut with, indeed violence, footage from helmetcams taken recreationally by the American soldiers currently occupying Iraq.

I am about to hop, via a highly circuitous (Vancouver?) route to New Zealand, for a cycling-camping tour starting out of Christchurch. If you happen to be a New Zealand rhubarb reader on South Island, drop me a line at simon[at]kicp.uchicago.edu. I'll be heading South, West, and then to Christchurch via Arthur's Pass. (I will also be in Sydney for a ten hour layover 1 February.) If you are super-excited to follow the journey in a virtual fashion, "friend" me on facebook; I hope to post occasional updates there (and not on rhubarb, where everyone is super-serious poetry-only.)

After much debate, the book I will be carrying with me is Moby Dick (narrowing beating out A Voyage to Arcturus.)

We are not yet ready to release for absent magazine issue three. If you have sent us work and cannot wait until 28 February, we totally respect that; contact us at glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw. We do have a lot of amazing material lined up, including translations and essays from St. Petersburg (Russia, C.I.S.), manifestos from San Francisco (California, U.S.S.R.), and work from red-blooded American states as well.

what blogs does rhubarb read?

2008-01-28T15:57:00.000-05:00

My updated poetry-blog RSS file (OPML format) is available for download here (right-click "save as" if it does not download automatically.) I provided a brief RSS introduction last October. Updates this January include culling a few broken feeds, dropping a few blogs that have turned away from poetry matters, and adding a few that have caught my attention.

You can always subscribe solely to rhubarb here, but I encourage you to take the whole file. From John Latta's pretty photos and apostroph'd angers, to the New Criterion armavirumque's hilarious reactionaries, to Mark Wallace thinking again, to Nicholas Manning YouTubing the revolution, it's a heady dose of awesome.

If you've never used RSS before, it is quite a wonderful way to "get the news" from the more infrequently-updated blogs such as rhubarb — like a charming Liverpool urchin, your reader will pass along what new comes up. Statistics tell me that google Reader is the most popular, followed by bloglines, followed by client-side readers such as Shrook (for Mac OS X, which I use.)

To add the OPML file to google Reader, see here; to do so for bloglines, see here.

If you do go ahead and add this to your reader, you will probably be confronted with an avalanche of posts. I suggest "marking all as read" and starting anew — I find that on any given day I'm presented with about five new articles from the poetry blogosophere, which is very managable.

Timothy Liu : AND TO DUST THOU SHALT RETURN

2008-01-27T16:58:00.000-05:00

(from Slope #24 [Winter 2007])

The field was finally sown.

The evening fallen.

Perhaps some sweetness in the air.

So he began to read.

His woman in the other room.

Adjacent to his solitude.

Neither in despair nor free to roam.

Caught as yet in the about-to-be.

It would take some time.

The book he held approximating field.

Of course the consequences.

Unseen mouths to feed.

As seasons changed from room to room.

Winter here. Spring over there.

It would take some time.

The woman he held.

Their emptiness already in full bloom.

*

Had you been so adept through a series of polished hoops?

All of your training amounting to this.

Countless titles and certificates affixed to a wall.

That sort of thing.

Halos you couldn't pass through now.

Working out salvation by the sweat of your furrowed brow.

The shape of your body afflicted with what it is.

What you were becoming all along.

Could regimens really keep the future at bay?

Suffering, death, etc.

All of the usual calamities that kept you employed.

Congress with whomever sought your care.

Now left benighted on pastures where you had once put out.

*

Who told thee thou wast naked? the story goes.

We had to begin somewhere.

Even in disbelief.

As the veil was rent in infant sleep never having known it.

I can feel it in my bones but I cannot see it.

A mother refusing to give suck.

If not this day if not her voice then even so.

Inhalation. Exhalation.

Was the body only messenger to the message?

This milk will cost you.

You ask the world for bread but are given stone.

Systole. Diastole. A Sisyphian stone.

With all the dead around you now coming into view.

Each with a stone not of their choosing.

Nor of their making.

The eternal journey from heart to mind less than three-feet long.

I relax my shoulders, my shoulders are relaxed.

I relax my liver, my liver is relaxed.

And so on.

With our tailbones anchored to the center of the earth.

@

If there were such a position to hold, Timothy would be the obvious choice, along with D.A. Powell, I think, for the Queen of Queer Response to elliptical poetry — a group largely dominated by heterosexual women. Where elliptical work tends towards a desire so abstracted as to be absorbed, like tea in a towel, back into language, the residue of these more aggressively sexual writers lies more on the surface.

All that said, the poem I've chosen from the series presented in Slope is perhaps — in contrast to others — squarely in the elliptical tradition of deferred desire. The series that presents the possibility of sex in this work is one of distance, space, "congress" — a sort of Shaker dance. When it comes to contact, space dissolves into estrangement: veils are "rent", "livers" relaxed. It's not that the poem is beyond desire — thinking of relaxing one's liver does generate a strange kind of sensation somewhere near sex — but that it does not come out, in the assertive Propertian style that D.A. Powell used so well, as a speech act.

I generally collapse double-spaced lines when I reprint things on rhubarb because it's one of the most over-used techniques to lend weight to the weightless. But here this languid white really does aid the poem, giving it a post-rock sense of droning time [*]: enough space to look around, look down at the invisible crotch, look back up and allow the poem to think further through.

What is most beautiful about Timothy's poem is the sense of coming-after that is never enunciated; a feeling, from the reader's point of view, that the speaker is so belated that he's the proverbial fish who doesn't know she's wet.

There's an old joke — I don't remember its origin — about a professor who taught a course on the fin de siècle. At the end of the last class, a student raises his hand and explains: things went wonderfully, we read a lot of beautiful material, but do you keep calling it a "fantasy echo."

In Timothy's long pauses one almost hears the fantasy echo one's self: systole. Diastole. Whether what we get are the echos, or the words that generate them, is an ambiguity of the poem. What is resounding, in an undriven fashion, is a kind of religious detritus, a theological catalog far past its prime. In the 21st Century, when one Wakes Early Sunday Morning it's more likely to encounter church if you stay home and read.

[*] Quite a bit like that that's playing on the Slope website. Readers should know I absolutely love this kind of music, and am going to an Explosions in the Sky concert in Chicago come April.

Julie Doxsee : Two Dears, Two Tours

2008-01-27T16:12:00.000-05:00

(from January 2008's Unpleasant Event Schedule)

Dear Fountain

Your waterfront is so
like a day's supply of

satellite. You sonar my
wishes & molehill them. I find

a monocle on your cupid
& the smudge of a rubbed-

off antenna. I take
your stepladder all the way

to the middle where
algae sprouts in moon-

scapes to prevent showers
from splashing your sides. You

point up to the papers
waterfalling from

my coat & show them
the bends in your water.

@

It has been a long while since I've gone down into the online journals seeking rhubarb material. In general, I can be a bit triumphalist about the increasing importance of the online, relative to the print, venue. And so it's important to note that the real need we have in the poetry world is not better writers, but better editors. Excepting recent crush-list endorsements from Julia Allison, my guess is that the readership on rhubarb is interested mainly in the brute fact of selection, and less my own discussion.

Paging through the various online journal lists, one finds a great deal of what I'd call "third way" work — things neither "post-avant" or "School of Quietude", but something in between. The former shows in the syntactic devices and a trend towards prosey, sprung (if at all) rhythms — iambs appear no more frequently than a statistical noise — and the latter shows in a general shared belief in the universality of "story".

That's not the only way it could go, of course; there's a complementary third way, that one might imagine, of received forms and disjunctive content. But it's the first kind that holds sway, as in this piece, from the magazine Void, by Carolyn Srygley-Moore:

How many times have you been saved
from yourself as if evicted
out of a filthy all-night truckstop.
     Once and again.

It's not as if you lived inside
the perimeters of history, rather in its echo,
beaten about the eyes by an infinite
     pulsing of soundwaves.

Today my daughter brings me a blade of grass
she has believed into a flower
and I believe it. It will be ages until
     she is forced to be born.

