PhillySound: new poetry

(photo of Brenda Iijima by Kerri Sonnenberg)

Welcome to issue #4 of PhillySound Feature, an occasional blog-zine which focuses on the work of a single poet. Members of our blog collective alternate editing issues and choosing poets to feature.

To read previous PhillySound features visit the zine's ARCHIVE.

Our fourth issue is dedicated to the very fine work of poet BRENDA IIJIMA.
Please enjoy,
CAConrad,
editor of issue #4

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Brenda Iijima is the author of AROUND SEA (O BOOKS, 2004) and several chapbooks, most recently, EARLY LINOLEUM (FURNITURE PRESS, 2004) and COLOR AND ITS ANTECEDENTS (YEN AGAT, 2004). ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIMS is forthcoming from LITMUS PRESS in early 2006. She runs PORTABLE PRESS AT YO-YO LABS from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn where she has lived for the last 7 years.

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From ECO QUARRY BELLWETHER by Brenda Iijima

Flock of seagulls hover in the embroidered dawn
        Glows the cathedral air
Peacefulness of creamy orange
        Salt splashed metamorphosis snowfield
Touch approaching festivals

( )

        Two texts usher in congeniality as various specifics
Of meaning begin to meld. Essentiality becomes
        Phantasmal. Infinite trajectories hone in on strings
Sublimation of mercurial zero

( )

Tenderness tied to this immediacy

( )

        Unfolding

( )

So, among the brook and hemlock outcroppings
        Wildness unhindered and spiraling
Dance spur beyond an abyss of an act itself
        Animal vitality freely—objects are blind effects
The sun tarnishes the feigned
        Nirvana veil

( )

Mountebank
        Fu fighters
Yá de l’ Un

( )

        With this message of self erasure
Read theoretically
        Determinism unraveling spool
Glued to the gap in symbolism
        Architectural fetish, self combustion

( )

Air brushed full name ozone
        Other names peel their veneers

( )

Summer tinge
        Heat
Lake's dimness loved
        Loved

( )

Wallow a nude whole
        We, marrow
Lounge spawns trust and timber
        We, lasting

( )

Pardon o parcel
        Immediate land
Expanses of sumptuous skin and brain
        Slash is residual
Every covering, coating, stroke
        Cadastral

( )

        In this
Conversion of paper

( )

        Sight recognition flight recognition
Extraneous trajectory migratory
        Song birds gave way to acid rain
Quietist of forest      quell

( )

        Under the underbrush lush spruce moss mulch
Pinecones jostle portrait
        Your stones take on resemblances to magic

( )

Pulsating ratios
        The paper screen is torn
Household effects enjoy flashing scenery
        Bluish summit of reliability
With reference to this dragging wind
        At night, difficult to know the season

( )

So it is at the gates of hell
        Giant ants pushing out
The acropolis bears the drama
        So thick of itself

( )

Then awareness of the giant condition about to seal coastal
        Fate. Fishing villages dissolve into murky tumbles
Of surf. The earth raked.
        Water encircled incoherently

( )

For
        As long as the horses survive
For
        As long as the bamboo grove
Survives
        For
As long as the song birds
        Survive
For as long as the

( )

        Torque, blanche
Where border where speech where
        Erosion, erect, erection, pinnacle

( )

Empty
        Clear
Hidden

( )

        What seems to go on
Forever
        As if forever
Bound for

( )

        I've been happy there echolocate
In awe

( )

        Bird telling lands since the mouth was born
And shook to pieces. Treasures of light in the beak
        Shimmers from cave to valley and sculptures
Theme of noise. Economic pressure. Chromium,
        Expertise. Besides, these mechanisms totter
Toward night. Terra Cotta. Sepia. Red arrow on the plot
        Pheromones. Grope cold clouds, carcasses
Even a horse joke. Frightening in a million bundles
        Give or take. Rhythm in relation to death.
Night is anything but night. Death follows

( )

        River carries on land to another as a voice does
Another passes loosely
        Blur

( )

Strata clearest

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SHORT INTERVIEW WITH POET Brenda Iijima
Questions by CAConrad


"Bike through emollients bite the thickness

Amputation

On living

In a mouth"

    --Brenda Iijima, from AROUND SEA


QUESTION:
Brenda, your book AROUND SEA has tones, not in a descriptive sense with your words, but actual ringing tones in the reading of these poems. They tone up to tune up. From my reading, your bigger message seemed to hit me at "page ninety-one". Or a new look and listen I should say at the poems as a whole. It's here you invoke The Scientific American Cyclopedia of Formulas, 1921. The process of building an actual mirror, from the silver and/or other metals, to the warning of how access to air will corrode if one process is taken over another.

The reader here is forced into the nearest bathroom to contemplate molecules and their reflections, and maybe more important is digesting the responsibility of the power of reflection in general, asking to find the break in the path behind the mirror itself. It's this page where your hawk carries us out, so to speak. Suddenly it's not so much the question about the mysteries of the world but the mysteries of our Selves which block the mysteries of the world, and, every, one, and, thing.

Asking, how could we BE HERE and not know the importance of every sustaining, living being beyond our human family? It's here that previous pages become newly seen epiphanies, like,

"And the Magellanic Clouds
NGC 598 familial extension

scansion

like ghosts
'cause we're so pale

half the time

Turbulent cobweb
elliptical cup of laughing gas"

Capricorn is the advanced Earth sign. It is the last island before air and water take the zodiac home. How do you as a Capricorn see poems as your Land, the AROUND SEA as spiritual tool for some awareness of WHO WE ARE in the race to preserve this world?

BRENDA IIJIMA:
I am a Capricorn goat (goat is ascribed to the lunar year in which I was born, so I am a double goat)—a conflicted sign—because at least half of my being is given to capricious joyousness, the other is involved in diligent, goal oriented struggle. The diligent side of my being is winning over, joyously because if there are contentious struggles going on that represent crises of magnitude; it is where I want to dedicate my energies—as a poet—as a civic individual. Just this morning it was reported on the radio that the reputed Klansman accused of participation in the murder of three civil rights activists is now being retried, 40 years after these crimes was committed. Edgar Ray Killen's trial came to a false stop when a sole jury member found it impossible to find an ordained Baptist minister guilty of such a crime. It has taken Philadelphia, Mississippi this long to formulate the most remote form of justice. Destructive forces move with such velocity and almost unhindered. It is puny to announce that I want to work for the resolution of these and other such issues. Writing's capacity is immeasurable and can't be sated.

Art for art's sake is a triviality when imminent matters express duress. When I write (what's seen to be) in an experimental mode, I don't feel that language is merely servicing my ideas—these meanings, rather language is acting holistically with the world that engenders it. The writing—to be vital, fecund, generative seems to need to participate in the world, not in a vacuum governed by cleverness, superficiality and solipsism. Entropy is the culmination of such institutional verse operating on aesthetic concerns alone. The effect is to tranquilize. Poetry that pursues its own lingual bonanza as a witticism seems formulated with cynicism and embedded in a fin de siècle stance I consider gratuitous. I never feel I am writing out of or in opposition to the New York School, Language Poetry—however these modes of writing are parsed and termed, etc., rather what can be present in all classification of writing—a disregard for tangibility. I can't fault philosophy or theory on these terms, after all they are exercises in showing the tangibility of language's existence, its experience, its relationships, its connectedness being-in-the-world. Philosophy justifies this position as best as it can. Language can't fly away but it can falsify. There seems to be such a proliferation. I am interested in language that has an anticipatory quality. Otherwise it seems insidiously dead on arrival. Plastic in the undesirable sense. Equivalences are not what they seem to be!

Language can be stubborn as it advances glibly while dulling itself as it is made to express the status quo or quotient gesture that immediately separates from the individual transcribing such a statement—multiplicities and nuanced specificities get denuded. The vitality of representation gets completely stranded when it is given over to bulwark symbol and prefabricated stunts of conceptual or categorical standpoint. I am interested in perceived boundaries, thresholds, their insistences. Phases too. AROUND SEA is partially a study in how language dissipates and reactivates—psychically, physically, theoretically, etc.,—manifold potentialities encompassing and stretching outwardly toward, beyond the usual vanishing points, permeating without finality. I hope there is an expansiveness about AROUND SEA. And that it is shakable—being presently shaken. Yes, I pondered scale, proportion.

QUESTION:
Brenda, some of how your AROUND SEA challenges reminds me of John Muir saying, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitches to everything else in the Universe." And so soon after Muir's gift to us all by helping preserve the land and trees, we are faced with our present government's total disregard of Muir's legacy. You have been doing your part in helping fight the Bush administration's allowance of commercial logging within the boundaries of the Giant Sequoia National Monument. It's almost incredible that it could even be possible that land Trusts are being breached. Please tell us about your petition to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, and what's the progress report of stopping this madness?

BRENDA IIJIMA:
In an effort to prove that there isn't consensus about the many blatantly destructive policies that are being proposed and forwarded concerning the environment I decided that I had to respond with a personal letter of plangent protest to as many issues as I possibly could—still this didn't seem enough. I came upon the idea of mass producing a personalized letter and calling it instant petitioning. I hand out letters within the various communities I belong to. The recipient of the letter need only send it in the envelope I have provided. The contact feels excellent. It is a vital exchange. On the average I am able to generate 200-1,000 letters regarding a specific issue. My goal is to concentrate on at least four pressing issues a month and to make sure that the correspondence reaches representatives who could actively address the situation at large. I am hoping that others feel renewed energy to speak out (or is it up?) and that this information gathers people with commitment to press for environmental considerations (in the very least). I am hoping that this approach curbs the sense of beleaguerment. This project has helped me become more fluent in how this government operates and I feel the functionality of the individual, so long as enough individuals aren’t acquiescing by not expressing something constructively to their elected officials. Lobbying groups that hire lawyers to challenge various dubious situations are excellent antidotes, but I do believe that individuals should also endeavor to bring concerns to the attention of their elected officials (who have office hours, email addresses and mailing addresses for precisely this interaction). The environment is a common denominator. Without its health all other concerns are moot. I am not naively excited, but I am infused with passion and increasingly more knowledgeable about the environment and what it means to protect it. It happens not to be it, rather it is us and all the myriad beings that have us as their care takers because how can an animal challenge a human. Rhetoric has no place in these letters. This is language with a motivation for survival. If you'd like a packet of the current spate of letters going out, please email me: yoyolabs@hotmail.com

QUESTION:
Brenda, what was your process in writing AROUND SEA?

BRENDA IIJIMA:
My initial impetus was to try to present environment without human intervention—a ponderous impossibility. I couldn't conjure landscape without the bracketing of language because of language’s formulation and construction—how it has been used to engage in the world. I wanted to see within symbols given to the land as representation, to place these recordings of setting upon, naming, coding, acquiring in contrast to land—all that is—environment—nature. To spin these systems. To match deliberation with deliberation. Each naming occasion was as much an occasion for intrusion/invasion however mild it appeared. Mostly violent and acquisition driven. Reclaim the land for the land. Acknowledging the uses of language—rhetorical forms. I set out to familiarize myself with every discovery narrative—a genre with a very pointed political goal. The double bind of exposure. And the sort of double blindness of cataloging and intellectual knowing. Fractal encounters created this conglomeration and outline with pock marked holes and other features.

QUESTION:
What poetry are you working on now, and what can you share with us about it?

BRENDA IIJIMA:
I am acclimating and regrouping (directly) after the experience of writing ECO QUARRY BELLWETHER. Presently I am in transition. Other projects continue on but having spent the better part of this year in process with ECO QUARRY BELLWETHER I guess I’ll mention a few resounding intentions I had and however much of its sense I can convey without resorting to exegesis.

The manuscript consists of four pillar-like sections buttressing a vision of sensuality and political discourse. I wanted to present a simultaneity of the political interplaying with vatic, multifarious, careening, incompressible language of the environment which is experienced sensually. A breakthrough occurred the night I was fortunate enough to hear back-to-back readings by Nicole Brossard followed by Alice Notley (at two separate venues—I dashed from one to the other by taxi, barely in time). Nicole Brossard read with complete dedication to the emotive, sensual interactive realm of the mind melded with registrations of desire manifested in feelings. This came across as daring, rare and utterly beautiful. Alice Notley read work fervently, as if she was an emissary from a camp of Trojan women, giving prophecy, warning of the ramifications actions have—fiercely, boldly, incredibly searing in her proclamations. Their voices felt very present to me while writing of this document. Waves of confidence flooded me. I realized this manifestation by ushering intermittencies, unruly variables, careening, wild, open language—as much receptivity as can be conjured. Although I feel myself to be an autonomous self, evermore, with the realities of total global environmental duress and the arising of a kind of totalitarian media domination coming out of a glutted global commerce run by a few magnates and supported by law, I feel this tumultuous unruliness in opposition to this. No way can I bar myself from this avalanche of steely power pushing for domination only to bring on more chaos. I should itemize the various degrees of this and how it is being played out—I will in a forthcoming essay! Meanwhile there is the array and disarray of words and their meanings and logic that sticks residually sometimes dubiously to semblances of words, phrases. Previous work felt like I was hovering. Now I am surging and plunging and also wrestling. But I wish I were swimming.

QUESTION:
Brenda, if you were given the opportunity to spend an hour as a visiting poet with a group of high school kids who are interested in poetry, and you could say, ask, do nearly anything you wanted, how would you spend that hour?

BRENDA IIJIMA:
Anything to avoid dogmatic recitation and boredom. Perhaps we would give the funds away (to whoever would need them) on a long walk anywhere—determined by our mutual moods. I am a proponent of a self-study regimen as far as poetry is concerned. Schooling is for those who want to be schooled—need not be the obligatory or ubiquitous way poetry methods and attitudes are acquired. We'd be very much attuned to language in all its uses. And we'd comment on what we saw and said. Sure we'd share our reverie for books. Beyond that I wouldn't plan a thing.

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COMMUNITY COMMENTARY
A few poets were asked how they feel about Brenda's poetry. This is the collection of their replies, many thanks to those who participated.

TERENCE DIGGORY:
"A sentence can't handle this fall." That is Brenda Iijma's latest summary of her position, from a section of a recent manuscript entitled "Tertium Organum," after P. D. Ouspensky. "Fall" has all the mythic resonance of the Biblical story and expresses Iijima's sense that she is writing out of/to a fallen condition. But for this Wittgensteinian Steinian who inherits the German language through her family background, Fall is also the "case" that is the world of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist ("The world is everything that is the case."). Iijma's insistence that the sentence can’t handle this world points to later Wittgenstein, philosophically, and to the Objectivists, poetically. Language is inadequate to represent the world, but in poetic language we can sometimes catch the fleeting presence of the world in its music, its movement. The musical quality of Iijima's work distances it from Language poetry, ties it to a lyrical tradition with ancient roots. Its primal nature is suggested in the image of the ocean that is Iijima's image for the world that escapes the sentence: Around Sea, not About Sea, is the title of her first trade publication.

Here is a stanza from Around Sea:

             A numeral like zero
             holds the world up.
             But water itself
             goes way down, bottom
             of the bowl.