The belief that "evicted from truck stop", or "charming daughter story", have some kind of universal valence, that they can be cited without explanation: these are (to me) the trademark failings of a certain kind of highly conservative writing, the same kind that provides a heft to epiphanic experience on a hillside and other long-emptied cultural touchstones. [*] Such moments, in a third way work like Carolyn's are then roughly merged with a sort of abstracted, imaginary, syntactical world [**] one associates with more radical work.

Faced with such material, it's heartening to see the kind of take-no-prisoners style of Julie here appearing in Unpleasant Event Schedule. What Julie can do that Carolyn can not is generate story "behind", instead of presenting it in asides throughout the work.

It's Julie's faith in the invocative power of lanugage — as opposed to story — that gives things a kinetic lunge; things "sonar", "splash", "point", "bend" in a way that allows what I would call the peculiar institution of the poem to create without reference. "Sonar" hooks in to all sorts of things: a physical ping from our memories of World War Two movies, a lyric assonance from the word in our (twitching) throats, a seeming strangeness of invisible radiation.

What it doesn't do is demand the sharing of any particular content. It's a kind of satellite poem itself, content to orbit somewhere above the daily life of language. It's a lift-off that the third way can not accomplish.

[*]. When was the last time you had an epiphany? I mean, seriously, not as part of the liturgical calender. I am guessing — just about as long ago as you read Portrait of the Artist. Can we all, as a culture, move on?

[**]. Meaning: the catachresis of living "inside" an echo creates a conflict with the more literal, spatial story of "inside a perimeter", leaving the image failed and reducing it to a linguistic moment — a standard and appealing device from the last, experimental forty years.

iowa poetry workshop walkout

2008-01-23T21:00:00.000-05:00

File under awesome. Well placed rumormongers inform the rhubarb bureau (last heard from here) that poets at the now-appropriately acronymed Iowa Writer's Workshop have refused to sign up for workshops this semester. Protest centers around ~~internet residuals~~ a lack of classroom focus, and "student homogenization."

In other news: I picked up a copy of Goethe's Faust (Walter Arndt translation — more rhymes than the Princeton edition), am working on a new apostrophe (Robert Oppenheimer to Araki Yasusada), and am soon to find out if I will be in Tokyo or the California desert come September.

a journal bill of rights

2008-01-06T20:49:00.000-05:00

We — Elisa, Joanna, Irwin and I — are wrapping up the selection and solicitation process for issue three of absent magazine. This is really going to be not only a tremendous issue but also a particularly innovative one.

There is still time to send us material; please read the guidelines for the specific way to do this. Acceptances and passes will be sent out 20 January. While you hastily ring the New Yorker to withdraw work to send to us, I wanted to lay out (below the fold) some thoughts I had on the moral aspects of publishing within the many overlapping communities we inhabit.

I am in an important set of ways an anarchist, but on the other hand I do believe in attempting, in a provisional sense, to make explicit the moral rules that underlie a community. Perhaps the best example of this online is wikipedia, which has, over the years, generated a number of acronyms — e.g., NPA, AGF, ISNOT — that, in explaining things allow also for their growth.

One thing should be clear: while by-and-large the journal world respects the spirit of the bill I elaborate below, the book-publishing world does not, and the major reason for that is the emergence of the pay-for-play contest.

1. authors have the right to be read

Authors who submit work in an acceptable fashion (broadly construed — follow the guidelines and perhaps read my previous remarks) have the right to expect to be read by those taking public responsibility for the editorial direction of the magazine. What that means is that if someone isn't listed on the masthead in an editorial capacity, they should not be in the position of rejecting or accepting your work.

My guess is that a large number of the "mid-list" magazines — the flotsam of Minor MFA-Program Review and no I'm not talking about yours — break this rule with alacrity. My list of backchannel (keep them coming, folks) on the massive pre-screening done by un-named "interns" grows year to year. I don't think a twenty-two year old is necessarily going to be a bad reader (the opposite may well be true), but it seems clear that a lot of interns are selected for reasons other than editorial acuity. If you are not willing to acknowledge an intern as exercising editorial judgement, you should not be asking them to do it sub rosa.

[Because of this, I should add, I would recommend against sending to a mid-list publication without having a personal connection to a name on the masthead. It's certainly possible to break the prescreening other ways, but I find the notion that I should have to — when there are, see below, many places that don't require it — either silly or insulting depending on how much I've had to drink.]

An additional guess is that a large number of publications on either side of the mid-list follow this rule well. Those of us who fly by night do this kind of work with the hope in part that we'll find new writers with only their work to recommend them; those with the clout to assemble a long list of "contributing editors" can farm it out.

In a sense, I have (in past years) formed a relatively good weightless, inertialess test mass. The places that published my work when I first began to write again — see links to the left — could not have done so if they prescreened. Meanwhile, the few print places to the right of the mid-list that I have sent to — Conjunctions, the Boston Review and the Chicago Review — have all given me good reason to think they follow similar policies, either through later correspondence or an SASE postmark from a different part of the country.

Some may argue that the volume of submissions requires a filter, imperfect as it may be. I can see the logic: for issue three our pile is five hundred high. But declaring oneself an editor is a moral statement; farming out the intellectual and aesthetic labors to interns is equivalent to those in academia who hire undergraduates to do their research and "flesh out" their subsequent prose.

Further, it should be said that no one is forcing you to ask for submissions unsolicited. There are a number of terrific journals that do not; indeed, for a long time and before the geographic fragmentation of the American community, this was the norm. Today, a number of places, such as Juliana Spahr and Jenna Osman's Chain continue the practice — as, in many ways, does absent in as much as we're shaping up to be again 50% solicited.

2. editors have the right to be read

Editors have the right to expect that submissions will be from authors with a familiarity with the magazine and its project that extends beyond the submission guidelines. They have the right to get irritated with submissions that are clearly carpet-bombing missions planned in the café near the Barnes and Nobles periodicals.

Furthermore, they have the right to let that prejudice their selections. This I think bleeds into a point I'd like to make below, so let's first return to the author's rights.

3. authors have the right to moral support

"Moral" here used in the sense drawn on for the notion of "moral rights" in the United Kingdom: an acknowledgment of the particular aesthetic-ethical nexus that accompanies artistic creation. To me, this is not simply a good way to "run" a community, but a vital part of the creative process; in a way, poetry itself can not exist without the contingent decision of people to take this step. I want to make a particular shout-out to Typo on this score, but in general the "state of the nation" for us is strong and I think every poet reading here can name others.

To elaborate: authors put a great deal of unpaid effort into the construction of things for others. There is a great deal of pleasure to be found in this work, but authors have the right be be treated with respect for their choice to create a communicative work for strangers.

They have the right to be treated as equals, and not plaintiffs or "content providers" or the crowds outside the glass windows of the Morning News; automated correspondence is fine, but it should not argue the latter. In general, poetry journals are good about this, but I remember an incredibly insulting letter I received a few years ago from Analog Magazine, a science-fiction publication, that suggested a reason for my rejection was not only an inability to spell or use proper English grammar, but the fact that perhaps I should not be a writer at all.

[Confidential to science-fiction publishers: if you want to read a terrific short story about the East End of Long Island, a post-oil society sustained by bicycles, and the Marriage of Figaro, call me. I know I guy.]

One particularly egregious case is the emergence of "reading fees." The worst offender continues to be the Tupelo Press, who charges money for reading book manuscripts; the practice has not spread to the journals (yet), but a few of the lesser ones — I am told, this seems to be largely a School of Quietude invention — give "priority" to those who enclose a cheque for a year's subscription. Quite beyond an implicit violation of (1), they just seem tacky.

4. editors have the right to moral support

Editors have the right to expect that the authors they publish will make reasonable efforts to promote their journal and to engage with the editorial directions that journal takes.

I mean very basic things; if you are published in a journal, you should be spreading the news about it. Blogging poets should feel obligated to post links to issues they appear in; above and beyond that, they should feel obligated to engage with the issues in critical and creative ways. I don't think authors should ever be in a position of marketers — self- or otherwise — but I do think that an author that can't intelligently engage with other writers about the editorial directions their publishers have made should not be publishing except through a third party.

It's a counterpart to (2); to put it another way, an editor that has accepted your work has spent without question an absolute minimum of an hour from start to finish. It's a pleasure in many ways, but it is a different pleasure from that of language-making. Authors should consider devoting some of their own time in a similar labor. We've gotten used to an atrocious amount of poet-spam, so I don't expect people to e-mail their mailing lists with every publication, but I do think that authors should consider how to spread the word about their editors' work at least as carefully as they craft their cover letters.

A final remark on this score is that editors deserve to be treated as something more than "judges"; they should be understood as being responsive to more than simply some subject-less set of criteria. Editorship is a creative act, and in a way the fact that creativity lies on both side of the transaction is a fundamental aspect. It's not a personal relationship in the usual sense, but it is a relationship.

To elaborate: publication is not a prize, or a present, or a payment on an I.O.U.; it is part of the formation of a community, and if someone is not participating in that community, I think it is more than fair to take that into account. A poem may be "on the face" a good work, but if it doesn't answer to the needs of the magazine's direction and readership, there's no fairness or equal-time doctrine to overrule an editor's decisions.

In the end, I think the least acknowledged right is (4); it's one that many just don't see. I can promise, however, that once you do get used to it, the writing life becomes far less lonely.

[Confidential to Zambia: we're really curious. Drop me a line.]

the first annual rhubarb reader's survey

2007-12-26T14:55:00.001-05:00

The first annual rhubarb is susan reader's survey has been taken.

There were fifty responses (including my own) which is enough to give results to a statistical error of ±7%. You should bear in mind there are all sorts of things that can skew the results here, the strongest I think being "response bias" — you are learning most about people comfortable and eager to reveal themselves.

the crying of lot forty-nine

The survey was supposed to quantify what can be quantified about "regular rhubarb readers". In one case, the responses indicated that the person could not have been such a person, so the final dataset included forty-nine responses. Because of rounding, percentages might not add to 100%.

reading habits

last poem read before this specific websurfing session

within the hour	33%
within the day	49%
within the week	16%
within the month	2%

rhubarb readers are voracious "consumers" of poetry, with nearly everyone having read a poem in the last day. I suppose if you buy into the myth that all "we" do is write in ignorance of the tradition of our fellows and predecessors it might be heartening (or chastising), but this ain't the New Criterion.

source of this most recent poem

online journal	25%
online chapbook/book	2%
print journal (literary)	8%
print journal (broad)	6%
print chapbook/book	60%

This was the first surprising result of the survey. It is not a surprise to see the importance of the online journal for what is admittedly a sample of people predisposed to get their poetry news from the web. Nor is it a surprise to see the dominance of the "book" — something that validates what seems to be the major obsession of the "poet": getting a manuscript together of sufficient ambition and value to represent herself in that format.

What is surprising is the near-total irrelevance of the literary journal to the rhubarb crowd. (Note that I specifically asked readers to exclude the current websurfing session from their response, so if anything, we are biased in favor of print.)

Seth Abramson may be the extreme case, listing well over fifty print journals he's appeared in, but I don't think I'm out of line in thinking that poets still lick stamps and mail. What this survey tells me, however, is that, if one wants to get work "out there" and into the minds of colleagues, print journals are one of the least effective ways. (Online chapbooks, beyond Beard of Bees, have yet to take off — we will see perhaps next year how the numbers change.)

last poetry book purchase

today	8%
within the week	29%
within the month	41%
within the year	20%
over a year ago	2%

this purchase was

a chapbook (<48 pages, stapled)	14%
small press	49%
university press	29%
major press	8%

I made a bit of an error in that I defined "small press" as SPD, which left people to decide for themselves whether, say, Coffee House Press was "small," "university," or "major." The take-home lesson here from these two responses is that rhubarbians are good members of the avanty-gardy poetry community. The overwhelming majority (this requires a little behind-the-scenes cross-referencing) have picked up a book from an avanty-gardy channel in the last month.

Heartening is not only that the "major presses" (that I defined as "FSG, Knopf, &c.") are indeed suffering from their generally useless picks, and also that given a choice between establishment (university) and non, people pick the latter.

writing habits

last poem written

within the hour	6%
within the day	16%
within the week	22%
within the month	14%
within the year	3%
I have not written a poem this year	8%

Cross-referencing with the "last poem read", one again sees that people are indeed, contra conventional wisdom, reading more than they write (indeed, the guess you can make is that people write one poem for every seven they read.)

I would like to shout out to those who visit rhubarb post-coitally, so to speak.

performance (forced or otherwise) of social markings

This is the tricky part. A non-negligible fraction of respondents did not fill out this part of the survey (about 5%, with income being the touchiest, sex the least.) Before presenting the results, I want to state first my respect for those who declined to state, and also to acknowledge my own discomfort with asking for, and reporting on, these numbers.

sex

female	33%
male	67%

This was the most stunning result of the survey for me. As I noted during the Chicago Review numbers dust-up, I review a majority-female slate of writers (57% woman.) In terms of readers, however, numbers are flipped. Girls write, boys watch.

race

There were a surprising (to me, I'm not a sociologist) number of mixed-race responses. For simplicity, I've counted an n-race person as 1/n different people. i.e., if you told me you were mixed white/Hispanic, I counted that as half a person Hispanic, half a person white. I have no idea if that makes sense, or is really offensive? I know little about being mixed-race, but you may wish to remark. This is definitely pointing to a failure of trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

white	66%
Hispanic	4%
Black or African-American	6%
American Indian, Native Hawaiian/Alaskan	4%
Asian Indian	2%
Chinese, Fillipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese	8%
Other	10%

Here the surprise is the diversity of rhubarb readership. The stereotype is that the avant garde poetry world — at least the world of the writers I review — is overwhelmingly, and unrepresentationally, white. In fact, the rhubarb numbers of white vs. non-white are about on-par with the United States 2000 census (where 69% reported as white.)

It is, because of the small number statistics, hard to make more remarks here, although I will venture to say that rhubarb readership is more diverse than the average reading I attend. Racially speaking — if we take the ratio of Asian to Hispanic and Black as more than statistical noise — rhubarbians look a lot like the Harvard class of 2011, though with a surprisingly high number of people identifying (at least in part) as Native peoples.

income per capita within household

above twice 2006 national average	10%
above 2006 national average	27%
below 2007 national average	63%

The 2006 (U.S.) national average is $36,629/capita. My guess here — treading into dangerous territory, but see below — is that many rhubarb readers have taken pay cuts in order to pursue important but ill-renumerated careers such as teaching, research, and child-rearing.

current education level attending or acheived

high school degree	4%
bachelor's	27%
master's (not MFA)	13%
MFA	29%
doctorate	12%
other professional post-graduate qualification	2%

Unsurprising is that MFA's form the plurality of readers, although again the fact that they are not the overwhelming majority is interesting in and of itself. Clear, cross-referencing with income statistics, however, is that rhubarbians are earning less than they could "on the free market", given their general level of qualifications.

the crying of lot forty-nine (redux)

Thus endeth the first annual rhubarb survey. I'm curious to learn of people's responses to the results of these questions, to hear suggestions for new questions to ask next December, and also to hear more general remarks on the nature of trying to collect "statistics" about the poetry world.

I go back and forth. In my job applications I conscientiously filled out the optional E.O.C. race and gender responses: I think it is important for us to have good ideas about how our communities break down by race and gender. I am a supporter of affirmative action, and filling this stuff out is an important part of that.

On the other hand, it is clear that these numbers give us illusions of understanding, and I think it is only in as much as these numbers violate our usual assumptions that they are useful.

I am wary also of reporting numbers that may be misread by precisely those under-represented groups that I, at least, think should be playing a larger role in the community. A good friend, now a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, studied test anxiety among women and minorities and found that when told that one's group underperforms on a certain task, one tends to underperform as well. Simply observing an imperfect state of affairs can make that state more imperfect.

Regina Derieva : Between the Window and the Door

2007-12-14T20:53:00.000-05:00

(in St. Petersburg Review, 2007)
trans. J. Kates

A different dimension. The advance scout
takes in how a part of speech goes begging
on dry land. How an otherworldly light
of the Homeland lies on outsiders.

How the Lorelei, once across Lethe,
will pose, armed with pistols to the teeth,
for a memorialist and a harpist.
How the streets empty out after a sweep

of the next ism in line. "Twinkle, twinkle
Little Star" the scout thinks, nearly
resigned to prison. Between the door
and the window lives a molting monster.