The human world is upheld by signs, but signs themselves, vessels of meaning, float on "dark oceanic / doubt," as Iijima calls it in an earlier poem, "Believe" (from Person (a)). In contrast to the uplift of signs, water’s fall leads to a natural world, the world that cannot be contained in a sentence, though the impossibility of saying that uncontainment is discovered in the shape of the bowl that Iijima limns as false bottom of the abyss. We cannot read this world, but we can hear it in the depth of the vowel "o" that echoes throughout the stanza’s closing lines, in contrast to the consonant "l" that persistently marks sonic boundaries in the opening lines and at the very end of the stanza, in the "l" of "bowl." What is lost in the sentence might perhaps be recovered in sentience, if somehow we could feel the world "strange and un- / bridled" (Around Sea), not "clogged with familiarity" ("Tertium Organum"). Iijima struggles to break up the jam of log(o)s:

       Register fuzz, miasma
             Wobble jammed orchestration
       Detonates sounds to brood and oxidize candor
             Little animal hides one at a time
       No, mask like motions of totality troubling game
             River clogged with familiarity
       River circuits, sentience, river sentience

                          ("Tertium Organum")

----

ERICA KAUFMAN:
In the mission statement for Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Brenda Iijima describes her editorial process as, "I look for the utmost realization of the felicity of language. Urgency. Gorgeousness, lushness—most often sensuality and splendor additionally. Emotionally and politically loaded." This statement indicates the high level of pride and care Iijima takes in both the books she produces and the poems and artwork she creates. In the essay "INCLOSER," Susan Howe asks, "Does the printing [of a book] modify an author's intention, or does a text develop itself?" In Iijima's case, text and book co-develop, art melds with word, image with language, tangible with oratory.

Meredith Quartermain describes Iijima as a "master crafter of soundscapes" and recognizes that in an Iijima poem "the potentialities of language are never forgotten." I would agree with these statements and add that Iijima is also queen of turning verbal to visual. In "Viewed from the Sea," she begins "2" with the line "yielding foliage as an idea," a unique enveloping of a visual word like "foliage" with active, more cerebral definers. Foliage goes beyond visual, beyond beauty, to an active ponderance.

In Around Sea's "A Poem for the Land," Iijima writes, "Telling this/ is like being/ tied to a tree/ in the garden." In these four short lines, Iijima sets up an entire scene and then subverts it. The image of a person as tied to a tree is somewhat familiar, but the addition of the garden image alters the entire poem. It is as if each word and line break are so carefully thought out, that every syllable in these poems resonates both in the eyes and in the mind. In "2," she strings together one word stanzas of odd pairings, "Seersucker/ Briefcase/ Sacred/ Animated."

Again I am reminded of Howe's "INCLOSER," and how she writes, "every statement is a product of collective desires and divisibilites." Iijima is able to negotiate between the individual and unique and the universal. As she writes in "ECO QUARRY BELLWETHER," "Only/ Is a quantity." Or, in "Roof Garden," "The claim of this brand is to subvert us/ to ecstasy." Silliman refers to this linguistic phenomenon in these poems as "the language that follows every "unlike."' And, when a vocabulary becomes new, a reader becomes submerged. And, this immersion in a familiar reborn is one to read again and again.

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LESLIE SCALAPINO:
Brenda Iijima's Around Sea is a poem that's a collection of numbered pieces—not to be described as a sequence, since the word "sequence" implies a transpiring in order. If one mixed up the numbered pieces composing Around Sea to read them in a different order, reading would be altered—yet the gesture of Iijima's text, or any of its parts, is not an unfolding occurring in its sequence. Neither the whole, nor a piece of it, goes forward or back, is vertical or horizontal, as movement of narration or of perception.
        The words in Around Sea are locations as such, and therefore spaces, without describing any location. They are thus "unlike" something else. Apparently Iijima traveled and the text reflects her actual movement at some time, but without referencing her movements or life. The use of many gerunds creates a sense of action being only in a present continually. One piece or segment (#1 on page 23) is a collection of 'unlike this' 'unlike that,' adding "Even now" as if to say 'even at present' is unlike 'it'. Even the present is unlike the present and/or is unlike what words are, hers or any. Or: even after time has gone by, the words are unlike their objects or any memories which are their referents.
        There are no thoughts or few thoughts in Around Sea, in that there being no locations, only words—the sense that words are devoid of complication by being an outside (as if words were the objects they cite, and are seen as never to be that), not reflecting the mind except as action or movement of it, but not being it—allows the mind to rest as one is reading, rest from constructing as imagining. Brenda Iijima's own mind, also, is not the subject, is noticeable only indirectly as a mind-action of play and things being placed together. For this reason, Around Sea is not only restful but there is a sense of clear sight of an aspect of an 'outside' that we cannot see in any other way. And which would change if this were 'technique' or a 'mode' that was repeated.
        If a thought or feeling is arising in Around Sea it is arrived at in reading as moving through sensory as spatial juxtapositions: as in the following first eight lines of #7, in which reading what are then (after reading the third line) judged (by the reader) to be posted signs, is followed by, but simultaneous with, "mesmerized"—which is followed by, but related to, knowing (which references feelings of other people who are not either the viewer or the reader):

             LOCK UP
             HEAVY VOLTAGE

             Mesmerized:             razorlike fencing

             Magnification of the combination             look up at the sky
             Through oculus slot              A lock
             State penitentiary                       PANOPTICON STAR

         You must know of this pent-up feeling         (#7, p. 47)

         Brenda Iijima's way of making no mind imposition on occurrence, yet the occurrences having a word order (as if an occurrence is 'found'—as, what it actually is—by the line or word order, while the words are unrelated to, in the sense of do not render, describe or narrate, the occurrence) is I think akin to Larry Eigner's work, at least Around Sea is.

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NATHANIEL A. SIEGEL:

If you stay over with Brenda she will make you a comfortable place to sleep. You can drift off to sleep thinking of sea shells stacked and photographed. You will want to look at everything in Brenda's home even the plaster is of interest. In the morning tea and juice and sunshine talking about let's see…the conversations are immediate fresh green ripe like vegetables please remember to eat right I am concerned about you. Brenda makes stuff the collage for a chapbook "you made that!" Her offspring take many forms take is wrong word MAKE poem MAKE reading MAKE dance MAKE vest MAKE book. Her companionship sits attentive present and restless-active- mind equal heart HER NATURE ocean rhythms HER HARK call advance in every direction connection PROTECTION ENVIRONMENT protection freedom PROTECTION OPEN SPACES and coverlets for dreams!

Friend note: this sentient sentiment is mailed post-haste time "I love Brenda in gold !"

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STACY SZYMASZEK:
Just a few pages into Brenda Iijima's Around Sea I knew that I was in the presence of a poet who comprehends both the luster and the multi-dimensionality of words. Iijima is a Word Worker, a facet of being a Poet that not every Poet values, or is able to so directly access. Her sonic dexterity has often been noted and extolled, but there is also a tandem graphic quality produced by her anagrammatical logic that inundates a reader's senses: cypress becomes papyrus, partaking becomes parking, gestures become lovers become flowers and sister becomes sinister. When patio becomes ratio, a shift so undemanding, yet disarming, I feel realigned with my reptilian brain. Lacking language, its impulses are instinctual and ritualistic. Iijima participates in the ritual of making a community of words that move us.

Every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space…

- Blake

Rereading Around Sea caused me to reread Blake, whose lexicon has been the topic of many studies. Iijima's text, like Blake's, insists that we meet and attend to words in their vertically fathomless force field. Iijima is also a visual artist and if you are familiar with the books she makes at Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs you may wonder how she might illuminate her own texts. I'm thinking in particular of her herbaceous illustrations of Jill Magi's Cadastral Map as well as the creature quagmire enriching Roberto Harrison’s Mola.

Congratulations to you Brenda! for being a prolific writer and publisher, and bows to CAConrad for conducting these celebrations of poets.

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BRENDA IIJIMA online:

from THE EASTVILLAGE.COM

from MILKMAG.ORG

from SHAMPOO

listen to her read on LAVAMATIC.COM

Meredith Quartermain's review of AROUND SEA

from THE BROOKLYN RAIL

from ART IN AMERICA (with Jack Kimball)

Below is a letter Eli Goldblatt is circulating,
CAConrad

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Dear Friends,

I have been involved with Chax Press, a literary and
book arts press, as one of its authors and an interested
friend of its various projects. I give my own time and
money to Chax Press because I care deeply about
what they do.

Currently, Chax Press is experiencing a deep and
immediate need for transitional funding. I wouldn’t ask
you to help if I did not consider it an urgent matter; you
can rest assured that your money will be well spent,
and that this press will continue to do wonderful work. I
am only asking people who I know can help, and who I
can trust with my own deep care for Chax Press. Chax
Press has been around for twenty years, and feel sure
they will be here for a good while to come.

For those twenty years, Chax Press has published
literature that crosses boundaries, holds no ground
sacred, transgresses — poetry that, as Emily Dickinson
put it, takes one’s head off. These books obliterate
distinctions between poetry and prose, language and
art, literature and life. The effort Chax has put into
support of Gil Ott's work is particularly dear to me. In
addition to their fine edition of Traffic and their part in
the tribute volume The Form of Our Uncertainty,
Charles Alexander and I will be editing a posthumous
selected writing to be published by Chax sometime in
2007.

Chax Press receives support from national and local
arts agencies, but the greatest part of its budget comes
from individual donors. I ask for your tax-deductible
donation of $30 or more, to help the press through a
time of need. I urge you to make this contribution
immediately – write a check and put it in today’s or
tomorrow’s mail, please. Charles Alexander is offering
all who help a significant discount on any of four new or
forthcoming books from Chax Press.

Thank you for helping to make words and the art made
from words matter. Please see the attached form below
for more information on new books and how you can
send a donation to Chax.

Sincerely,

Eli

Please join us for a celebration of the life and work of Henry Flesh
(1947– 2005)
Selections from the author’s works will be read by friends and colleagues

Tuesday, September 6th, at 7 pm sharp
Cooper Union Great Hall
7 East 7th Street @ Third Avenue

A reception and art show will follow at the Pink Pony café
Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side between Houston and Stanton

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The above is an announcement sent to me today about the passing of Henry Flesh. I'm shocked that he's been dead since June and I had no idea. I KNOW I KNOW, the picture of him above is strange because it's out of focus, but it's perfect. At least I think so, like, his molecules are going-coming-leaving-starting all over. Flesh, flesh doing a step to the left. Oh boy.

Anyway, wow! I'm sad about this. The first time I met him was at a reading and book signing he did in Philadelphia for his book MASSAGE. Novels don't interest me too much, but his reading was powerful, a sort of sexy brutality. Not brutal in that Dennis Cooper-let's-kill-them-THEN-fuck-them kind of way, but human, very human. Like he was saying This Is Who You Could Be kind of brutal, all of you, all of us. He had the We down in the story, if that makes sense.

The next time I saw him was at a reading I gave in New York, and we were suddenly SHY around one another. He knew that I knew that he knew that I knew how we felt, how I felt that we felt. He was the Elvis of super nerds to me, and I was ridiculous around him. But he liked that, and I liked that he liked that. We just liked it dammit!

When he first heard that Soft Skull was publishing a book of mine he said we should read together, and that made me very happy. Funny because I've never been happy before about the idea of reading with a novelist. But it was him, Mr. Flesh. Hehehe, when I would e-mail him back in the days of working at Giovanni's Room I'd always call him Mr. Flesh! It just sounded so cool, where saying Henry or Henry Flesh, well, you get the idea. Mr. Flesh! You are so damned cool Mr. Flesh!

But then we fell out of touch. And the next time I saw him was at a reading in New York for Eileen Myles's book of poems SKIES. She had done this interesting thing where she asked others to come and read from the book for her. So a bunch of us were there. I arrived with Hassen (Hassen you must remember this). Henry told me he was reading the poem "Bone" and I said, "Great, we can both read it." He wasn't sure if he should read it if I too was interested in reading it, but I insisted we both read it. I mean, WHY NOT give a poem two different readings, especially if it's a beautiful poem. No one writes breakup poems like Eileen Myles, and "Bone" is a beaut! Wow, I remember just HOW different the readings of that poem were too, because he really emphasized the break of the breakup, and I was sucked into the love surrounding it. For me it was the What of the roses of it.

         each lack each pit
         of the rain slowing down outside
         reminds me of your missing
         warmth, your regularity.
         I hated living with you
         I had enough
         I know you hate me for
         having said it with Roses
             --from "Bone" by Eileen Myles

That was the last time I saw Mr. Flesh. He hugged me goodbye and I was kind of jelly, stupid, in fact I giggled and it didn't seem to matter because it made him smile. That's nice, his smile the last thing I saw of him.

Anyway, he was a sweet, beautiful, sexy man, and I'm sorry I didn't spend more time with him like we said we would. Life is so fucking short. It's times like this, when you have someone in your mind, someone you liked being around, someone you were even attracted to, and you find out they've died -- well, you know where I'm going with this. It's got to be something that you keep in mind, death, to keep the living moments more alive!

Dear Mr. Flesh,
Henry,
keep the burn alive for the next incarnation,
yeah, see you then, I'm looking forward to it,
CAConrad

*poem by ethel rackin
(w/ "...it's Saturday/which stands for all Saturdays/a song is a drug you tell yourself you need
till need takes over and you really do")
(BTW, i miss you around here, ethel, if you read this)

hi friends.
finally tapped into our neighborhood blog because i wanted to mention bird if another hasn't already.
jared my bird/boy, who's now snug in boulder not phila had, when home, splurged and bought andrew bird's *the mysterious production of eggs* as well as *weather systems* - something we (j & i) heard him (a.b.) do live at the tin angel on 2nd st a couple years ago & which was so astounding and intimate almost as if it didn't divinely happen at all - but back to "...eggs" - i don't know maybe a.b. is well known among us but in case not if there's anyone you listen to this season or year let it be him because the stuff's far too delicious if not life-changing to not partake. so much so that i've kept close - even still almost prefer to keep it to myself or mention him sparingly i guess because you know what happens when. &/but i felt bad for him & gang a moment when he came to town back oh what maybe 8 yrs when i was one of maybe a dozen who showed up for The Bowl of Fire show. didn't seem to phase a.b. who put on perhaps the best smoking violin & tragic shadow not to mention the spine tingling compositional performance i've ever seen. maybe i cried for joy

there's that,
hsn

ps
philadelphia is a rough town, no doubt and that's consensus among all influx handsdown. certain poets and some boheme aside & possibly their exceptional exception(s) are directly resulting from the former. diamonds, blues, that sort of thing. philly? salt/vinegar potato chips.

pps
& i adore joe massey but the New Sincerity Manifesto is maybe a tad ironic don't you think she sez not to invalidate but applaud such postmodern delight & i can say that now without cringing maybe as a challenge but that's ...

&tc
wow, look what happens when i think i can sleep in the next day i get all wound up at eleven or whatever it is.
how come nobody's writing/talking about
-gaza? i'd like the egyptians to come here tonight & guard the crazy camden border two houses down
-or russian oil? i just don't have time, otherwise...

Jonathan Kozol has written an excellent article (Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid) in the Sept 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine. He follows the effects that the federal judiciary’s dismantling of the mandates of the Brown decision over the past two decades have had on primary and secondary schools in poor areas. For those who want an understanding of how their poorer students (college or otherwise) think or learn to think, I recommend this article.

An excerpt: Jonathan writes:

“Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

“Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into ‘robots,’ found no reason to dispute the charge. ‘Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?’ he asked, and ‘will never snatch your pocketbooks....[sic] These robots are going to be producing taxes.”

And how does the mercantile school prepare its students against becoming cogs on the labor end of gross capitalism? Jonathan writes:

“In all the various business-driven inner-city classrooms I have observed in the past five years, plastered as they are with corporation brand names and managerial vocabularies, I have yet to see the two words ‘labor unions.’ Is this an oversight? How is that possible?”


Will Esposito

Kevin Killian sent me the link to his latest article, which you will enjoy reading as much as I did, trust me! It's a short, but very fun trip reading this!

One of the reasons he sent it to me is because he KNOWS how excited I would be to see him mentioning the ELVIS / SATANA connection!

NO ONE EVER mentions the ELVIS / SATANA connection! Ah, but Kevin Killian does!

Reading his account of going to see her in San Francisco at a recent screening of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! made me think how, when you fall in love with Elvis, you also love (and are simultaneously jealous of) Tura Satana.

Busy thinking about WHERE the snapshots are of my Satana drag from one Halloween,
CAConrad

P.S. IN A JUST WORLD TURA SATANA WOULD KICK PAT ROBERTSON'S ASS FOR WHAT HE JUST SAID ABOUT DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ!!!!!!!

Today's CBN News aired a segment entitled "Hugo Chavez vs. America" . While portraying Chavez as a Castroesque dictator, even the far-right media begrudgingly admit that he enjoys popular support in Venezuela. Read the transcript of the Newswatch piece here.

In the post-clip commentary, an utterly frustrated Pat Robertson said "I'm not sure about this doctrine of assasination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,"

- Frank Sherlock

Check out Joe Massey's New Sincerity Manifesto. He discusses the launch of New Sincerity in an interview with Anne Boyer at Odalisqued.

- Frank Sherlock

"Fifteen or 20 years ago, the idea of Philadelphia as a place to go for quality life would have been laughable to many people, even to Philadelphians."
--a "journalist" from The New York Times

I'm not quoting the "journalist" above to argue her point, which, let me tell you, I could go on for hours telling you just HOW wrong she is! (Ah! I almost wish I hadn't used her quote here, it's painful to look at!)

But the fact is she's talking about the very time I arrived in Philadelphia. Next year it will be 20 years. And Philadelphia was FILLED with artists, jazz, poets, sculptors, let's just say it was wall-to-wall amazement!

You've probably heard others (maybe yourself) say When I Win The Lottery I'm Going To.... Well, I do play the lottery (as faithfully as the next member of my family), and when I win The Big ONE, one of the first things I intend to do is to buy several brownstones downtown and rent the apartments to poor, working class kids for $200/month.

When I first moved to Philadelphia in 1986 my first apartment was on Juniper Street in a converted hotel called The Imperial. I was in apartment 501, and various boyfriends, etc., would always make comments about the blue jeans popular back then. But my rent was only $210 a month, which afforded me the opportunity to have a job that didn't kill me, and I'd come home, write/write/write, then go out with friends.

That time was crucial to my development when I look back on it. Especially going out to see friends. There used to be a bar at the corner of Juniper and South called The Bacchanal, WHAT an amazing place! In fact, I'll just say that I still have yet to find a place in Philly or New York for that matter, with that much going on. Artists of all kinds, philosophers, poets yelling at one another, and so much to listen to and learn. It's where I first met Gil Ott. It's also where I first met my boyfriend Angel, who was standing very still at the time while a young woman wrapped his naked body in plaster strips for a sculpture.

This is not going to turn into a long trip down memory lane, I'm just trying to point out that the affordability of the city back then allowed me to be part of it, coming from a poor family in the middle of the rural routes of Pennsylvania. And it was luck that I could afford it, being it was the time that it was.

There are a few people I work with today who came to Philadelphia for the very same things I came for, but I'm sad to say they can't get it. Not that it's not there for them, but that they literally canNOT get it because they're working three jobs JUST to pay the rent. They're the exhausted poor.

That very same $210 a month apartment I mentioned earlier is now $850. That's MADNESS!

It's fine for youth with money already in hand, they don't have these problems of course. But who knows how much genius is being wasted on greedy landlords.

Let me say that my friend Nicole McEwan is a landlord who goes out of her way to make space affordable for artists, and in fact encourages artists to take up residence with her. It makes me happy to know she's there, and that there must be others like her.

Recently I was telling a friend about my plan to buy brownstones when I win it BIG, and she said that I should just let them live there for free. To be honest, it helped having some kind of job, but like I said, not a job that was going to drain me of my spirit. And hey, $200 a month is pretty fucking okay. And will free up lots and lots of time to write, or paint, or whatever they need to be doing. (Besides, I've already decided that the $200 includes all utilities)

Instead of hating the rich --something I spend too much time doing as it is-- I want to talk out loud about my plans for winning the lottery. NOT just because I believe I'm going to win it, but also to maybe encourage those who already have money to see what NEEDS to be done to give time and space for those less fortunate who want to develop talents we all need in this world. We really do NEED everyone's creative potential right now.

If this world is going to change for the better it can only be done with a creative collective. And frankly, we NEED poor kids in there making art with everyone else, because we NEED those who are going to help keep a different focus on the world for everyone. Diversity in class as much as race, as much as anything else.

CAConrad

Will,

You say, "I meant no harm to Philadelphia, nor no NYC proselytizing. I thought that that was clear." Well, I'll take your word for it, since you've given me your word here. However I've got to say No, it wasn't clear. In fact, I'm confused how you could ever think it was clear, but that's the way it played out.

I thought I was pretty clearly PISSED OFF about this article. And that it was printed in The New York Times, NOT some weekly rag, but one of THE most respected newspapers in the world. This "journalist" is lying and slandering end-to-end, (racist, classist, all-around the type of elitist scum I despise!) and I'm trying to grapple with it, then YOU come along with your comments which, NO, were not clear, now that you say you meant no harm.

To me you weren't set up for dialogue, in fact, to me you were agreeing with the "journalist" (I'm not even interested in writing her name, she deserves NO publicity!). Most especially with your "Oh come on." When someone BEGINS a statement with "Oh come on," it generally means that they think the person in question is ridiculous. And frankly there was nothing ridiculous with my signing off NOT A NEW YORKER, considering the lies she told of Philadelphians walking around saying we're the 6th borough of New York!

I'd rather you insult me before the city. This of course is not to say that the city doesn't have its faults, problems, horrors even. But let's agree that insulting the city is not the same as talking about its faults. Insulting Philadelphia is like insulting my mother. And to be honest, I'd rather you insult my mother before Philadelphia!

Later you say, "I thought this strand was funny, but I see now that you don't think it so funny." Okay, I'll take your word for it, but let me say a couple of things about this.

One, you didn't appear to think it was funny, but you say so, so I'll take your word for it.

Two, you say "I see now that you don't think it so funny," which, again, I'll take your word for it, but it's surprising, considering that I've been DEAD SERIOUS about this from the start. For instance, the title of my original post read, "This argument about Philly vs. New York upsets me because of the obvious yet ignored class issues involved." The key words being "upsets me" and I'm NOT in the habit of saying something "upsets me" if it doesn't (for future reference).

Where I really take issue with your last post however is you saying, "To argue merits and demerits is fine. On the other hand, I'm not going to be alligatored into some inarguable muck at pond bottom." There's no way I'll take your word for this! This is bullshit!

It's ironic that you suddenly want me to take your feelings into consideration when you were so incapable of reading anything I had said in order to understand where my feelings are.

One more thing, so what's up with Simeon, Levi and Jacob? Jacob being murdered by Simeon and Levi, right?

CAConrad

Walt Whitman hom(m)age 2005/1855

A celebration of 150 years of
Leaves of Grass

Strand Bookstore
12th Street and Broadway

Thursday, August 25 at 6:30 p.m.

Poets gather for a tribute to Walt Whitman on the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Leaves Of Grass.

Moderated by Frederic Tuten, the author of Tin Tin in the New World, this night of poetry, feasting, and libation will be a French-American homage to the great American poet. In acknowledgment of the importance of Whitman among contemporary French writers, biographer and memoirist of the recently published Them, Francine du Plessix Gray will read the poems in French.

The poets who are reading—Macgregor Card, Tom Devaney, Marcella Durand, Chris Edgar, Peter Gizzi, Robert Kelly, Lisa Llubasch, Joan Retallack, Lytle Shaw, Elizabeth Willis, and artist Trevor Winkfield—will be available to sign their books.

Walt Whitman hom(m)age 2005/1855 was published jointly by Turtle Point Press in New York and Joca Seria in Nantes.

--TD

How am I shitting on the love? I like Philadelphia enough. And what would you care if I did or didn't, Conrad? I still can't find the books I want. That's not a difference of opinion. I also can't go to a rodeo in Philadelphia, and if I cared about cattle I'd be miffed about that. But I just don't see how you can construe the post "Riga" as shitting on the love. I would rather NYC than San Diego, and I write that only because I have to.

I meant no harm to Philadelphia, nor no NYC proselyting. I thought that that was clear. To argue merits and demerits is fine. On the other hand, I'm not going to be alligatored into some inarguable muck at pond bottom. I thought this strand was funny, but I see now that you don't think it so funny. So I'm going to bow out before I raise more hackles.


Will Esposito

The notion that a city should surrender its identity once it's been "discovered" by priveleged hipsters is disgusting. I have NEVER EVER heard a Philadelphian refer to her or his city as "the sixth borough". But what do you expect from a journalist whose weekly gossip article is fueled by snarky put-downs?

The story behind the story is New Yorkers running away from themselves. The reason settlers need a "new Brooklyn" is because these same people plundered the old Brooklyn, leaving chain stores, mediocrity & skyrocketing rents in their wake. Developer Bart Blatstein is despised in Northern Liberties. People like him don't make vibrant neighborhoods, they "develop", then destroy them. The same people who want to keep their 718 area code in Philly wanted to hang on to their 212 when they first moved to Brooklyn. Go figure.

I welcome my NYC sisters & brothers to Philadelphia. Just leave the NY Times delusions of annexation on the Chinatown bus. Embrace the 215. Stay (even on the weekends). Know the city. Become the city. Love Philly. Hate Philly. Be Philly.

- Frank Sherlock

Dear Will,
are you actually attempting to get me to agree to some notion that New York is better? Or that it's okay for the Times to casually comment on New York consuming the Philadelphia borders, not to mention the boarders who are increasingly broke from rent escalation due to the wealthier influx?

Or worse, that it's okay for the "journalist" to write such bullshit as, "All of which has collided with a peculiar cultural moment in which uncool is the new cool, in which blue-collar scrappiness and a surfeit of fried-meat specialties now seems endearingly kitschy."

This above quote of course needs to be examined because she's admitting that she and what she considers her New York Kind I suppose, have more money, more class. And of course the article was so wrong in many different ways about the SUDDEN art scene blooming, I mean, what a fucking joke! She obviously hasn't been aware of the oodles and oodles of artists, writers, poets, not to mention the enormous number of jazz musicians. She only mentions the Philadelphia orchestra, but that's NOTHING compared to the jazz in this town.

It reminds me of the arrival of that fucking poet from NY (what's his name?) something O'Neal or something? He ran the "big" poetry events at the Painted Bride, and he literally said "There was no poetry in Philadelphia before I arrived!" Huh? What an ass. I remember laughing with Gil Ott about that one! It's one of the few times I ever heard Gil Ott call someone an asshole.

I'm aware that the tricky part of this argument on my end is to NOT appear as if I'm bashing New York. Because I'm really not, nor do I want to bash New York. I have a lot of good friends up there and the city is great for a million reasons, it is, and I know it, I know it already okay?

But while I am NOT bashing New York, you Will ARE bashing Philadelphia.

You do realize that, don't you?

Let me ask you Will, seriously, and directly, is it really NOT okay with you that I love, FUCKING LOVE this city!? Your argument swings in the direction of, OH C'MON, HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY!?

Well, frankly Will I truly LOVE this city! And if I loved it anymore I'd be arrested for indecent exposure!

You may slather all the reasons you want onto this discussion as to WHY I'm just not seeing The Truth, but it won't change me a bit.

I've loved more people in many different ways in this city than I have anywhere else on this planet because it speaks to me with all that language Love speaks with.

Next year will mark my half life here, meaning I will have spent half my life here.

Will, you can share all the ideas you want, disagree with me, hate me for all I care, but don't try to corner me into some bullshit idea that I've misplaced my Love for half my life. No way.

This city's in my dreams when I sleep and I don't just mean the streets I walk. There have been nights where a color pattern impossible to explain breaks loose and trees and sidewalks and everything bursts into light and converses. It's a dream where I can feel and see all the different incarnations, also meaning long before the city was a city and it was streams of water and moss and rocks and squirrels and deer and lion.

One of those dreams wound up in that chapbook Frank Sherlock and I wrote, where I'm in the dream, standing on a corner and can actually see where a field of buttercups once grew. Where a thicket of berries sheltered rabbits. It's an amazing dream, and the next morning, in the waking world, I bought chalk, and I went to those spots from the dream and I wrote on the sidewalk, "cantaloupe ghost" etc., where the world was when it was in my dream.

Just because you can't hear the Love doesn't mean the rest of us are deaf.

Listen, I'm very serious about this, DON'T SHIT ON MY LOVE! I don't care if you disagree with my opinions, but LOVE is not an opinion, ever.

I feel like we're brothers and you're trying to convince me our mother is a whore! And even if she is a whore, I Love her anyway!

CAConrad

Oh come on, I'd rather NYC than Bismark or San Diego or whatever. NYC is where Europe ends. The U.S. ends in London. I lived in Pasadena. Talk about xenophobic miseria. And Philadelphia: I can't even find the books I want. It's either SPD or SEPTA to St Marks. There are blond rattlesnakes, like twenty different kinds. It's right near the university sort of.


Will Esposito

Somedays I don't even feel like an American.

But I always feel like a Philadelphian,
an intestinal expatriate.

NOT a New Yorker,
CAConrad

p.s. I don't know the rattlesnake museum. How could I have missed that? There is a lot of really great art there, and beautiful shrines. And this sounds silly, but it's true, the guacamole is a religious experience, and I mean it. No where else do you feel guacamole enter your body like that.

I have this friend who lives in Patchogue, Long Island. His commute to Penn Station for work is two hours. He believes he is a New Yorker. Philadelphians are New Yorkers too. Theyre not Manhattanites though. And these are the "those" who decry Philadelphia. Wouldn't you want to justify your $3000 per month rent too? Philadelphia hasn't been run through with retail chains, just like some of Brooklyn hasn't, most of Queens hasn't, all of the Bronx. (Staten Island is a neighborhood of Cleveland.) Starbucks Gap Urban Outfitters Gap Starbucks. Starbucks Gap Urban Outfitters Gap Starbucks. It's a street map for consumorons. I really like the rattlesnake museum in Albuquerque.