And if it were not for China and its wall,
the scout could pretend to be a stranger
and exit by either the window or the door.
But there is no land where beasts live in peace.

That's all there is, and any amount of sobbing,
like a nightmare, says nothing about anything.

@

After my stomping on the latest issue of Poetry Magazine — although I do recommend buying the issue for the terrific Italian translations — Mark Wallace asked me if there was a magazine I did like. It's hard to say; I don't think I'm alone in finding every magazine imperfect to a greater or lesser extent, although I find Chicago Review and Conjunctions hit what I'd call my "vivid tastes" more often than not.

The St. Petersburg Review, something I picked up in Quimby's, is a creation, or product of the mysterious Summer Literary Seminars, something that occasionally I run into a product of on my rounds in the Chicago scene. Mikhail Iossel makes the case in the introduction that St. Petersburg has a higher density of writers than any city in the world, and I wonder if that is true. (He claims Paris as a contender for the title — is that true? From my own visits there, I find the suggestion surprising.)

It's not a perfect magazine by a long shot; indeed, I think its ratio of failures to successes is roughly that of the December issue of Poetry. What surprised me is that, among the names I hadn't recognized, the freshest, most provocative work came from people who turned out to be in their sixties: in addition to Regina (b. 1949), there was also Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (b. 1946.)

What I found provocative about Regina's poem here is the animation: a "part of speech" goes begging [*], and it is the way in which the objects that surround this hero-scout develop and move in contrast to his stillness that gives this poem the life it needs. Surrounded by a lot of poems in the issue that I found journalistic, memory-in-verse, this work, along with a few others (including Eugene Ostashevsky and Timothy Liu), struck me as taking the greatest risks.

Perhaps — no perhaps — I extrapolate too much when I find a kind of polish in these lines that, in retrospect, I should have recognized as coming from someone much older that myself. There's no attempt to shock, no abrupt shift or self-consciously impoetic thought; Lorelei appears without apology as does the Great Wall of China. There's no framing, no distancing. It's a kind of sureity — of being understood, of being respected — that I think "we" no longer have.

I mentioned above that much of the work was "journalistic" in nature; going to the website for the journal I find far more highlighted the fact that the issue features "poetry and fiction by women of the gulag" (Regina is not one.) I haven't read this work closely enough, but I wanted to quote an "unknown author", whose folk song is featured in a gulag memoir. In full:

Suddenly the police patrol blocked our path,
Our sleigh ground to a halt.
Someone fired suddenly straight in the girl's chest,
And she folded like a flower.

Are the meanings of such poems to us lost? It is clear that the way we (or at least I) read this — as a kind of creepy aestheticization, a cruelty of the author — is not how those in the gulag would. How can we recover this sort of poem, and which of our own works — say, those of American consumer culture — become equally impenetrable once the surrounding experiences drop away?

I found, recently, a rather stunning statement by an art critic; Roberta Smith on Lucien Freud in the New York Times. After a discussion of his painting technique, she writes "[i]t would be simplifying things to say that the density, plasticity and color of oil paint provide Mr. Freud a place to hide."

If you think about that for a moment, it's a rather strange statement to make. Yes, in some sense, the ridges of the oil painting in Freud sort of look like places to "hide"; but what this has to do with how much Freud reveals of himself, or his response to his subjects, in an emotional sense seems deeply unclear.

It's what they would call in analytic philosophy a category mistake, and I wonder if a keener eye than mine can spot such moments in poetry criticism — which given its high-minded theories probably does far more often than art.

[*]. If J. Kates is here, I'd be curious to learn if that is a grammatical phrase, or whether part could just as well be "fragment."

Lisa Robertson : from The Apothecary

2007-12-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

(pub. Tsunami Editions [1991], reissued BookThug [2007])

Shed by my own botched history I become a catalogue whose profile is a parody of the rugged and elemental — nothing incurs that does not tend to roll like a photocopied image through an alphabetized allotment similar to a parking lot but whether my misogyny works effectively as a surface is a question which should be addressed by an expert in spatial adjustment — the effect of the movement of my limbs is less elemental than luminous or evil in the way that a revision is carried over to a borderless camp where each attempt to speak reaches a baroque proportion of monumentality.

@

At a pace of roughly one page every ten minutes, I am now on page ninety-three of Phenomenology of Spirit. If you have ever tried to do this, the trick is to take lots of notes and plough. Things make sense in retrospect.

Hegel is taking up most of my reading time, but I did have a chance to pick up Lisa Robertson's "new" book, which is actually a reissue of one of her first, published in 1991 (I know for a fact you can get a copy at Clay Banes' Pegasus.) Some of it does indeed look like the above, and I wanted to juxtapose it with a paragraph — taken roughly at random — from the Phenomenology:

§138 In the first place, the second Force appears as the one that solicits and, moreover, in accordance with its content, as the universal medium in relation to the Force characterized as the one solicited, but since the second Force is essentially an alternation of these two moments and is itself Force, it is likewise the universal medium only through its being solicited to be such; and similarly too it is a negative unity, i.e., it solicits the retraction of Force into itself only through its being solicited to do so.

It's a fruitful juxtaposition of proses, with the similarities bringing out in relief the differences. In particular, what is similar about these two works is the languid certainty, a kind of expectation that the reader will attend to the rhythm of the work without being spurred by abruptness, will be attentive, will not need repetition and paraphrase.

What is important in both these texts is produced but not highlighted — or rather, the text itself comes under the highlight. In Lisa's text the patter becomes, not quite sinister, but strangely flat of affect as emotionally loaded terms — misogyny, evil — roll by.

And yet a greater similarity is the sense in which both of these texts unfold, and take the unfolding of themselves seriously, as part of their point. In a sense, Lisa's work does this because it is poetry, or is counted poetry by the publishers because it does this, but it is also true that her unfolding is pushed to the fore because of the baroque nature of her "point."

Both, in other words, are impossible — or nearly impossible — to recall on a first reading, but leave a kind of residue in the mind nonetheless.

Of course the differences are many, but what to me stands out as the law of Lisa's text is, in contrast to Hegel's paragraph, the relentless evolution, the opposite partner to the obsessive returning and retracing of Hegel's text. Both are esoteric, a function of hidden knowledge, hidden valence, but in opposite fashions.

Lisa's text draws in the outside world, pulling the singular — photocopiers, parking lots — in the service of the universal — allotment, luminous, monumentality — with a few "middle terms", such as "catalogue" which can attach to either side: either catalogue as Yellow Pages, or catalogue as abstract set.

What is important here, to be clear, is not that Lisa's content is particularly esoteric, but the way in which her unfolding of that brings a kind of esoteric knowledge with. I don't particularly know "what" Lisa is saying — and only just about, after hours, know what Hegel means — but I rather want to assert that what's interesting is the nature of the trace, the residue, that her work leaves behind.

This (a clip from a blog post by Dan Piponi about something definitely esoteric) might itself be a "middle term" between Lisa and Hegel, with a certain involution and repetitiveness but also an outward branching:

For me, two of the most interesting aspects of category theory in computer science have been monads and generalised folds/unfolds; if M is a functor that happens to be monad, then given an arrow (i.e. a function because we’re working in the category of types and functions) A->MB and an arrow B->MC we can compose them to make an arrow A->MC, even though the tail of the first arrow is incompatible with the head of the second.

In any case, I'm hoping that's of use to someone; I know these juxtapositions are helpful for me to see what is going on in Lisa's surface-repellent text.

Milo De Angelis : From "Theme of Farewell"

2007-12-04T18:19:00.000-05:00

(from Poetry Magazine, Dec. 2007)
trans. Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli

In you all deaths gather, all
the broken glasses, the sere pages, the derangements
of thought, they gather in you, guilty
of all deaths, incomplete and guilty,
in the wake of every mother, in your wake,
motionless. They gather there, in your
weak hands. The apples of this market are death,
these poems retreat into their grammar,
in the hotel room, in the hut
of what does not join, souls without rest,
aged lips, bark ripped from the trunk.
They are dead. They gather there. They failed,
the operation failed, they failed.