Will Esposito

a note to scroll down to the 9th, as I just added some new voices to the Q&A on competition: Tim Peterson, Sharon Mesmer, Juliana Spahr, Tom Raworth, Shanna Compton, Bob Holman, Erica Kaufman, and John Sakkis. Thanks to these latest seven, and to all the others who've participated in the discussion.
CAConrad

Have you heard of Rose Gentle? She's blowing me away! Taking Blair to court! Here's one article from The Sunday Herald. And another from Counterpunch.

In support of Angry Mothers everywhere,
CAConrad

When Jason Brooks was giving his farewell reading at La Tazza, friends of his were down from New York. One of them was this horrible woman who works for the New Yorker, what an awful human being she was (probably still is). She sat next to me while I was talking with Jason and said, "You don't actually enjoy living here do you!?" Jason started to say things about Philly to ward off what he saw coming in my glare, but it was just too late. I smiled and said, "I take it you don't live here?" "No, I certainly don't! I live in New York where people know how to use deodorant!" "Oh, you don't live here, I'm very happy to hear that," I said smiling an even bigger smile. "OH, yeah, you only have TWO SUBWAYS, well, I guess that works, right!? And a cheesesteak shop at both ends!" "Excuse me, but are you going home soon? I sincerely hope so!" She then growled at me and left my side to return to the bar, where she continued to get plastered, and more obnoxious. I hope she never comes back!

Jason apologized for her, then we started a conversation about the snobbishness and where that comes from. He said, "Well, you have to admit, Philly people do feel they're living in the shadow of New York." I about choked on my drink, "Actually, none of my friends feel that way. We don't walk about thinking, Oh it's a lovely day, Oh but it's just the shadows we're walking in, Oh it's not really Philadelphia!"

See, this is the kind of thing that pisses some New Yorkers off because they don't understand that I don't HATE New York, in fact I LOVE New York. It's a great place! It's just that I LOVE Philadelphia, and it's Philadelphia, not New York. Do you fucking understand this? I'm not hating New York here, I'm just saying that I don't WISH I lived there. I very much like living in Philadelphia.

The only time I ever hear people in Philadelphia pine over New York like they're the poor orphan cousins is in neighborhoods like Rittenhouse Square, where I work. But then again, I've seen these people cream their pants if someone nearby is speaking French, or with a British accent. They really do go out of their way to make it clear they feel Philadelphia is inferior, but I believe this is actually their way of proving to be superior to the heart and bulk of the city, which they fear and loathe.

This is a working class town, and folks in Rittenhouse and Society Hill know it and are clearly ashamed of it! When I was working at Metropolitan Bakery just before the 2000 Republican Convention (I'll ALWAYS remember this!), the city was cleaning up the streets and planting fabulous trees and plants and it did look beautiful! But I'll always remember this pack of lawyers who live in Rittenhouse, coming into the bakery, and the one guy, the one with the biggest, stupid voice, said, "The city looks GREAT! My only question is, WHAT are they going to do with the scabby people in South Philly, maybe ask them to go to Atlantic City until the convention's over!?" They all cracked up. They just loved themselves. Yeah, what a bunch of wonderful, loving human beings. WHAT A BUNCH OF SCUMBAGS!

To be honest with you the New Yorkers who are moving down here are not all that kind either. First of all, they always seem to go out of their way to make it CLEAR they are from there. Okay, got it, you're from THERE. Recently a young woman said, "I don't LIVE here! I live in New York!" And I said, "Oh, but you said you're phone number is 215?" "I'm just going to school at Penn." And I said, "Well, BEING somewhere for four years might be considered LIVING there!" She sneered and said, "OH I GUESS SO!"

Some days my irritation runs dangerously close to exploding all over the place!

Class geography politics is both fascinating and irritating to me. I experienced it all the time when I lived in Albuquerque, which is 45 minutes from Sante Fe. I worked near the airport at Alamo Car Rental doing security checks on cars (probably the worst job of my life in my little aluminum booth with the tiny fan in the middle of the fucking New Mexico sun), and there were always these fancy assholes from LA who would make comments like, "OH, let's put the peddle to the metal and get out of THIS town!" They were always headed for Sante Fe of course. Albuquerque was the working class town. It became a routine conversation, someone would say how hungry they were, and I'd suggest a place nearby, and they'd say, "WHAT!? OH NO! That's okay, we can WAIT until we get to Sante Fe!" People acted like Albuquerque was filled with the plague, they really hated the place, and I bet they never really spent time there. Granted, I didn't enjoy living in New Mexico, but I have to say I preferred Albuquerque. Sante Fe had the most extreme case of rich and poor I had ever encountered, and the rich people were so racist it freaked me out. The same company I worked security for at Alamo had me work a couple of weeks at a museum in Sante Fe, and the fucking rich people there would always make the most outrageously racist remarks about Mexicans and say, "YOU KNOW what I mean!"

Anyway, I could go on, but I'm not going to,
it's too Goddamned depressing,
CAConrad

Did anyone read the article, "Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough," in The New York Times yesterday?

Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/fashion/sundaystyles/14PHILLY.html

It's a mostly positive article about how some New Yorkers are moving to Philadelphia.

However, the writer, Jessica Pressler begins by going to see what "a real Philly apartment looks like" -- it's a "spacious" one bedroom apartment that supposed to be $800 in a brownstone "on" Rittenhouse Square. The problem is that there are no brownstones directly on Rittenhouse Square. And if there were, the $800 bucks rent would not reflect the prices of what you're going to get for that there. The rest of the article, the focus is on the not-so-close-to-Rhittenhouse Square neighborhood of Fishtown.

Then there is this item: "Philadelphians occasionally refer to their city - somewhat deprecatingly - as the "sixth borough" of New York," -- SAY WHAT? -- I've never, not once heard anyone call Philadelphia -- and I've heard called nearly everything -- but the "sixth borough" of New York."

Thanks for the props, but get the facts straight.

The link for the website movetophilly is also slightly strange (besides an email link for a tour) since it doesn't seem to go anywhere: http://movetophilly.com/ -- maybe it was just when I was trying it.

--Tom

The recent post by Shanna Compton (thanks, Shanna) reminded me of this from Whitman:

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least; Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.


Will Esposito

Besides being a dedicated activist with The Global Women's Strike, my good friend Mary Kalyna is also part of the Eastern European Women's Vocal Ensemble SVITANYA. She called me this afternoon to tell me how activism crossed paths with the singing this morning when SVITANYA held a performance at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown.

Present in the audience at this morning's concert was Celeste Zappala, the mother of Army Sgt. Sherwood Baker, who was the first Pennsylvania National Guardsman killed in Iraq, and also the first Pennsylvania Guardsman to have died in combat since 1945.

Celeste had just come back from (literally just come back from) Crawford, Texas, where she had been camping and protesting with Cindy Sheehan and 500 others outside President Bush's ranch. It is exciting to hear that the 500 others are not only other parents of children who have died in Iraq, but also active duty service men and women who came to camp with Cindy Sheehan and support her protest while on their two week leave.

If you're interested, this Wednesday night at 7:30 pm, Celeste Zapala will be giving a talk about Cindy Sheehan, and leading a vigil in support of her efforts at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown. The location of the church is 6023 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. It's easy to get to, check out SEPTA's website for details.

Read Celeste Zappala's article "The Problem With Karl Rove's Phone" on Michael Moore's webpage.

CAConrad

I read one review that Whitman wrote about himself a few years ago. What I remember from it was that he compared his work to Homer's, Milton's, and the Bible!

The interesting thing for me is not that Whitman wrote this about himself, what's really interesting, is that so many future critics and readers have agreed with Whitman's own assement of his work.

--Tom Devaney


Here is a section from my poem "The Car, a Window, and WWII" --

The experimental film Walt Whitman Nurse and Poet,
it's not bad; we enjoyed the catalogue of birds.
The dull and unmusical notes of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo,
like the cow, cow of a young bull-frog repeated eight or ten times
with increasing rapidity.
The way sounds become words, and words
can store their sounds, and return back to Sound.
As we learned, some of the birdcalls and songs were recreated
from written descriptions.

Hello folks,

We're in the midst of bringing ixnay press back to life - first up, in the very near future, will be the second installment of the ixnay reader. Shortly after that, there might be a perfect-bound book, and we're going to try to assemble pdf files of the ixnay press back catalog for web distribution as well. As part of the revamp, I've set up a new blog that'll house the details regarding future projects. In the spirit of the original poppycock newsletter, I'll also post reviews and interviews there on a semi-regular basis. Any time something new hits, I'll be sure to post a quick link here on PhillySound so you know to hop over there for more info.

Thanks much,

Chris McC

For a critique of the lesser detractors of MFA programs please see:

dark horses the cartoon

I have no idea who put this blog together. Nor do I care to name him/her. There has never been a limit to the amount of fame one can win from frisson.


Will Esposito


for the dangers of video games, read:

man dies after video game

The writer referred to in the Jim Behrle/Kent Johnson blog war as "some Bosnian dude" is the incredible poet, Semezdin Mehmedinovic. Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias are available from City Lights Books. Here's a Mehmedinovic sampler:

Deserter

Only then--
not before you have coffee
at the train station;
the dispatcher tapping the wheels
of the locomotive with a hammer;
the paper tucked under your arm--
leaving the city in peace--
you'll never be true to yourself anywhere
unless your very life is the only truth
unless the empty air calls itself freedom--
unless you're a deserter
with an uneasy conscience
unless you're Billy the Kid


- FS

Jonathan Skinner will be at Temple University this year conducting a juicy, interdisciplinary seminar he calls "Imagining Open Spaces." He's also looking for a place to live in Philly until May. If you have any rental offers/propositions, please email me at: fsherlock7@hotmail.com.

Jonathan also edits Ecopoetics -one of the most interesting litjournals around. You can download the first three issues for free.

Here's the course description for "Imagining Open Spaces":

Led by 2005-2006 External Fellow Jonathan Skinner
Sponsored by the Temple Society of Fellows in the Humanities


This interdisciplinary seminar explores the history, ecology, sociology, politics and aesthetics of green open space in North American cities, focusing on the case study of Philadelphia’s own Fairmount Park, which was partly developed from plans by perhaps the most notable landscape architecture firm in the history of urban planning. The legacy of Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s firm is a core object of this course. We will study the landscape aesthetics behind Olmsted’s designs, considering class and race in relation to his hygienic agenda and his attraction to “Southern” landscapes, as well as the catalytic role Olmsted’s parks would play in the mid twentieth-century civil rights movement. We will also look at the poetry of open spaces—Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” the “Sunday in the Park” section of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; the on-foot, projective geographies of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems; Ian Hamilton Finlay’s polemical poetry garden, Little Sparta; Cole Swensen’s park and garden writings—and at the interventions of contemporary artists and composers: Robert Smithson’s land art; Cecilia Vicuna’s ephemeral street installations; Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundscape compositions; Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art.” Concepts from ecology and sociology will help ground our discussion in bioregional and demographic contexts, as we survey some of the discourse around urban landscaping: including writings on urbanism, situationist theories of walking, postmodern philosophies of space and notable contemporary landscape constructions, such as the Freshkills Lifescape project on Staten Island. The seminar involves discussion, lectures, field trips, a screening and a guest speaker or two, and demands active participation: students will be asked to pursue a project, involving onsite investigation, that essays a creative and/or critical intervention in spaces at once social and natural.

- FS

QUESTION ONE
This first one is only for those of you who were in a creative writing program. How do you feel about creative writing programs and competition? How was the competitive atmosphere? Was this atmosphere mostly student directed, or from professors? In the end, do you feel this competition moved you and your poetry forward? Or maybe that it kept you back in some way?

QUESTION TWO
How do we all feel about Walt Whitman writing reviews of Leaves of Grass under various pseudonyms? This was something I didn't know about until one of my visits to the Whitman house in Camden, when a young history student was the curator. He showed us pictures of what a mess Whitman's room had been at the time of his death with trash to the knees. In that trash is where they found drafts of his reviews of his work.

But is it unethical to write glowing reviews for yourself? What are your feelings?

-------

BELOW ARE SOME RESPONSES:

Tim Peterson:

Tarzan Workshop

Here is poem. Describe poem. Does poem feel "earned"? What are "formal characteristic" of poem? Is A) lyrical, B) narrative, C) meditative, or D) rhetorical? Because those only options for what poem can be. Is better than last poem? If not, Tarzan think student slipping. Write down suggestion for poet, and now Tarzan proceed to "fix mistakes" in poem. Does poem feel "welcoming to Tarzan reader"? Tarzan personally think "loaded gun" is mistake -- poet should change to "fluffy bunny rabbit" to not intimidate Tarzan. That cheap move. Describe "music of poem" – do poem voice sound "flat" here? Do poem show "Tarzan mind at work"? In order to "fix," poet need make exactly like ideal poem which Tarzan have in mind but which he never reveal. Student keep until get right. Other student here write more close to Tarzan ideal poem, so Tarzan make jealous by give other student all Tarzan praise and attention!!! Tarzan bet student feel shitty now, right? Tarzan know how to write Tarzan poem, student not allowed artist. Student apprentice, Tarzan train student write poem like Tarzan write. Have read all book on Tarzan syllabus composed entirely of book written by friend of Tarzan? Good, if student write like friend of Tarzan book student soon publish by Copper Canyon Press no time! But wait! Tarzan no got to best part, which mean REVISION! Ah, yes, revision. Do student know Louis Gluck make over FORTY DRAFT of single poem, and over half of draft just CHANGE SEMICOLON? Do student know that most "serious poet" do nothing than sit at desk and REVISE POEM ALL DAY LONG? Because Tarzan poem "never finished"! Tarzan teach strive toward make "perfect" curious “inwrought Tarzan thing” which ideal form and which also Stand Up To Test Of Time, because Tarzan poet not live in this world. Nosirree, live in next. Ugh.


SHARON MESMER:

QUESTION ONE
I started college (Columbia College, Chicago) when I was 17, and my
first poetry teacher, Paul Hoover, was amazing in the way he framed the
competition issue within a serious career context. I wasn't in a
"program" per se (this was in 1978, before the MFA era) but I did take
many, many workshops and lit classes with him, and he pretty much
introduced me (and others: Kim Lyons, Connie Deanovich, Elaine Equi) to
the Chi literary scene, such as it was then: post-Berrigan and Notley
(they'd live in Chi for awhile and pollinated), post-Yellow Press. His
take on competition was sort of like, it's there, you can't get away
from it, but be prepared, and find some positive way to deal with it.
So, from 17 on I pretty much understood the dynamics. That doesn't
mean I was any good at competing (I wasn't and I'm still not,
unfortunately), but at least I was prepared for it even back then.
When I did get into an MFA program, it was at Brooklyn College, and
Ginsberg was my teacher. Now, for better or worse, he was all about
the work, and the issue of competition was not something he wanted to
deal with, although he was always helpful with career stuff like
recommendations, introductions, etc. And -- for better or worse -- he
was one of the most magnanimous, generous people I've ever dealt with
within any poetry scene. (Why "worse"? Because one could always talk
to him, and now he's not around.) He once called me at my boyfriend's
house at 11 in the morning on a Sunday (after calling my apartment
first and asking my roommate whether she thought it was okay to call at
the other place) to ask if he'd already done a recommendation for me
because he woke up worried that he'd forgotten to do it. He once said
to me, "You got some information, why not share it?" While that may
prepare for you for your karmic errand, it doesn't quite translate into
advice on career moves. However, I can only hope their examples
translate into generosity that I can extend to my own students. I
really try to pass that on whenever I can.

My Columbia experience was about cultivating talent and finding a place
in a literary scene. There were students there who, like me, were
interested in writing as a career, and we worked/drank/ slept together
and then bitterly resented each other forever after. But we were all
writing pretty good poetry for people in their teens and early
twenties, and I think **that** aspect is competition at its best.
(And also "academic poetry" was a different animal in 1978.) The
Brooklyn experience (1988-1990) was not about competition because most
of the people in my class had never even been published. I was quite
appalled to discover that. I had been published (in Maureen Owen's
TELEPHONE) at 18, had edited a couple of Chi lit mags (B City and
letter eX) by the time I was 23, and then there I was at 27 with people
who'd never even sent out a poem (tho I know that isn't the case there
now). So I just sort of put my energy into spending as much time as I
could with Allen and learning certain things from him.

About competition: when funnelled into the energy that makes you write
better and better work because your friends/colleagues are really
producing, it's great; when funnelled into the energy that makes you
boring because you're all worried about getting a job, it's fucking
stupid.


QUESTION TWO
I love it. I totally agree with what Holman said. In fact, I'm gonna
do a few myself. Right now. So look for reviews of my new book by the
eminent critic Norah S. Remsem.

----

JULIANA SPAHR:

QUESTION ONE:
I wasn't in an MFA and/or creative writing program. But I can't imagine that I would like to be in a competative atmosphere. I now teach in an MFA. I don't really see much competition; it seems to me as if everyone gets along fine. But I might just not be able to see it. Sometimes the poets and the fiction writers seem to get in little fights. Or say they can't understand each other. Or complain about who gets more of what, when. Once I gave an assignment where everyone had to fill out one of those Duncan influence charts and then discuss it for the first class and I inadvertantly created a huge name dropping session and some people in the class freaked out and I had some visits to my office that week.

QUESTION TWO:
It is cute. Although the idea of dying with papers to the knees makes me scared.

----

TOM RAWORTH:
For the Whitman, I share pretty much your take.... I find it amusing: "I Write of Myself" - who better?. With contemporary sophistication though I'm sure he would have written first an essay attacking his work, and THEN one praising it, under two pseudonyms. As I remember, the novelist Anthony Burgess did something similar back in the sixties. Yes, I find it:

Burgess was the maiden name of John Wilson's mother. He also used the pseudonym Joseph Kell and once reviewed Kell's novel INSIDE MR ENDERBY (1963) for the Yorkshire Post; when the editor sent him the author's novel - Burgess thought it was a practical joke but it wasn't. Burgess himself wrote letters to the editor of the Daily Mail as Mohamed Ali, an outraged Pakistani moralist.

I imagine those who object would be mostly critics whose self-importance blinds them to the walls of the teacup.

There were no Creative Writing programs when I was young. I can only comment from the experience of having "taught" briefly in several MFA programs over the decades. From my point of view there was no possibility of "teaching" creative writing. The writers in each group were obvious, and the smarter of them were simply using the time to write. I did find it useful to expose them all to as wide a range of writing as I could... on several occasions the work of an until then unknown to them poet was a trigger. I tried not to create clones of myself and my tastes, and when talking about their own work concentrated on what (sometimes only a few words in a long piece) I found interesting rather than the surrounding reams of dross. My sense is that I didn't do too much harm, many of them continued to write, then to publish. Some of them became good friends. But in all instances I heard horror stories from students, of other, or previous, experiences in programs.

I didn't go through the education system myself. I went to work at 16. So I do appreciate the need for time. But I can't say I write more since I have that time. My first book was written, on scraps of paper, on bus tickets, wherever I could, while working full time and running a small press in my spare time. But then cliché'd everyone is clichéd different: that's what makes it interesting.

----

SHANNA COMPTON:
I think WW is all-around fabulous and I love that he published himself and promoted himself. His was the best brand of boldness--he didn't elevate himself over others, he raised all to the same stellar heaven-toppling level. These days we suffer from so many silly attitudes about publishing and legitimacy and all of that. People tend to forget that the "publishing industry" is new fangled, relatively speaking. So many of the writers we admire "privately printed" their own work and published themselves and their friends, and like Walt, did their own publicity too. And aren't we glad they did? Because the legitimacy any writer possesses originates from her writing, not the circumstances surrounding its publication. You know? And damn it, somebody has to be your champion. Personally I have no problem saying that I like my own poems and that I want lots of people to read them. I did write them for you, after all. What Would Walt Whitman Do could be a very electrifying mantra for many younger poets intimidated by what they perceive to be seemly poetic behavior, particularly since it requires them to tamp down their own enthusiasm for...well...themselves. No fun.

Anyway, take care...
Shanna

----

BOB HOLMAN:

QUESTION ONE
I teach at Columbia, where I went to school (undergrad – my only formal degree), so I am in that most wonderful position of becoming the person I used to laugh at. As Milosz says, “The man I used to be no longer embarrasses me.” I am astonished at how the world turns ferriswheelishly: I was at Bard teaching undergrad Poetry Performance when I started the Bowery Poetry Club, but Bard had no interest in Club-Academy synergy. Columbia did, so here I happily am. “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance” is offered by the MFA Writing Program– that’s anti-competition, right, a Performance course in a Writing setting? I thank Alan Ziegler, head of the department, for having the vision, and my coworkers for okaying it. The course is all about collaboration, uncovering new inspirations via others and their art and their approach to art. Coco Fusco teaches Performance as part of the Visual Art Dept, and I talk poetry film with the Film Department, but for Writing I’m the guy who critiques the students’ reading (as in perf) skills. I’m outside the Inner Circle. Now if you want to talk about my work in Slam, and my nights at the Nuyorican – woowie! But, alas, there’s no degrees, no competition.

QUESTION TWO
Hilarity! How American! United Statesian! Truly the Father of US Poetry!

----

ERICA KAUFMAN:

QUESTION ONE
I got my MFA at the New School. I had the privilege of studying with some truly fantastic people, and still keep in touch with many of them. I am not a competitive person, at least I do not see myself as one. One thing I got out of the MFA program was a sense of myself as a poet. My writing definitely changed a lot and I think I learned a lot about how to stick up for myself and how to deal with criticism.

QUESTION TWO
This is a great question, something I've not really thought about. My gut instinct is to think more about the time period and society Whitman was living in, rather than the notion of writing a review of oneself. I think that Leaves of Grass was initially self-published. If this is true, it makes complete sense (rationally) for Whitman to write reviews under a pseudonym. The publishing world in the 1850's was much different than now, so I think he had to write these reviews in order to get any sort of attention for the book. And, Leaves of Grass is a masterpiece and deserves as much attention as possible. And I love the idea of the floor of Whitman's room being covered in papers, some of which were drafts of these self-composed reviews. But, I also agree with Conrad, in that reviews seldom affect how I read something. They open my eyes to books I want to explore, but do not shape my opinion. Because of this, I think writing reviews of oneself is completely ok. I doubt I would ever do it, but I see no problem in it being done. And, I love the idea of pseudonyms.

----

JOHN SAKKIS:
Maybe I’m the exception here in that I WASN’T in an MFA program but am IN one currently. I’m a second year Poetry candidate at Naropa University, a San Francisco transplant and a competitive person (in the most generous and community based way...duh...). I received my BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, a competitive university in that they host departmental and pan-State-university competitions each semester. Most universities do. Naropa doesn’t. On its masthead Naropa actually bills itself as a “noncompetitive” university. This is hilarious (as ANY student in the program will tell you). What Naropa means by noncompetitive is that they simply don’t have the contest money (unlike Iowa) to offer its students. Well, that’s not exactly true, during the summer semester two students, one Prose concentration, one Poetry are selected to be the Ted Berrigan and Jack Kerouac scholars. Naropa also has the Zora Neale Hurston award for students of color. Hold up! wait a minute...yeah, I thought Naropa was supposed to be a noncompetitive university? These scholarships sure sound like awards to me, and last I checked one needed to compete to be rewarded. Like I stated above, the whole non competitiveness thing seems to be an easy, less embarrassing way for Naropa to dodge admitting that it’s Writing and Poetics Department is somewhat lacking in funds (and I know a little about this, I was MFA representative to the university council last semester). Of course this is all layed out for the incoming student as an “university philosophy” (which is great! which is fine! awesome, uf’ the bullshit of contest...only...). But what really gets me is that our MFA student advisor periodically sends mass e-mails to the MFA student body announcing competitions at Iowa, Brown, SFSU et al., “you guys should totally submit!”...Look, is this “kind” (because there are plenty of other) of competition that interesting? (the question certainly is).
One more quick anecdote on competition of a different ilk. A new chapbook of mine, BOUT BOUT was recently published by Farfalla Press. The publisher and I are in contact about the book pre-published. The publisher continuously talks shit about his other writers. Something like “I can’t believe I gave such and such a perfect bound book...he better know I did him a huge favor...” or, “yeah, his book never sold so I use copies to balance my TV stand.” Oh man, this is getting weird, I should have anticipated what was to come. BOUT BOUT is published it looks good. Everything is fine. I soon find out that the publisher suddenly yanked the book out of distribution with SPD (now it’s back). I’m wondering, hmmm, what happened? A couple days later a few students tell me that the publisher burned the remaining copies of the book. I’m like...hmmm, what happened? (though not THAT surprised). It turns out the publisher “only” burned 15 copies of the book...lucky me (sarcasm). I approached him about this. Basically, to make a long story short he thought he overheard something I said that I never said (you’ve got to love the private liberal arts university scene), he soon realized this. He then goes on to tell me that “if only I was a major author” he wouldn’t have done what he did. That I “was lucky to have a book from Farfalla” etc. etc. The psychology of this character and this press goes much deeper than I have room to properly explore but in my mind, and in the minds of a few others who know this character, and have worked with his press it mostly stems from a totally misguided feeling of competitiveness. As in, “I’’m Farfalla, I’m publishing your book, Why isn’t anyone publishing my book?” This is needless to say, an incredibly unhealthy and damaging way to look at what your doing (ostensibly a great and difficult thing...publishing poetry). I wish this guy and his press the best. Under it all he’s a pretty good guy with a pretty good (prodigious) press. So there...

2. I’ve taken up way too much space with the former question but I will say that I don’t think it would be possible to review yourself and get away with it in our current poetry climate (what the hell does that mean?)...unless you’re Kent Johnson of course.

QUESTION #1

I graduated from NYU's MA in Creative Writing, which turned into an
MFA program, but when I was there in the early 90s you still had to
take linguistics and lit courses and pass a translation exam in
another language of your choosing. I must say that I felt VERY
intimidated because right off the bat I felt inferior due to the fact
that I was the only student in my class who was accepted who did not
graduate from an IVY league school...or some top notch university; one
very sweet woman actually said: "I've never met anyone who went to a
state school before!"....Luckily, Michael S. Harper was the teacher at
the time and he blurted out "I went to a state school!".
There was a sense of competition for attention of the teacher. This
was certainly student generated. I was so young! (only 23 when I
entered the program, so that's 15 years ago) and naturally most young
writers want to be nurtured and admired and told that their writing is
worth something. For the most part, I found the program, the
professors and the other students very helpful and encouraging. We
were encouraged to say both critical comments and explicit praise
(what was working, what wasn't working in the poem). In the end, I
think it did help me writing and make the fire in my belly grow. I
wanted to publish and I wanted to make my poems better. Some people
from the program did not continue writing and got corporate jobs or
editing jobs; others became quite well known within 10 years from
winning highly publicized contests or from their manuscripts being
picked up at well established small presses. I sent my manuscript off
to contests several times before Soft Skull contracted Logicalogics in
2003. It went through many incarnations...."Becoming a Queer Saint" ;
"The Logic of Orange" etc...and truthfully I think it does take 10-15
years to put a first collection together (on average) post-grad school
or otherwise. I certainly don't think a poet needs an MFA to be a
successful writer or to win a contest for that matter, but the
MA/MFA/Workshops help a poet refine his/her craft, learn how to edit
his/her own work, hear him/herself read the work outloud to others,
*which really helps a great deal* and to develop that elusive "inner
voice" or "writer's voice" that is supposed to magically appear from
the practice writing. I've heard so many writers say this before me,
but I really think it's so true: reading is the best way to better
writing. And I mean Philosophy, History, Letters of "Enter Favorite
Dead Writer's Name Here", Biographies, Novels and yes poetry:
especially to see what's being published currently in the journals and
from the presses. Sometimes fine tuned manuscripts will continue to
make it to the final round time and time again, yet not be chosen due
to the subject matter, the craft, the experimentation of the
punctuation, the pornography, etc...or the judge knew who s/he was
going to pick before they received the finalists package, which is
more common than one would like to admit.
CRUSH, by Richard Siken (sp?), which was chosen by Louise Gluck for
The Yale Younger Poets award this year, is absolutely brilliant (in my
humble opinion) and it's a miracle that she chose it because it is a
strange and risky book. I highly recommend it! Anyway, I hope I've
touched on some of the questions in #1. If I were 23 again and NYU
accepted my for their M/F/A program, I would most definitely take the
whole crazy trip again; I might not have wasted the contest money
until I really believed the thing was finished. In some ways, I was
just sending it to contests as practice, you know, to see if I could
actually finish a 48-60 page mss.

Question #2

No I don't think it's unethical that WW wrote his own reviews under a
psedonym and I think we should do it too! hee hee. You gotta get your
book some publicity...but I think it wouldn't work as effectively
because there's like so many more outlets and so many more
distractions.
xoxox
Ron

I was at the Iowa Writer's Workshop for Poetry (95-97) and my teachers
during that time were: Marvin Bell, Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, and James
Galvin. I have many friends that I made during my time there and have been
really interested in seeing there work appear in the world.

The thing about Iowa that may be unique is that they have a lot of money
for giving to the poets and fiction writers in the program. For instance, I
got a Maytag Grant the first year and a Teacher's Writing Fellowship the
second year. Before my time there I had no money but by the time I was
graduated, I had money to travel and explore a little bit before going back
to work.

I should say that I am not a competitive person. I sometimes feel jealous
of people who have achieved more or who hit the jackpot somehow but I try to
keep that under control because I think I'm on my own path. I too was wary
of a competitive environment before I went away but I kept
reminding myself that I have two years to work on Poetry without worrying
about money and how to get it.

The other participants were really thoughtful and constructive in their
comments. You have the opportunities to read the work of everyone in the
workshop every week because they do mass photocopying so someone who is not
in your workshop may be reading your work and they may ask you about it
which I found really exciting and it was new to me because I did not think
the fiction people would care for the Poetry or take the time or whatever
but some of them do and this got me interested in the work of my peers which
was also new for me.