The place was motionless, the word obscure. That was
the place we agreed on. Goodbye, memory of the sparkling
nights, goodbye, big smile, the place was there.
To breathe was a darkness shutters had made, a primitive state.
Silence and desert were switching positions and we
were talking to a lamp. The place was that one. The trolleys
rarely passed. Venus was returning to her hut.
Out of the warrior throat, episodes broke free. We didn't
say anything more. The place was that one. It was there
that you were dying.

@

As Don informed me, Poetry Magazine now has its compleat content online, and I wanted to reward the decision of the Foundation to do so by looking closely at its December issue, which has just gone up.

If you want to skip my "global" thoughts and get to Milo, scroll down to the boldface. But before turning to the poem above I want to talk briefly, and negatively, about some of the other work in this issue. Before I do that I want to say that I get the impression that Poetry is in a period of change. Don Share hangs out in the blogosphere, and Nick Twemlow is another person who has a hand in both the Foundation's work and a number of magazines you're likely to find reviewed on rhubarb. This, I understand, is new and may take time to Reaganomically trickle down. Right now it's true, as Ron Silliman noted, that the Foundation's web work is far more provocative.

The English-language poetry in this issue is stunningly, terrifically poor and the root of this poverty is I think an absence of ambition and the danger that accompanies it. The primary mode here is the image, and, as the poem progresses, its drawing out.

Devin Johnston writes, for example, picturesquely about oysters "voluptuous and cold". Things might go places; his "liquefaction // of cloud" has an almost grotesque feel with an energy pumped by the aphrodesiac associations, but that "almost" sticks with you all the way through. The poem is uninhabited, empty, but not in a queer way, just in the kind of dull way a restaurant is around 3 pm.

Fiona Sampson's After the Air Tattoo, meanwhile, is an aftershock of Louise Gluck, with a bird name that will send you to Sibley and half-successful kennings ("plane-roar", "half-dark") that remind you of that teacher who told you that poetry was simultaneously self-expression and telegraphic imagism.

While Devin seems to have little to say, Fiona does have something within this poem, but needs an editor. It feels like a draft that might, one day, survive in an opening line. The Lodger is more interesting, but the untorqued conceit of the title, and a few poor choices (a line-break before and after "down"?) again leave the taste of the classroom.

I could go on — I have, I promise, read all these poems — but I think I've given a sense of what is going on. Biographies show that nearly all these poets are established in a very firm sense, with multiple books, or first books from national presses, or positions in writing programs. Perhaps the magazine could stand, as their poets this month could as well, to take some risks next time — it's bizarre but true that Poetry was far more adventurous in 1917 than it is in 2007.

The essence of these poems' failure, as I've said, is the lack of ambition, here most manifested in the relentless, wave-like sterility of voice. They come in little speech bubbles, inflating from the author's photograph; no strangeness here, subtle or otherwise. There's no threat, no unusual glance, no flash to derange the ordered lines. Louise Gluck hovers over some of this work but you won't hear "I hate sex" from these folks.

Perhaps the only poem that even tries for a voice is Atsuro Riley's "Hutch", but the voice there, fragmented, diction-dense, is so resoundingly familiar from the Modernists that the must rises almost visibly from the ethernet:

From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

Them days men boys gone dark groves rose like Vietnam bamboo.

Aftergrowth something awful.

Green have mercy souls here seen camouflage everlasting.

Nary a one of the brung-homes brung home whole.

This is Faulkner, As I Lay Dying without a plot. Atsuro's work seems to be the token "crazy stuff" in this issue, with parenthetical words and sentence fragments, but it is so only on the surface, a bedside lamp with cracked glaze.

On to the Italians. Or at least one Italian. I find prefaces to translation deathly dull, so I have not read what I am sure are wise remarks by the chief of the translations, Geoffrey Brock. You might want to. After all the kvetching about the poems above, it's hard not to read this poem, in its excellence, "in contrast", but I'll do my best.

What Milo's work, refracted through Susan and Patrizio, does is weep. Weeping is one of the best modes for the standard three-to-six-beat line; while I've railed against the essentialism of calling pentameter "breath" it must be so that every line corresponds to some man or woman's breathing all the way out to Whitman's post-coital and many-line exhalations.

It is the stop-start of these lines, the way they continually upset your belief in how long they will last, that brings across the kind of heaving, diaphram-spasm of weeping, the panic that one has too little breath or, alternately, too much and that you'll wear out your throat and lungs before your body lets you rest.

Neither Susan nor Patrizio do what I think would have been the mistake here — break these things up into little whitespaced spasms. What is terrific, almost in an original sense, about this translation is the awareness, the coming to awareness, of this weeping. It is like listening, with curiosity, to a voice three rooms down, listening in until its obscenity becomes clear.

It is that subtlety — admittedly, a subtlety for "us", jaded and spoiled 21st century readers, and not for a Platonic version of Helen Vendler — that also brings a sense of control, a sense of staging to the work. What comes out in repetition here is the way the flung metaphors, Venus and that Miltonic "sere", all of that, works in counterpoint to the breathing of the lines.

There's a bit of a crony alert to provide at the end of this review, which is that unnamed sources within Poetry have given a (very highly tentative) go-ahead for a long form review of mine. The curious might be interested in the essence of the review, which I quote from an e-mail:

My guiding principles were: (a) talk about the experimental types, with a focus on small presses, (b) not say mean things but actually find work that I liked, and avoid general snarkyness, (c) be primarily idea/explanatory focused, as opposed to evaluative.

If this actually goes through, you'll be (almost) the first to know.

Update. From Susan Stewart: "I think whatever you've liked in our translations comes from Milo himself — his book-length elegy is really extraordinary. If you'd like to see some more of our translations of his work (and others), you might look for TriQuarterly 127, an issue on Contemporary Italian Poetry that came out a few months ago and, unlike the Poetry portfolio, has the Italian on facing pages."

boy meets Hegel

2007-12-04T12:38:00.001-05:00

First, take the survey. It's not too long, and I will publish the results in a later post. Learn about your fellow rhubarb readers. In case it's not completely obvious, I will have no idea who you are — it is completely anonymous.

I've finally bitten the bullet and picked up a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit. amazon.com, who is sort of like a clever uncle with a great library who gives me books and it's only when I've gotten home that I find my wallet is missing, told me that I wouldn't really understand it, so I should get the lecture notes from Alexandre Kojève too.

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and stayed with Joanna Guldi, who had on her shelf a copy of Alain Badiou's Being and Event — which she had finished. I was a bit impressed, because I've been laboring, on and off, on that book and its bizarre recapitulation of axiomatic set theory, for months. Now I love Jo, but I'm pretty sure that, if only because of constant exercise, my mathematics skills are better than hers.

In the end, Jo talked me down from the ledge of her Bryant Street apartment by convincing me that a degree in comparative literature enables one to read this kind of stuff the way my mother reads Page Six of the New York Post.

I deal — perhaps a subject for therapy — very poorly with implicit knowledge. I like to build systems from the ground up, and I like to have many paths to the same point — intuitive paths, analytic paths, synthetic paths — the kind of coherency you get best in physics. I think this partly comes from the fact that I moved from the United Kingdom to the United States at the tender age of twelve, too late really to have an intuitive sense of how to "behave like an American".

[It also may also have to do with the fact that — as I only realized in retrospect — I was taught, ironically enough, here, by some very clever people who just happened to be insane Marxists (of the "vulgar" variety, as I'm sure Josh Clover would tell me.)]

In other news, I am back on the job market. I have about twenty-five fellowship applications out to various Universities, and one college — Deep Springs — which has already given me an interview. The students there — who ran the interview, with a few faculty and the Dean in attendence — were very sharp. I know a little bit about the school, because Katie teaches there, and G.C. Waldrep used to — and also because T.J., one of the bartenders at my local, graduated there a few years ago.

the rhubarb - absent - Christmas - Hanukkah - Rohatsu - Ramadan - Kwanzaa - Yule - Newtonmas so you can get paid list

2007-11-30T16:06:00.000-05:00

Shorter Simon: If you want to support absent magazine and the work of our wonderful contributors you can bookmark this link for amazon.

Verbose DeDeo: As we head for another season of alienating consumption, there are a few ways to avoid the plague, and one of them, most relevant to absent readers, is to support, with our attentions and time, the work of friends and strangers in the poetry world.

I've cobbled together, from the many books on my shelf, a list of ten unusually good books of poetry from the avanty-gardy world. I make no claim to "best of >timespan<", nor do I wish to extend my cultural hegemony over your thought-body through colonial assertions of legitimating violence. Instead, this is a stack I would give to a clever friend outside the scene just as much as I'd show to a colleague to make sure she'd not missed a few gems. Forthwith -- and without further comment --:

Rachel Zolf, Human Resources.

The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser

Eugene Ostashevsky, Infinite Recursor or the Bride of DJ Spinoza

A Bernadette Mayer Reader

American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics

Lisa Robertson, XEclogue

Sarah Lang, The Work of Days

Meg Hamill, Death Notices

Katie Degentesh, Anger Scale

Jennifer Moxley, The Middle Room

There are many ways to get a hold of these books. If you are lucky enough to live near a bookstore that respects and supports the poetry community -- off the top of my head, I can only think of a few in the United States, hello Clay -- that should be your first stop. But should you find yourself berift, you can get them on amazon.

And that's where you can help out absent magazine at the same time. If you do buy these books by clicking on the links above to get to amazon, absent will receive a kickback of 6% of the purchase price.

Running absent magazine is very cheap. We have hosting fees, and we are also running an ad in Boog (coming soon to a hipster near you.) All told, we run at the most a few hundred a year. Most importantly, in the coming months, Irwin will need a lot of beer to keep his coding skills at the white hot level of insanity that we like to call "the zone."

That's not entirely true. Irwin doesn't program drunk. The guys who wrote Internet Explorer, on the other hand, were high. My brother totally heard this from a guy who worked there.

One of my own personal goals with absent has been to get us to the point where we can pay contributors for their efforts, and so surplus -- beyond hosting and Boog -- revenue will be directed to that end.

-- Simon DeDeo, co-editor, absent magazine

points on poems & punctuation

2007-11-27T09:07:00.000-05:00

[Guest blogging on rhubarb this Tuesday morning is my impossibly learned companion, Julianne Werlin, an expert on many things including the Renaissance, Thomas Hobbes, and punctuation marks.]

Paul Valéry's definition of poetry — "the poem, a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense" — does not strike me as a bad one. Its greatest strength, perhaps, is its inclusivity — for it seems quite likely that we might note that same fraught pause in the oral epic of the Kyrgyz and in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (probably an extreme example of the phenomenon). Admirable in scope, then, but perhaps lacking in specificity. For what Valéry's definition ignores is writing and its very considerable effect on poetry. The question of punctuation in verse reminds us that in order to repair this neglect, we have to add a third term: to sound and sense, then, sight.

I think it is getting more difficult to make Valéry's elision all the time, but it is still just possible (we've all seen it done), and this despite a contemplative pause spanning nearly four centuries — four centuries, that is, since English literature was able to produce a poet like George Herbert. Not that Herbert himself was, as far as we know, much of a punctuator; aside from printers, humanists, and lawyers, few people were in his day. But Herbert's shape poems (altars, wings) serve as the most emphatic "look!" possible. They are simply impossible to imagine in a culture that is not largely literate (there is no medieval Herbert) because they are in no sense mere transcriptions; the poem itself is a written artifact.

And yet. Herbert uses rhyme, writes in various meters, uses alliteration, assonance; in short, nearly every possible form of structured repetition of sound is at his disposal. The conclusion Herbert's poetry leads us to, I think, is the extent to which one of the major functions of poetry in a literate culture is to mediate between the written and oral, exploring their frequently problematic relationship. End rhyme itself, as a poetic device, suggests as much, in its reliance, on the one hand, on aural repetition and on the other, on the unit of the line, a written feature — the line is reinforced by the sound of the rhyme, the rhyme is made possible by layout.

This mediation is much more thoroughgoing than might initially appear. It is not just a question of space — the space of the page — being transformed to time, of the visual in interplay with the phonological; at least, not in any simple sense. An example: writing, according Jack Goody, a theorist of literacy, tends to use fewer personal pronouns than speech. It is, Goody concludes, less personalized, less contextualized. Here, as elsewhere, poetry has a special part to play — for what, after all, is the lyric I, if not an exquisite attempt on the part of poetics to have it both ways?

To return, then, to punctuation. In poetry, punctuation is one more means by which poets transverse the divide between writing and speech. Adorno was not wrong in comparing punctuation marks to traffic lights (though his contention that they are the prototypes of traffic lights may be rather too much of a good thing). I don't mean to suggest that punctuation is just a guide to speech, a perspective that has led many to think of punctuation marks as simply pauses transcribed. That would only make sense if written poetry itself were simply transcription, which anyone familiar with, for example, enjambment — a topic recently discussed on this page by its author — knows it is not.

Instead, at times aural, at times syntactic, punctuation marks hesitate at the intersection of the two spheres; they are often the kind of thing Geoffrey Nunberg called an 'acoustic image'. But they are also guide to interpreting syntactic structure, and as such they have a role to play in another characteristic feature of writing, and of contemporary poetry: the preference for subordinate over coordinate constructions. Punctuation is most necessary in these sorts of construction, and most regular (hence it is easier to explain when to use a semi-colon than a comma). But even the most syntactic mark cannot, in poetry, escape playing a role in meter, or ending a line, or emphasizing a caesura.

In the essentially unspeakable sentences of the modern novel (cf. Ann Banfield), sentences written from a perspective too diffuse ever to be embodied, punctuation has become quite regular in its application, because there is no, or very little, navigation between the written and spoken. But in poetry, where it is everywhere necessary, they can serve as a kind of a compass: comma is a compromise between sound and syntax; period juxtaposes sentence to line, and both may stand in contrast to phrase.

The particular function of punctuation in poetry also explains why the use of marks is so much more variable than in prose, why, depending on the emphasis of a particular poet or tradition, points can skew heavily toward the visual or aural or syntactic. Take, for instance, the American tradition. American poetry, as a poetics of landscape, has always had a particularly intimate relationship with its visual element.

It's practically a truism at this point to note that the expansive lines of a Whitman are at least as much about a relation to the blank space of the page as to meter; Eliot's troubled relation to the visual aspect of punctuation is apparent enough in The Waste Land; and then of course there is e e cummings. As an orthographer, he sometimes seems to have the renunciative zeal of a high school student who's just discovered atheism, but of course his work has a much more complex relation to the page than such an impression might suggest. His experiments are finally about emphasizing the visual aspects of verse; to that end, they frequently substitute space for punctuation marks. And it is probably no coincidence either that an American, that is, John Berryman, should prove the most insistent and perfect manipulator of &, a mark whose use is purely a visual decision, or that open field poetry is an American invention.

What the visual emphasis in American poetic punctuation demonstrates is the extent to which different approaches are possible in verse. To this extent, verse at once looks back to the Renaissance — when punctuation, part way through the process of standardization, for a moment opened into many avenues — and forward, to the fact that real linguistic innovation is, probably for the first time in history, occurring through writing, the inevitable result of large scale written communication within and across education and dialectical boundaries. To the problem of the relation between the written and the oral, then, poetry offers prescient answers; and punctuation, with its complex and varied repertoire of signals, is one of the chief means of articulating this response.

— Julianne Werlin

Atoosa Rubenstein does not like the avant garde

2007-11-14T18:20:00.000-05:00

Atoosa Rubenstein has not only declined to be my "friend" on facebook, but also has ignored an invitation to join the increasingly inaccurately named absent magazine facebook group.

There's a lot going on here. I used to think that Atoosa's provocative "alpha kitty" interventions, after her departure from ~~Sulphur~~ [on edit: Seventeen], could be read productively as a flarfing of the New York social environment. A kind of "recovery action" that resurfaces, through the use of automatic devices, the ideologies of late capitalism, Atoosa's work is pròject that projècts.

In Atoosa's case, this automatism is achieved through the computer-like — in the originary sense of "one who computes" — machinery of the P.R. industry. It is the very abandonment of authentic subjecthood that makes her critique so radical. Or so I thought. Really, I've had to rethink a lot of things here. For example, is something true simply because I say it is? What if I just really like saying it? Does that add epistemological force?