There were many great poets who came to Iowa City to read and this was
sometimes a great thing because sometimes you meet up with them later in the
bars for instance. They are a mixed bag, personality-wise (the famous
Poets) probably like everyone.

I think that is all for question one.

Question Two.
What a great idea for Walt Whitman to write his own review for "Leaves of
Grass". Is the "Song of Myself " poem in that collection? Because if it
is, it's not so shocking that... you know... he'd promote himself in any
possible way. I have not read the reviews but someday I will and then
maybe I will review myself favorably if I can find a venue.

Have a beautiful day.

1st Question

Will Esposito:

Someone said to me that there were five MFA programs that really meant anything. I think this could be true. There are 300 programs in the country that graduate 3000 poets each June. I don’t know 3000 poets I could read and like. Some schools must have more interesting writers and many must not. What should this matter or even mean? I don’t know; I wish I had written Buck Downs’ answer (see below.) That I enjoy poets who came from MFA programs and who didn’t means you learn what you learn from somewhere.

And then yes, the competition that breeds like malaria, but works like a Darwinian pressure, which I bracket so that you can skip:

[You get hurt a lot in an MFA program. You don’t get to think youre wonderful and brilliant for too long. At UMass Amherst there were so many student-writers who had been publishing in great journals and many who had books published before they left and others who started successful presses. Jubilat, Verse Press, Slope, Rain Taxi, Conduit--these were the outcomes of being in touch with faculty and visiting readers, but mostly outcomes of fellow students learning from one another what can not be learned in class --in short, the outcomes of community. For some, the MFA program is the first community.]

I never believed the cookie-cutter complaint about MFAs. It assumes a personal stasis. The writer who graduates at age 25 is not the same writer who is re-absorbed by the real world (whatever that is) at 26 and who is writing at 30, 35 or 50. Youre talking about two or three years in the gulag, in heaven, or whatever. Then you get in touch with everyone else again.

And then there is this: A visiting writer to Amherst decried MFA programs. Someone asked how he’d learned to write. He said he’d hunkered down in a Manhattan studio and wrote. He was asked if it was difficult to make ends meet and learn how to write, in Manhattan of all places. He seemed confused--he hadn’t worked at all. The studio was a gift from his parents. He had allowances. Having three years at UMass paid by teaching fellowships vs. working at the Metro bakery--well hats off to the latter for self-sacrifice, and to the former for finding an easier path, I guess.

Lauren Ireland:

I’m just now recovering from an MFA program where competition was peculiar and consuming, for some. There were the typical cliques you’d find anywhere, and in those cliques poems became inbred and those poets tended to publish similar things in similar places. I spent a lot of time consciously avoiding both the social and poetic aspects of the factions, mindful of my efforts to write away from them. I’m glad I did and I suppose I would consider this a sort of reverse competition, though I could have done without the ridiculous politics and gossip. No, I enjoyed the gossip.

There was a bulletin board in the department hallway where poets could post their latest literary journal conquests. I always viewed this with distaste; it seemed that most of the poets who announced their publications were publishing in lousy journals. This, too, forged a determination in me to only publish in what I considered to be the best journals.

I don’t recall feeling that professors encouraged much, if any, competition. I found the professors to be helpful to a fault, if a little busy or absent-minded. They seemed to act as bumpers in a bowling alley, offering gentle guidance. I learned as much from my colleagues as from the professors. The poets in my program whom I admired were the poets I learned from. They were present always in my workshops, at readings, at parties. I entered into a sort of quiet, self-imposed, deferential competition with them. This still touches my writing, and those poets are the foremost reason I do value the time, and the sickening amount of student loan money, I spent on graduate school.

2nd Question

Lauren Ireland:

It is unethical to review oneself, glowing or otherwise, because poets (I, at least) are too close to their own work to view it with any kind of impartiality. Certainly some sort of detachment would result from years away from one’s work, but the mental and emotional ties, for better or worse, are always wedded to one’s poems. I always look back at my old work with either pride or disgust; there are some poems I’ve written and grown to despise, and others seem so good I couldn’t have been their author.

However, there is something so endearingly naïve about Whitman—his childish egotism, his bare-assed baby-view of the world, even after his war-time experiences—that I have to forgive his reviews. Someone else mentioned Pessoa, and that is where my mind went first, but it is difficult for me to ascribe that kind of pathology, or single-minded purpose, to Whitman’s intentions. It is presumptuous of me to assume this; I can’t help but to find charming earnestness and sweetness in Whitman’s reviews of himself. I have to believe that he believed in his own poems.

I should clarify that I don’t find Whitman as one-dimensional as I feel I’ve just described him; it is just that I find a wholesome quality in his poems, and a willingness to strip bare and divulge so much, that it is difficult for me to view him with much cynicism. I know many poets, some here, some elsewhere, who have self-aggrandizing tendencies and who are fond of rather vocal public self-praise, and whose intentions I always meet with skepticism. If they don’t quite have the balls to truly review their own work, they have friends to do it for them. They aren’t Whitman, though, and their poems don’t begin to approach his. I think I’ve arrived at this: there’s nothing unethical in believing in one’s own work, but it’s mighty suspicious to tout it in reviews, hence Whitman’s need for pseudonyms.

Will Esposito:

A few respondents seem to have exhausted this question. I don’t think America offered (or offers) too many avenues for radical queens of genius. It’s a lot of underbrush that makes going difficult. The best Whitman move was to publish Emerson’s personal letter to him without Emerson’s permission. Emerson was miffed. I think a more interesting question now is what do you get when you don’t promote yourself in any way except that which is respectable. What are the lines of propriety? Do your poems die with you or is there still hope for a poetry of genius in a nation that teaches advertisement as the one true hope for the kind of respect Whitman still receives?

QUESTION ONE

I got a PhD from Buffalo Poetics, not a creative writing program in that we never had workshops and we were reliant on our own motivations to find each other as readers of our work. Many people have many ideas about this program—that it is a school for only the strictest adherence to "language poetry;" or that it is a poetry mecca, some kind of ideal community; that it is an ultra-aggressive, competitive scene for cut-throat, ambitious poets… I have to say that my experience at Buffalo resembled none of these things.

Within the SUNY Buffalo English Department the Poetics program was seriously embattled, forcing many poetics students and faculty to bond together in simply trying to understand what in the history of poetics created such a cloud of suspicion over poetry in the Academy in the first place. For example, when Myung Mi Kim came to her professorship at Buffalo, she said she was expecting to find a place where some of these old battles had been worked out, but instead she found that it was a place where the battles just seemed to rage at the highest possible decibel. So the most competitive elements came in the form of defending a wide variety of contemporary poetic practices against charges of "flakiness," not "making sense," "not really KNOWING anything," etc, as they were being made by Romanticists, Identity Politicians, and scholars of the modern who had made huge investments in very traditional readings of, say, Dickinson or Whitman or Emerson. This "other side" (there came to be pretty distinct "sides") lobbed all kinds of charges at Poetics and these charges had to be answered regularly and very carefully, as they often pertained to faculty hires and admissions of poetics students. The "other side" had a whole vocabulary for contemporary poetics—most notably they made continuous pleas that the department needed a return to "nuts and bolts," which was posited as decidedly NOT what experimental writing concerned itself with. "Nuts and bolts" was presented as the exclusive domain of narrative and New Yorker-style poetry. I suspect this preference was largely based in a relative comfort with poetry that you can "get" on a first, casual, read-through. But …doesn't that kind of casual reader comfort actually function to HIDE "nuts and bolts" if by nuts and bolts we mean, mechanics, the parts that work together to make the meaning? It seemed to me that the "other side" wanted Poetry Range Rovers and poetics wanted to work on poetry engines and invent new ones.

(Certainly some faculty who were not poets, nor "poetics" as such, were very much in favor of the poetics program and found the critical thinking going on in poetics exciting and rich, namely James Bunn, Neil Schmitz, Jill Robbins, Joe Conte… )

There were students and faculty alike who could very easily swagger into an almost delighted tizzy when given the opportunity to exclaim how much they *hated* poetics. But, being the wanna-be undercover operative I am, I came to frequent those crowds, and found that "stupid" "ignorant" "don't know the first THING about poetry" "windbag" "total bullshit" and "self-indulgent" were the most common phrases for referring to poetics students, faculty, and the program in general. Over time I began to realize that what these students were reacting to largely concerned notions of manners and propriety. My first inkling of this came when I began showing these nay-sayers some experimental film. In time I noted that it was precisely when a film directly addressed film as a medium--whether by addressing the camera, complicating or multiplying the narrative, relying on visual quotation, using the actual film in a different way through color treatment, emulsion, etc--that the nay-sayers would respond rather viscerally as if someone had come right out of the TV and told them to FUCK OFF, STUPID! Film and television addressing its medium was deemed rude and insulting, and assumed to make the viewer feel bad/stupid "by design," and this is what was "self-indulgent."

In terms of tradition and the study of poetry and language, I found many of these folks had more affection for what seemed to them to be the obvious and only purpose of poetry: that it be "good language," well written, displaying a mastery of correct usage, as if to say the litmus test for any poem was its eloquence or exacting. Contemporary provisions were made for Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde and Def Poetry, I suspect because they also "made sense" more immediately and, moreover, provided an outlet for bad feelings. I think many of the nay-sayers in question were actually VERY afraid to let go of the idea of poetry as an outlet for feelings. I also know that many of them wrote poetry but showed it to no one.

Ultimately, the labeling of poetics students as "self-indulgent" seemed hypocritical. The model of poetry as the righteous-teddy-bear-for-the-self-in-all-its-anger may serve as a linguistic attempt to meet primal scream therapy half way, but then what? What are the political or aesthetic strategies gained for the future? Where is the hope? Audre Lorde’s activist life may have done something for her social causes or for activism itself, but her poetry didn't do anything for the medium of poetry. It is a record of her life in line breaks…so what.

If poetics nay-sayers find empowerment in taking poetry away from concentration of its specific medium, language, and away from its history as an engine of/for thought, and away from analyzing the social forms that poetic thinking has critiqued in the past, only to be deployed as either a display of disciplined standardization, or a rhyme-based argument about one's feelings, then I suggest there is a great deal of money to be made in writing self-help with line breaks. That is at least half of what passes for poetry in these circles. But poetry, at its core, the poetry which still has much to teach us, does not find its end as the engine for righteousness and-or teddy bears. Poetry is bigger than the self. Poetry is bigger than teddy bears. (which, by the way, does not preclude it from still helping or expressing or engaging concepts of "self." Nor does it preclude anyone from hugging it in bed.)

The truth is I came to feel genuinely sad about these nay-sayers, because ultimately all they wanted was to be married and safe and confident that they had always driven very straight on the road of erudition. "Contemporary" media generally threw them off, and they did what they could to disparage such things. But more than that, they did harm to poetics and to poets all along the way.

With other "poetics" students, I felt *some* competitiveness, but not because anyone suggested there was only ONE way to do Art or Poetry or Writing, as Kevin Killian experienced with his Video Arts friend. The other poets in the program were generally not so dogmatic about HOW to do things. The more slightly dogmatic critical approaches seemed to come from the poets I felt were more conservative, like Graham Foust and Peter Ramos, whose work and feedback I appreciated (and who I believe would not mind being called "conservative" in a discussion of aesthetics). Peter told me once he felt it was ridiculous if poetics people wrote poetry without knowing all the traditional forms. He did NOT write in traditional forms or insist that anyone else do so, but he was pretty disgusted, I gathered, that so many people in Buffalo knew very little, if any, detail of the old forms, yet deigned to challenge the forms writing could take. Graham said pretty explicitly in his "Rust Talk," which can be read on line through EPC webzines, that he felt many poets in Buffalo were just doing sloppy Susan Howe imitations. While I cannot claim objectively that he was 100% wrong, I felt rather that the poets I knew and read in Buffalo were all taking risks, raising all manner of challenge to what could count as poetry, performance, sense, story, etc., at times, albeit, with no palpable success. But those years in Buffalo, for many, were an opportunity to push their praxes as far as they could. While I disagreed with some of what Graham said, I must admit it has stayed with me as an anxiety I do not mind having. But in the grand scheme of things literary-academic, I defend the right of poets to TRY anything, to risk personal foolishness for the sake of advancing the medium or in the hopes of addressing some problem with language, media, and ideology. Even if the TRY-ing involves deploying a strategy learned from Susan Howe, or whether it be imitative or dull or offensive, I defend the right to live out one's life poetically even if you seem to suck at "moving" audiences with your writing. I defend that right wholeheartedly.

Rather than competitiveness I would characterize my feelings as irritation. To me, Buffalo was simply a place where a wide variety of poetic strategies were being tried out and my fellow students were a constant source of irritation in that they were always bringing up stuff I never thought of, stuff I didn't always want to think about, stuff I thought I had worked out, sometimes stuff I thought was irrelevant.

This irritation, embraced, continued and continues to challenge my judgment in the realms of poetry, poetics and politics. I did find myself, at times, feeling that the program might be infringing on the poetry of some of my classmates and friends, and myself, too, for that matter. I felt the pressure of big ideas, plans, and projects emerging more and more as we were regularly called upon in seminars to theorize on/about the poetry we were reading. When criticism in prose becomes one's primary mode of reading, writing and planning, it can start to seem like poetry doesn't exist if there isn't some 'thing,' or some point, or some continuity holding it together. But Poetry is not an argument; argument is not a necessity.

I also realized in the process that I was not necessarily very well read or book smart compared to the average PhD student in poetics. I felt lost in some conversations, like they were all over my head. What was great about this, in the end, was that I decided to embrace my mediocrity as a student and commit even further to the medium of poetry as I understood and experienced it. I remembered that I didn't come to a PhD in Poetics because I wanted to be the quintessential academic; I got a PhD in Poetics because I am deeply committed to poetry and to sharing with others the attentiveness and joy it can bring.


QUESTION TWO

I am not bothered by Whitman reviewing himself. For me, this kind of writing is akin to writing a statement of poetics. Poetry is difficult, and a statement or meditation written adjacent to one’s poetry can go a long way in attempting to engage an imagined audience. With love-happy, idealist Whitman in particular, I can imagine him believing that nothing was too much to publicize his grand vision. His vision of America for all Americans was often represented in the public press as pornographic in both its themes and extended form. A true believer in radical democracy, Whitman would probably have rather left this for every reader to read and decide for his or her self, and the more scandal and talk in the public press, the more likelihood of gaining new readers.

If the question Conrad & friends are struggling over ultimately regards self-promotion, I would recommend keeping in mind Ashbery's line "to be a famous poet / is not be famous at all" or words to that effect (I am at my day job, without my Ashbery books). In other words, if you are spending your time writing or making art that is not readily understood or digested by the average zombie-critic and-or the passive entertainment-seekers, or people looking to make money off you, then you are in a minority. Whitman was a queer roustabout in 19th century New Jersey with a vision and access to printing. Just because he is famous now doesn't mean he was greedy or amoral then for writing about his own work. First, it is never immoral to write about your own work. Second, it is not immoral to publish your own work. When I get anything in the mail from other poets, I consider it a gift and I am grateful and flattered to receive it, even if I don't like the actual poetry much. Poetry is work. There is ever a dearth of small press outlets for emerging poets. If you have something to share, share it.