For easy comparison, consider Atoosa and Gertrude Stein. These two people are not really like each other. No word yet on Tinsley Mortimer, however. If we put her on the absent masthead, and she sued, would that be like a continuation of her work? Would we become co-authors?

Talking about New York socialites in this fashion can be fraught terrain. Do we really understand each other? How can we, when we each see each other through layers and layers of smoked glass — the glass of mutual misunderstanding? On the one hand, you are beautiful and famous. On the other, I spent all day, while waiting for my colleague to call about the paper we're trying to release, reading gawker.

To that end, I am releasing the following open letter, using this template.

Dear Tinsley Mortimer and other members of the New York socialite community,

In the last few years, I have written about the US experimental poetry scene, on my blog, rhubarb is susan, and elsewhere in online and print publications. For that reason, I'll refer to myself in the first person plural from here on out.

One of the things our work does is end up being a catalogue of what’s missing; a catalogue of some of the limits of a mostly unfabulous experimental poetry scene. We see a myopic lack of attention to fashion designers, lunches at that café near the Whitney, gallery openings with YBAs, internships with glossy magazines and a lack of collective action. We need more people like you.

We use this letter to ask people to write to us with suggestions about how to overcome this. Our intention is to try and compile a bunch of these suggestions for publication in order to start a conversation.

Would you be interested in being a part of this conversation?

Our plan right now is to start this conversation somewhere North of 59th street, but definitely South of 86th. East side please.

There are several ways you could help us.

We are looking for local co-editors for different regions (right now, organized by avenue) to gather brief statements from local socialites about their communities. Would you be willing to be one? What this means is that you would gather together some responses from people in your area around this issue. You could gather as few as two or as many as twenty. It would be up to you. We like the idea of more but we’re flexible.

If you are not interested, do you think you could suggest someone who is?

If we were to get these responses, we then would need to get them translated into opaque and boring prose that emphasises how much we read before dropping out of graduate school or being given a pity-pass on a nonsensical dissertation. If you wanted to do this work with us (like if you translated these into "English" that we could then smooth as necessary), that would be great. We might be able to pay you a small fee. If you don’t want to do it, we can probably pay someone else to translate it.

There are two ways we think it might be easiest for co-editors to get these responses. One is to just ask friends. The other is to put an ad in a newspaper or journal like Jen Hofer did when she was editing her anthology of Mexican writing. If you are interested in putting an ad, again, we might be able to pay for the ad. It depends on how much it costs.

We think an ad might say something like this:

"TINSLEY MORTIMER AND FRIENDS: TELL POETS
We’re a group of writers who are curious what it is like to be a woman in _____. What should we know about the living and working conditions of ____ women poets? What can be done? Is there anything to be done together? Send an email to glas[at]freeshell.org.”

But you could do whatever you thought was most appropriate.

We’d also like to know if there is anything you think we should say to poets. At some point we will probably do a similar process — solicit responses from our friends and place ads to reach those we do not yet know — who do not attend the after-hours parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and any feedback you can share would be helpful.

If all of this seems too much, then can we talk you into just sending us a response? Or if you think of anyone you know who might be interested in doing this work, forward this and let us know.

Our deadline on this is somewhat flexible but not infinite. Our goal is to get this material into book form sometime in 2009. We would like to start getting responses sometime between now and spring of 2008.

Hope to hear from you.

Best,

Simon DeDeo, and possible future legal counsel

attention span

2007-11-14T11:48:00.000-05:00

Steve Evans has been gradually putting the 2007 "attention span" lists online; you can read mine here. One of the most interesting aspects of the list is his summary statistics: which books, authors, and publishers are most frequently referenced. As in years past, I expect the statistics to be dominanted by books published outside of the contest system I have come to deplore; something worth thinking about for those who are unsure of whether to go "that route."

I expect my picks of Eugene Ostashevsky, Lisa Robertson and Cole Swensen to pop up more than once, and I do hope that Cathy Park Hong's (incidental) "quietist" signifiers haven't turned people off looking at her as well. I split my list between, on the one hand, people I am reading that other poets are as well, and on the other hand, things more unusual on my shelf in the past year that have been determining influences in my own critical and creative work.

Slavoj Žižek, incidentally, has an article on one of "my" books, Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding. The "German" tradition that Slavoj hooks into is generally unsympathetic to the kind of anarchist ideas that I find in Simon's book. I think Slavoj's reading of Simon — anarchist as superego — is deeply unfair to the complicated epistemologies that go down there. Sometimes Slavoj is intellectually provocative (his essay in the most recent Soft Targets is, though I disagree, really terrific) but not here.

In the end, I think my sympathies with Simon's approach to "subjects and state" are in part due to my pacifist convictions, which come out of my engagement with Quakerism. I find the way that the European left engages — and, though usually at the safety of metaphor, sympathises — with violence deeply problematic. There seems to be a reluctance to adhere to violence a moral content determined by something larger. (That's a civil war era grenade on the right there, by the way quite a beautiful and enigmatic object.)

I find that Situationists, and indeed many anarchists, consider violence to be a powerful metaphor. I, on the other hand, try to "read out" this notion from my own thinking.

It reminds me of something George Fox said to William Penn. Penn was accustomed, as a gentleman of the time, to carrying a ceremonial sword, and asked Fox if that was acceptable given the Quaker peace testimony. Fox's response was that he should carry the sword "as long as he was able," which I consider an injunction to question not only violence, but the rhetoric of it as well.

Stacey Levine : The World of Barry

2007-11-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

(excerpts, from The Clear Cut Future, pub. Clear Cut Press, 2003)

Barry was everywhere and so easy to marry, full of springtime, which is always hope and trust.

...

Barry's vehicle is large as a small house, with lush, curving steel flanks of midnight green, exhaust pipe thick as a fireman's hose, its mouth pouring white volumes of fog and upon this mouth I must briefly affix my own mouth, in order to best appreciate life, I think; though Barry has never instructed me to do this, nor have TV broadcasts, either, yet it is truer than god or the atmosphere—

...

Barry and I are very thirsty these days; dust from the warring earth flies through our throats and perhaps we wait for the world to mature, to catch up with us; the back side of god is too strange, too vulnerable to hold all of life, Barry worries as he drives; I laugh at him, feigning anger in a spirit of play, though the danger of our games is what frightens Barry and me—

@

Posting these three reviews -- Stacey, Jo Ann and Kevin -- now from the Butler Library at Columbia, from which you can see the tents of the student hunger strikers. I'm disappointed -- but not shocked -- to see that the expected nastiness about these students on the Right is mirrored by a casual distain from the hipsters smoking on the library steps.

The main objection seems to be -- despite the fact that the students are themselves keeping a low profile -- that it's a self-indulgent piece of look-at-me-theater. I doubt the mohawked brat -- the most vocal of the complainers -- has any idea of what is going down within the tents.

That said, they do have supporters in the community, including Dennis Dalton, a professor who has joined the strike. And not all the library smokers seem to be judging them according to the standards of the latest indie rock band.

The Clear Cut Future is the last of the three books I picked up in San Francisco. I've seen work by this press before -- they published (and here publish more of) work by the strange "Office for Soft Architecture" which, as far as I can tell, is a corporation invented by Lisa Robertson to issue "research reports" that begin like this:

The history of scaffolding has been dismantled. We can't write this history because there are so few documents -- only a slim sheaf of photographs. So we study the construction of the present and form theories. We use the alphabet as a ladder.

One thing that must be said is that the Clear Cut Press produces beautiful books. I don't know if it's the weather up there in Oregon, or perhaps over in Tokyo where the text is bound, but their books have the heft and palm-sized dimensions of the hymnals old ladies carried to my church when I was a child.

Stacey's work is billed as a "story", but I'm going to issue an access card to the poetic avant garde because basically the prose-fiction of the contemporary moment is so broadly dire, unexamined, cacophanated by the unexamined-I that she may require refugee status with us.

Stacey being a visitor to our poym shores makes it difficult to "read" her in the context of What People Do When They Do Prose. I'm just not as hooked-in to the debates over there in the land where books have agents and readers. The Story of Barry is so common today, however, that it's impossible not to read Stacey as pushing off that horrible "post-feminist" cliché, and that's where I'll start.

The Story of Barry — what I'll take to be the ghost text of Stacey's work here — is I think an invention of the male mind though there will always be the Uncle Toms among women who will contribute their interpretations and back cover photos. Barry is a lawyer, a Junior Partner in the Firm, the breadwinner for a yet-childless marriage. Barry is a good man, somewhat rough around the edges but in essence working-class aiming for the upper-middle. He lacks the sensitivity to react emotionally to art.

He is Man the Provider, and he stands next to the narrator of The Story of Barry, his wife, who recounts her own self-doubt as the opposite of Barry: economically useless, supported by men, the passive recipient of emotions generated by art, literature, nature. She knows her husband to be insufficient to her needs -- although accounts differ on what he's like in bed, he is sometimes rude and uncaring, sometimes caring too much -- but stays with him for many reasons.

The reasons are social, economic, familial, psychoanalytic. Why those reasons have force -- why the woman resigns herself to an existence she protests -- is what makes these books moral primers.

The Story of Barry is very familiar because we've heard it so many times before. We've heard it in Susan Minot's work, we've heard it in Jim Crace as well -- it's a kind of anti-feminist tract that today is labelled "post-feminist" -- a sort of co-opted Yellow Wallpaper for the Compact Disc generation. What, in other words, the most useless of the iPod generation will grow into when they buy in Park Slope.

There are many ways to break The Story. From the Yellow Wallpaper you can go towards Kathy Acker, say, and -- to debase Acker's work -- talk about dicks and cunts and cash and splash all kind of fluids on the sides of Barry's car. Stacey takes a different route to remake The Story into The World; a kind of Swiftian remix where the qualities of the feminine are exaggerated into a kind of quiet discomfort, a low-grade migraine that is emphasised by the uneven paragraphs that each begin the same: Barry, Barry, Barry.

It is, in other words, a selective deployment of the same self-consciously lush and "beautiful" prose of someone like Susan Minot. It was Susan who in her high-concept book Rapture -- which takes place during a blow-job -- had her female narrator summarize "that was worship." I went back and forth on whether to print the final paragraph, because it's deeply NSFR (Not Safe For Readers), but here we go:

God he was lovely. God he was sweet. God. God. God... Yes, it was starting again, the humming of the blood. She let it carry her. What was that Oscar Wilde quote?... She ran her fingers lower on him. She flicked him softly... Was this going to take her where she hoped to go?... He was getting closer. Was she gripping harder or was that him getting bigger?... She was creeping slowly to the centre of herself. He was the bridge she took to get there... Her mouth was battered. Everything around her was lifted and golden and electric... Her face flushed deeply... "That was worship," she said.

It's Stacey's tactic to take these kind of absurd, force-fed moments and push them not into parody, but towards something far less comfortable: while Susan tries to make the claim that an "ordinary" woman would regard oral sex as worship, Stacey torques her narrator far enough out that "god" creates not cringe-worthy discomfort but a deeper kind of unsettlement.

All the apparatus is here -- Barry's story is drawn well enough that it could indeed serve as a cover letter for the latest Minot-derivative -- and Stacey's reworking is subtle, not violent, not dramatic. I think in a casual reading -- the one I first gave Stacey -- it is quiet enough to disappear. But perhaps the signal, the brightest signal here, is that Stacey does give her voice a intellectual power.

What contrasts the two most obviously is, in other words, that while Susan's women are natural, taking their speech patterns from the suburban cafeteria, Stacey makes the right choice, the bold choice, to give her speaker the patterning of the poetic moment -- those repeated Barrys -- that leave the reader with an assertion, that continues through the eight pages of the text, of an engagement beyond that forced on her by Man the Provider.

Kevin Magee : Interpreter

2007-11-11T14:02:00.001-05:00

[for Steve Abbott
(from Recent Events, pub. Hypobololemaioi, 1995)

Stand up from the dead, the dead works
in my trouble saying arise
my only portion, disquietments
ill and absent from the ordnance

The fear we come with new and dangerous opinions
the sum of whose days spent in a room
struck dumb by the authority of
books, fare thee well then and cry for your mother

This is a word that
(if there is a heaven)
there will be an author for

The poor child gives her
money to a poorer child
This is phrased as a simple faith

[Variant]

This da was brought news of that
and much distracted, thoughts rising
stand up from the dead, from dead works

and those loose stragglings into other things
my only portion, prevalency
in my trouble saying arise

much disquietments
These things open a gap to unbelief
and savor of its sweetness in a manner

ill and absent from the ordnance
So that my spot
is not that spot

@

While I don't know much about Kevin Magee, his book comes with a boatload of markers that place him in the middle of various impossible Venns. Some of the work in the book comes from Juliana Spahr's Chain; others come from The Capilano Review in Vancouver, which hooks in to the Kootenay school from whence we get (among others) Lisa Robertson.

And then there's a strange piece excerpted from the Kootenay gang when they came to Buffalo -- a poetic statement by Emily Greenley which accompanied her submission to the undergraduate writing prize at Harvard. Emily committed suicide in 1990, but was around long enough to know William Corbett -- and Kevin Magee, who quotes her:

The unbelievably pretty ladies
had a good bit of luck

That were born with a body
that would accomodate fucks;

That's heavy stuff for the mandarins at Harvard's English Department, where a sort of retiring innocence was often the rule. There's a little bit of Emily's work around the web, but as far as I can tell no special issue or centralized repository.

Kevin's book is a bit of a sourcebook as well, in other words, throwing off bits of light and spacing out poems with page-long quotations from Spenser, Hopkins and Melville. It makes doing the usual rhubarb work of excerpting more difficult because the book is itself a context.

I was just talking about Jo Ann's linebreaks and one continuity between Kevin and Jo Ann is that Kevin is, as well, more than a little unconcerned with the musical tactics of that formatting technique. His lines here read by the stanza, a kind of elegantly brushed down prose block. Which is an aesthetic decision I think links in to the Spenser that opens the volume:

Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,
Wherein my feeble barke is tossed long,
Far from the oped hauen of reliefe,
Why do thy cruell billowes beat so strong,
And thy moyst mountaines each on others throng,
Threatening to swallow vp my fearefull life?
O do they cruell wrath and spightfull wrong
At length allay, and stint thy stormy strife,
Which in these troubled bowels raignes, and rageth rife

It is only in the 20th century, I think, that the obsession with the line-break began. Perhaps it starts with the junking of meter by writers who were unwilling to abandon every formal device; when you read Spenser you see how the line-breaks are integrated into the argument-making form and just another device.

But while it's possible -- of course -- to write without meter, it's impossible to write without line-breaks. And I think the responsibility poets in the grand vers libre tradition have to face up to is how to be as serious about the musicality of the break. Not just to take it as a gift from the tradition, but to create other musics that can compete with it.

When you don't do this, you end up with a kind of jargly mash of end-stopping and enjambment, something harsh and yet strangely unprovocative, almost as dull as the blank verse people churned out before the "liberation" told them not to bother any more.

Meanwhile, you can see why Spenser "had it easy"; the argument he makes bumps up against so many formalized sonic techniques that there is not the stuttering of the end line. The achievement of Kevin's poem here -- and of much of the work in the book -- is I think his return to "easy argument"; the way in which he asks to be read without the head-bashing of end-of-line obsession.

Interestingly, and by-the-by, a later poem quotes a page of obsessive John Clare -- the kind of person who can do the exact opposite: write in unbroken prose but create ghostly breaks faster than a two-beat line.

Here's another poem to end the review, and perhaps an even clearer demonstration of Kevin's "easy" technique, of how he lets the line-break lie without investing it with the heavy semantic-sonic freight of the "post-avant":

VAULT

It is by crossing the seven terraces

in as many hands the manuscripts

itinerant continued by, extracted out

and you have called that Cause made for you manifestly

amicitiae, testimonies of our love

penitentiae, a strict course of life

The seed of you in every virtue

and all that mark hath made

adorned with double rows of Rose

inconverted muting far from averring

some few broken reports of those

and other acts of Power and Force