Now, if the question concerns sycophantish coteries that develop around people who are considered to have power within the small world of experimental writing, and you find that those groups regularly attract young poets who are all too ready to sacrifice their own work for the security of acceptance, some readings, a chapbook or two, and a pat on the head from someone they probably fear----then I say, sure, that sounds gross, but does it really mean much in the end? Just cuz some cowards can't face the future without an authority figure to kowtow to, doesn't mean shit once we’re all dead.

I hadn't heard of these reviews by and about Walt Whitman. I like the
idea. I would like to read these reviews, and if they are wonderfully
written, then good for him. The people that say they are not looking
for some kind of attention/communication/success are only trying to
break it open for themselves from a different angle. I mean angel, no I
really mean a cliquey angle, though I am staggeringly tired.

Once last year I announced I would be singing in a style of Pj Harvey
meets Rabbis. In a press announcement Douglas Kelley used these words
as if he was saying it or quoting someone other than me. I did nothing
to correct this misunderstanding, even when friends said, "That Douglas
Kelley really likes you. I read what he wrote about you. Pj Harvey and
Rabbis."

As well, someone thought they read about me, when they were reading
about the film actress and performance artist, Shelley Mars. They were
gone before I got to correct them. I was Shelley Marlow before she was
Shelly Mars. When we met at Kate Millet's old loft, we came very close
to having a cat fight over our names. But we behaved ourselves in the
presence of our elders.

Yesterday, I was visiting Peter Trachtenberg and he acted out a
well-known nasty reviewer as Donald Duck throwing an illegible fit,
which threw me into a fit of laughter.

I am by nature a person who avoids competition--perhaps out of a fear that I might always be the one who fails--so to end up in a creative writing program that was not very nurturing (at first) was a big shock to me.
I worked very closely with my creative writing professors in undergrad and expected to be treated with respect when I entered graduate school. I found something quite different when I entered my first workshop. I felt, as Carol expressed in her response, that the students were pitted against each other, that the mantra "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" was the reigning belief. I thought, very seriously, about quitting. The first workshop where one of my poems was discussed made me want to walk out the door in outrage. Thank god I wasn't paying for this program!

As I hung in there, however, I found a wonderful community (albeit, small) of people who were interested in forming bonds through poetry. I have always been much more interested in collaboration than competition, and while I would occasionally feel jealous of my friends' successes, I was also thrilled for them, for the fact that they were good and deserved to be heard. I am especially grateful for the friendship and collaboration that I found with Deborah Richards and Yolanda Wisher. They are, essentially, how I got through my first year of grad school. When Jena Osman was hired at Temple, things got much better, and I am grateful to her for the spirit of collaboration and respect that she offered to her students.

As for Whitman, well, it's pretty ballsy. It would be interesting to try to write a review of your own work...if you could see it objectively at all.

QUESTION 1
My undergrad cw classes at the Univ. of Pittsburgh were pretty competitive, all about proving to so-and-so that you had read such-and-such so you would get picked to do the student reading at the bar. There was a definite 'scene', in that the value of the work only existed, for some people, within certain parameters, ie. it didn't matter if you wrote good stuff and you had a class with someone, if there was a hierarchy that you didn't work to squeeze into, then you didn't matter or, worse, didn't exist. And I think that's a top-down thing... if faculty members don't play favorites in a program, then students don't have to feel like they've got to one-up each other. Of course, in that same program, their was even a tension between faculty members that one could feel as a student. I recall that my senior workshop leader was not a tenured prof, although he was an incredible reader & writer, and there were two senior workshops, either him or the chair of the creative writing program. (I think he may have had different teaching philosophies and/or felt undervalued, which I think he was). Several students bitched, went behind his back, etc. because they had not gotten into the other class ... this did nothing for the ego of our prof, who was treated with disdain by several students through the term & he responded in kind to the entire class.

For a while, I found that whole cw atmosphere to be truly hurtful to my work and to my spirit as a critical reader... I think I'd even compare it to becoming stunted in the formative years... because I got to a point where I only wanted to bring poems to workshop that everyone would praise & love, so, I couldn't bring first drafts -- and if a poem was shite and I was stuck, I'd abandon it before bringing it to my cannabilistic peers and ambivalent profs. I know that I too had become a bit of a vulture, seeking out only the elements I could tear to shreds, without figuring out what I could learn from my peers by seeing what they did well.

However, I am in an MFA program & I love it. It is a low-resideny program at Antioch University in L.A., a historically nontraditional, self-directed, socially-conscious school, so that certainly has something to do with it because when I looked for a program, I wanted something that would help me develop as a writer & human being in the world, not just teach me to "best" my colleagues. So, there's practically no competition -- most of the competition that I've experienced is entirely self-inflicted (read: self-doubt, coupled with being humbled by the brilliance of my peers). I think the lack of competition has alot to do with the low-res model... I'm very independent (& in some ways isolated from my peers). I work closely, and connect on a very individualized level, with one faculty mentor for an extended period of time. For the majority of my experience, I've felt like my mentors could be working with me & me alone; so I've never felt the need to jockey for attention or outshine someone else. I really get to focus on improving my work, without have to judge it against how my professor is treating someone else. I feel like I've arrived a place where I can focus that competitive force between me & the poems - mano y mano, duking it out until the only one of us is left standing.

QUESTION 2
I read an essay by Dana Gioia recently that said because poetry is so rarely reviewed in mainstream media most reviews are overly positive... as if just having the book published & then reviewed is reason to celebrate (which, it is.. but...). So, that being said, I don't think a positive review means much of anything... I think I go into almost anything that has been critically acclaimed with an element of cynicism. Again, returning to the previous question for a second... I think some c.w. programs actually bring down level of writers critical powers by forcing students to read the work published by their university press or the profs friends, and then giving flack if a student questions the quality of the work (at least, this was my personal experience). I think its always important to question work. In a seminar that I recently took about leading workshops, the lecturer said she nearly always starts a workshop by having the students critique a piece by a famous writer. So, the group spends 30 mins tearing apart Rita Dove or Billy Collins or whomever (without knowing who it is), then when the writer's identity is revealed the point is, we all need help sometimes & even published poems aren't perfect.

On the flipside... at this point in time, a poet is really her own best friend... when I host readings, I encourage shameless self-promotion (as do most hosts that I've seen). Power to any poet, that can write a genuine critical analysis of his own work that the work can hold up to... I know, I'm generally my own harshest critic, I think I'd end up writing a negative review of my own work... or half-hearted accolade... and I've never seen these reviews of Whitman's (although now, I'm really interested!), so I can't say for sure, but I'd guess they're not any kind of flowery, over-exaggerated prose... I could be wrong.. I don't. But, either way, I think every poet should aspire to write a book that will weather his own criticism.

~Autumn Konopka

I think my take on the competition issue finally is whatever it takes dude, to "keep you sharp" in Frank's phrase, or avoid mediocrity as Kevin puts it. Whatever it takes to keep you scuflling, keep scuffling. The competition is not the thing, which is part of how quickly it becomes a drag when young people of any age take it seriously at all. I suppose the context of the writing program is important, since it is primarily in the arms of institutional care that the penny-prizes of these first-book last-book competitions find the base of their ziggurat, a.k.a your checkbooks.

This question reminds me of listening to a tape of a panel discussion Kerouac was in on. The topic was "Is There a Beat Generation?" and Kerouac, totally in the throes of the Pure Land, asks as an answer, "Is there a World?", i.e, that the taxonomy-building et al. of the literacy industry is always already a distraction from the thing itself, like so many egocentrisms are. If you can read, after all, you can write, and if you can read, you shouldn't really need lessons in how to read.

On a personal note, having demolished my competition into fucking itty bitty fucking smithereens & sown them like salt into the dust of the National Mall where nothing more shall ever grow, I have retired from competition. I am now what is called a "mascot".

xoxo,
-Buck

Wednesday
August 10
8 PM

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
(2003)-74 minutes

This award-winning video documents the events during and after the 2002 short-lived coup d'état against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Two independent filmmakers were inside the presidential palace on April 11, 2002, when he was forcibly removed from office. They were also present 48 hours later when, remarkably, Chavez returned to power amid cheering aides. Their film records what was probably history's shortest-lived coup d'état. It's a unique document about people power and an extraordinary portrait of the man The Wall Street Journal calls "Washington’s biggest Latin American headache."

- FS

I haven't thought much about the question of competition in a while, because I am, after all, living in San Francisco where I have adopted a general policy of laissez-faire about everything; but today at lunch as it happen my friend the video artist Kota Ezawa told me, very fiercely, that "art is a battle of ideas," and something about the way he was so insistent on this made me think more about how I really feel. So funny to come home then and find your call. Kota is all like, you should never make a dishonest work of art, you should not make things to sell, otherwise the market has won. In poetry I do think that competition is healthy and that nothing disgusts me more than a group of poets who all love each other's work. The only thing that means is that the mediocre has triumphed. Now that I write these things down, it sounds as though I were implicating you Philly poets by saying this on your forum. I didn't mean to do so but, now that I think of it, what's up with that? Are all of you these great master poets, or is there competition and hierarchy between you? That's the way it is here and, hey, we're in California where rank matters less than, well, a good brioche.

I didn't go to a Creative Writing program. Are they really hotbeds of competition? Or is it that, there are only so few first book awards and there must be some people who never win one? I don't know.

Regarding Whitman, maybe you could see these reviews he wrote of his own work as part of a general line of hoaxes and spoofs that have energized American culture since its inception? Oh, I don't know, you should ask Kent Johnson about this.

In the meantime may I ask the poets of Philadelphia to look out for our young friend Julia Bloch, an interesting writer who is going to be starting the PhD program at Penn this month? I told her that you would watch out for her and introduce her to people with whom she'd feel at home. Thank you, Conrad. xxx Kevin K.

Question 1:
I got an MFA at George Mason University. It took 5 long years to earn the degree because the job I worked alongside school demanded lots of hours. I was unhappy throughout my first couple of years in the program, and I seriously considered dropping out halfway through. I was advised by a wise friend to stick it out, as he guaranteed that I would someday use the degree. I took his advice, especially because my employer was paying for the degree.

I had a miserable time working with some of the faculty members, and I felt my MFA experiences to be largely destructive. I felt that students were being played against one another by their would-be masters. I got an email once from a professor that said my poems were "without meaningful intent or content." I don't know that I have ever felt anything as cruel. The environment allowed egos and drama to spread like kudzu. I wanted no part of it, especially since I had made friends with many wonderful poets in DC and among the GMU student body. I wanted to spend my time with poets who were supportive, generous, community-based, and fun. I made it through the program by latching onto Carolyn Forche, who was sympathetic to my grievances. She made it possible for me to engage independent studies and she stood behind me in my discretions.

I am glad I finished my MFA. Most valuably, and often in spite of my professors' examples, I learned the import of speaking about poems I do not like using language that is respectful and, ideally, constructive. I am glad I have my MFA because it has helped me in practical, employment matters. I am glad I pursued an MFA at George Mason because I never met a DC poet I didn't adore. My comrades from GMU are among my closest friends today, 10 years later.

The uber-lesson I hold from the MFA experience is to move away from things that hurt and to otherwise take advantage of the opportunities in any given situation, which are usually plentiful.

Question 2:
Sure. If the reviews were well written and meaningful, I wouldn't object. I'm otherwise not interested in playing judge and jury on matters of self-aggrandizement. I have a basic distaste for such motivations, as I think listening and talking should be in balance, but I've heard some thoughtful arguments to my contrariness. At the end of the day, I don't feel so affected by such actions.

Thanks for asking!
Carol

Oh YES, I know those reviews, and LOVE them. A few years ago, while I was teaching in an MFA Program, I tracked down 3 or 4 of those pieces, and copied them for the students You could call them "reviews" I suppose, but they're also "essays" and "manifestos." They’re brilliant and very well-written and address many questions about what the role of the poet is, can, or should be, that are still very relevant (and largely unheeded) today. Reading them made my opinion of Whitman go up, as I consider them among some of his best writing, and believe they should be taught alongside his canonical work such as "Song of Myself," if one wants to get the full sense of Whitman's "project" and "vision." I not only agree with Conrad that they are not unethical and also provocative and "incredibly funny" (well, once you’re in on the joke), but would even go so far as to claim that something like this is far more ethical than the "business as usual" attitude one finds in many poetry circles and is precisely what is needed in (the social institution of) poetry today.

It’s funny how Whitman is so invoked in poetry "circles" (as well as in the “larger” culture---Clinton bought Monica Leaves of Grass; Laura Bush was going to have a discussion on such allegedly “benign” poets as Whitman before she cancelled the event out of fear some people would want to "politicize" it), yet if many of the same people who invoked Whitman really looked at what he said and did in his writing and life, they would find it challenges at the core many of their seemingly habitual activities. At one point in one of these "reviews," he talks about how you’ll never find Walt Whitman at the polite poetry readings of his day, but rather mingling with longshoremen, etc. Yet, in American poetry today, poets who do not devote a lot of time going to readings, keeping up with the large amount of books being published, etc. are often looked at suspiciously, ostracized, not taken "seriously," or ignored for doing exactly what Whitman sang of himself. The question I would ask is How ethical is THAT? If one wants to truly support one’s fellow poets, is it really more ethical to partake in a culture that basically says "go to 50 readings a year, and maybe 50 people will go to yours; read 50 books a year, and maybe 50 people will read yours;" than it is to take a step back from this social involvement and look at a blade of grass or get some sense of connection with the rest of humanity who doesn’t call themselves poets?

I don’t know whether Whitman writing these reviews actually had any effect on sales for his book, but the mere fact that he made the attempt (utilizing his skill at journalist-speak as well as his connections in that "4th estate") is itself something I value and envy, similar in a way to the slaves taking on Christianity, the religion of their oppressors, to be able to express themselves in a way that might have gone unheeded, and yes, punished, otherwise. Today, words like "narcissism" and "shameless self-promotion" are often tossed around negatively, yet perhaps it's actually more HONEST and RESPONSIBLE for a poet, of for any artist for that matter, to write about themselves than to adopt the allegedly more ethical role of "critic" or "scholar." Sure, Emerson (who also helped promote Whitman) was right when he talks about how when we read any great piece of literature what we really are reading are the aspects of ourselves we perhaps couldn't admit consciously, and writing reviews of others certainly can serve that function---but have you ever tried to do a "close reading" of one of your own poems? I have, and found it to be an amazing experience, and NO MORE "NARCISSISTIC" than writing about somebody else's poems. Not only do I learn a lot by doing that, but I’d argue that the pieces of writing that resulted were at least as interesting as most pieces of writing that get published as "reviews" and maybe even as the poems themselves, especially if one lets go of the notion that a piece of prose can "explain" a poem in any definitive way more than a poem could "explain" the prose (this is also why I'm a huge admirer of Laura Riding's "close reading" of her own poem in her Survey of Modern Poetry). I certainly don't want to be guilty of the opposite claim and say IT'S ONE'S ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO WRITE "CLOSE READINGS" OF ONE'S OWN POEMS, but I do think it should the form should be permitted, and the way I see it, Whitman gives that permission in a way the standard ethics of the social institution of poetry does not today.

In the poetry world today, the APPEARANCE OF nepotism is frowned on. In fact, it's frowned on much more than nepotism itself. If the recent flap over the FOETRY website proved anything, it proved that it’s still considered more "ethical" to clandestinely help someone get published and reviewed (as you yourself had benefited from such) than to publish and review yourself. There may be nothing wrong with that, but if there's truly nothing wrong with that, than why be clandestine about it? This system has created a climate in the poetry world as toxic as the STEROID scandal, maybe even worse because it doesn’t even enhance the performance of the poets in the vast majority of the cases. And for what stakes? Perpetuating a fiefdom of dullness, or sameness? If at least this nepotistic network in the "anonymous" contests, and the hierarchical nature of poetry "communities" were exposed to elements of air and light more, there could be an openness to those who won't or can't play by the prevailing aesthetic or social rules, such as Whitman in his time. Granted, one difference between Whitman and Mr. Foetry was that Mr. Foetry had a more limited vision; he stopped at being a mere "whistle blower," too obsessively scouring the "poetry world" for signs of injustice---a temptation that, granted, is very hard to avoid, especially if one is told it's his or her duty to read a lot (too much) contemporary poetry, go to readings, etc---while Whitman, though acutely aware of such injustices, was able to focus on other things, one could say "larger" or "wider" things (such as his "self" in others, nature and his writing) and thereby frame such injustices as rather petty, like Dylan looking out from Desolation Row or Eden and laughing at (and even pitying) the paupers who "change possessions, each one wishing for what the other has got," beneath the thin veil of "community." This question itself has gotten me a little too intimate with Mr. Foetry’s stance, so I will end soon (so I try can focus on other things), but one thing the example of Whitman provides (and I will even admit that I am not even a big ga-ga Whitman head) is a kind of validation for me to try to go out and proactively create an alternative in my writing and life---and realize that I do not necessarily need validation from those who most loudly try to "speak for poetry" (as an institution or aesthetic object)—not that I am "better" or "worse" than them, but only that if I want to reach people in the here and now (which, granted, not all poets want to do---and that’s okay), because I truly believe in a vision that could somehow help others, I may have to do it "by any means necessary" and even if what gets defined as "poetry" today more often subordinates "vision" to "craft," and even if I won’t be able to pull up such a journalistic-"crafty" stunt as Whitman myself, I certainly admire him for that, and feel/think it's totally consistent with the other kinds of "thinking outside the box" one finds in Whitman's poetry.

C

Kevin, wanted to admit that I had a small extra paragraph in question 2 about the poet Fernando Pessoa's use of his Heteronyms, or alternative personalities.

But in the end I took it out because I thought I was getting away from the fact that Whitman wasn't writing the reviews to explore extra, or hidden personalities. But then again who knows what the old queen was up to in his bedroom with pen in hand, stroking his long white beard? Maybe it was like a whole play for him, we don't know. We don't know how he wrote them, but we do know he did. So our imaginations have to fill in the blanks, which is really quite fun!

Frank, yes, what you say makes perfect sense that Ginsberg was championing Corso because he believed in Corso as a great poet. Glad you said so. I also believe that if it were not for Ginsberg's spiritual life that he may not have been able to find the space inside himself to be so instantly okay with the situation. It was one of those moments in watching a documentary where I said to myself that I was witnessing a way to Be which would benefit everyone.

CAConrad

wow, question 1 made me wish i was in a creative writing program--juicy

QUESTION TWO
How do we all feel about Walt Whitman writing reviews of Leaves of
Grass under various pseudonyms? Is it unethical to write glowing
reviews for yourself? What are your feelings? Is it a big deal to you
that Whitman wrote these reviews? Or do you maybe see it like I do,
that he was simply saying, "Hey, I'm pretty damn good, check me out!"?

i'd like to point out another, perhaps, dimension that hasn't been
touched upon. it is possible that whitman was writing what raymond
federman coined critifiction well before the first wave of postmodern
writers (barthes, sukenick, katz, federman, etcetera)--after all,
whitman is created with many pioneering formal inventions. in terms of
this being morally reprehensible, absolutely not. especially as it is
(at least was) very fashionable to think that it can never be "I"
writing anyway. does it not make more sense to consider the entirety
of a artists output instead of isolating every little piece? add it to
whitman's work, consider it an odd off-shoot, figure out how to insert
it and then investigate with all the critical resources you can
muster.

to address conrad's point, you better like what you wrote!

to address conrad's point, why is it more problematic for a poet to be
able to market themselves than an visual artist? more often than not,
poets are more eloquent, they should be better at it. there is this
idea floating around that poetry can't be popular, and if it/or your
work is it cannot be good. how is this idea useful? is this still
connected? i'll try. all whitman was doing was trying to make back the
money he spent publishing his work--at the time there wasn't charles
bernstein and (the late) robert creeley to endorse every book of
progressive verse that came out, if not himself, than who? fuck, he
sang the damn thing.

Feel free to send answers to CAConrad13@AOL.com, which I promise to post. Oh, and by the way, I will refuse to take anonymous submissions.

QUESTION ONE
This first one is only for those of you who were in a creative writing program. How do you feel about creative writing programs and competition? How was the competitive atmosphere? Was this atmosphere mostly student directed, or from professors? In the end, do you feel this competition moved you and your poetry forward? Or maybe that it kept you back in some way?

Please explain, and feel free to add any additional questions/answers for yourself about such things.

Personally I have never had any experience with creative writing programs, but I have had quite a few conversations with poets who have. Some seemed to flourish, while others were left bitter and angry. And do NOT assume that those left bitter and angry are bad writers, because that's not at all the case with some pissed off friends of mine.

At the original PhillySound Festival a couple of years ago I hosted a live 9for9 panel. I asked the 9 poets how they felt about creative writing programs, and of course received very different opinions. Some said the programs are a waste of time, some said they are dangerous, while others said they're fantastic, and that one way they are good is that they afford you the time you want and need to write and study poetry. But this question isn't about programs in that broad sense, it's about the competitive nature of the programs.

QUESTION TWO
How do we all feel about Walt Whitman writing reviews of Leaves of Grass under various pseudonyms? This was something I didn't know about until one of my visits to the Whitman house in Camden, when a young history student was the curator. He showed us pictures of what a mess Whitman's room had been at the time of his death with trash to the knees. In that trash is where they found drafts of his reviews of his work.

But is it unethical to write glowing reviews for yourself? What are your feelings?

To me it was incredibly funny, and made me like Whitman even more. My reaction horrified a couple of friends, which forced me to compose an argument, which is the sort of thing that always tests your morals and ethics, and soon enough I found I had many fewer morals and ethics than my friends.

My argument was (and still is) simply, Why Not? I mean, seriously, ask yourself, do you LIKE a book of poetry better because of a positive review? Don't you in fact have your own ideas about it regardless of a review? That's my experience. But it's also my experience that I have searched out books of poetry because of a review, and that that review in a sense was something to get my taste buds working, but never to decide on the end result of how I felt about the book once found.

Is it a big deal to you that Whitman wrote these reviews? Or do you maybe see it like I do, that he was simply saying, "Hey, I'm pretty damn good, check me out!"?

CAConrad

By championing Corso, Ginsberg was doing more than being a magnanimous friend or a zen-patient buddhist.

He believed, he believed, he believed- in Gregory Corso. He believed in the genius of Gregory Corso. He believed that Corso was writing great poems. He believed it was important that the world hear his work.

In light of the competition discussion, I've met more and more poets recently who speak antithetically to this aspect of the Ginsberg spirit, by insisting that it's every writer's own responsibility to draw attention to their own work. It's based on a feeling that each poet has to work too hard to get themselves noticed to waste time pushing others who may be too lazy, crazy or otherwise engaged to do it themselves. It's my sense that poets' opinions about this directly relate to their perception of writing communities, or their imagined independence from such configurations. Some are disenchanted with their community, & some simply view them as a bald networking vehicles.

Sure, this is nothing new. But what's new for me is the pronouncement of this ethic in oppositional writing communities. I recognize there's a middle-ground here, but in its harshest interpretation, the microcapital gene could be engaged in engineering collective structures of experimental poets. The sickness of course, is that by applying the rules of late-late capitalism to poetry- you still make no money.

I bring this up not as a boo-hoo lament, or a glorification of the way things used to be. There are more young writing communities in more parts of the country that are sharing/publishing work they believe in than ever before. Poetry communities are more diverse in class/race/gender than ever before, & opportunites to share work (thanks to the internet) has never been more capable of extending communities.

I'm just fascinated with the insistence that everyone is out- or in it, for themselves. And I appreciate the honesty, when it is honest.

- Frank Sherlock

Hey, I also wanted to respond to what Adam wrote, in particular the part, "These all emerged as formidable partnerships, grounded in love and respect, but motivated by poetic growth and development." This sentence was preceded by examples of pairs of poets, one pair being Corso and Ginsberg.

True, Corso and Ginsberg were friends, but it is clear that Corso was often beyond competitive, and just downright jealous. Almost insane with jealousy in fact.

The best example, one that blows up in your face, is from the film THE SOURCE. There's a scene where Corso and Ginsberg are sitting on a bench (I think it's a bench), and Corso erupts, "MY BOOK CAME OUT FIRST!" It was just, simply, astounding, seeing this. Not just because of Corso, who obviously had some serious issues about fame, but mostly the scene is wonderful because of Ginsberg, who pats him on the knee, and without saying a single word. Just a little, "there-there" pat for his friend who is acting crazy.

The thing that made that relationship work --obviously-- was Gisnberg's immense patience. It would be easy to get sick of such outbursts, especially since those books had come out 40 years before that documentary was even produced. It was one of those blinks of evidence that Ginsberg was the generous soul, calm and understanding. It's such a beautiful, loving moment when Ginsberg pats Corso because in a way it actually PROTECTS Corso from our witness. It's Ginsberg's way of saying, "Don't judge this man too harshly, I love him, he's my friend, he says stupid things, but he's okay, so don't hate him." It's nice, and it works, at least it worked for me, because I remember thinking, "Okay, Ginsberg didn't roll his eyes, or yell back, he just made the gesture toward understanding and compassion. If he's not upset then why should I be?"

I remember seeing that film at the movie theater with my friend Janet Mason, and that was the scene where we looked at each other and BURST OUT LAUGHING! That outburst of Corso's was so unexpected and outrageous. But for me it took seeing the film a second time to fully absorb the most amazing part of the scene, which is all about Ginsberg. You fall in love with the man, right then and there, if you weren't already. I mean, REALLY, Ginsberg could make compassion SO SEXY! OOOO WEEEE! LOVE that man!

CAConrad

Nice to read some new voices here.

But let me write that I think Adam’s response doesn't speak to competition fully. Competition isn’t supplementary to poetic practice. It is the point of it. One needs to have refractory material against which to work; for poets this material is the tradition and materials of poetic practice, from Homer to me. (I have written already about this below.) To write that competition is merely supplementary to practice is to record punching as a tactic one might use effectively in a boxing ring.

Nor do I think poetry is just some job we leave for in the morning, that one might meet up with us after work and find the hooker does have a heart of gold, the chief executive office a conscience. What makes a poet interesting is that s/he is a poet. Not that s/he writes poems. What makes a friend is that s/he is interesting.


Will Esposito

G. Emil Reutter:

I have read the recent thread with great interest. Recently I have been hitting some venues in Philadelphia, Jersey and New York. I mainly focus on writing short stories but do have an affection for poetry and have written a few here and there. Raisng the bar so to speak is one thing, poet to poet but the influx of slams and competetions has turned many a venue into a star search format, there are times I do think Ed McMahon may pop out and announce the winner. Poets have enough drama in their lives without the added drama of mine is better then yours bullshit. When I share my poetry at readings some may not like it but if one person enjoys it I do believe it is worth sharing, it may be that person I wrote it for.

Adam Fieled:

The "competition" debate on Philly Sound has been fascinating, illuminating, and amusing. I'd like to present you my two cents. I feel that Frank is correct on one level; a certain amount of competitive energy can "keep (a poet) sharp". I also agree with you that personal relationships suffer when competition gets too "hot and heavy". What I think is being tested here is our ability as poets to separate ourselves from our work. If I can see you "as a person" on one level and "as a poet" on a separate but equal level, than we can forge a relationship that's growth-oriented, that contains a healthy element of competition which we both appreciate. Think of Pound and Williams, Kumin and Sexton, Ginsberg and Corso, Shelley and Byron. These all emerged as formidable partnerships, grounded in love and respect, but motivated by poetic growth and development. These poets were all able to pursue these partnerships on many levels at once. They had a healthy connection to their work; some attachment, some detachment. It's the Buddhistic "Middle Path" come to life in art & its' contingent on being able to draw clear psychological & spiritual lines. This is personal, this isn't. I think we should all take up the challenge of competition when it's offerred in the spirit of love and by desire for poetic growth.

Auden chose Rosalie Moore's THE GRASSHOPPER'S MAN for the Yale Younger Poets in 1949, and I bet it shocked plenty, this choice. The book was nothing like the poems he himself wrote.

Auden's introduction was full of things that make me feel he knew he was going to be questioned as to why he chose this book. He spent time talking about conflict, and the need for it, as well as the need for making room at the other end of the table. Here's a bit:

"...for poetry flourishes when the opponents are determined and evenly matched but, if any party gains too complete a victory and succeeds in suppressing its rivals, poetry invariably declines."

And Will, I agree that a "scene" without room for conflict is no fun. I mean, what the hell's the point, right? Although sometimes some won't be too accepting of methods, or volume and pitch, but conflict can be a poet's best call-out for delivery. As though some celestial pitcher of lemons pours itself into cream. (changes into? or mixes with the?)

CAConrad

Yeah Conrad, you get what you get. You have your karma; you don’t find it. But resentment and competition are both brutal. It’s just that resentment gets out there. You can be in competition with a poet and never know it, like Richard Hugo talking about how difficult it was to write himself out from under Roethke. He didn’t know this was what he was doing until he thought he had done it. As for the scene, we know the pitfalls. Inside of it you feel need to say that this is it, this is the line that’s art. When youre young you have to say it more because the scene has to be more: youre so much lesser than it. The poet who knows what s/he is as a poet can say what Frank says: show up and youre the scene. Because knowing what worth you are to yourself has so much more room in it for others, greater or lesser. On the other hand, I hate the scene that cannot accommodate conflict, as though all debate need end in acquiesence.


Will Esposito

Some additional answers to last month's process question...

- FS
____________________________________________________________

Kristin Prevallet:

Well the process is a process, meaning it changes with every poem. But since I've had my daughter Sophie and have had so much less time to "compose" I find myself "culling" my free writing "fodder" and attempting to assert some logic into it. How's that for some jargon? But I really am a material girl, meaning that I do amass a large amount of "crap" before sifting through it and finding little lines that might work. The "composition" (the follow-through) most always comes from what I have heard/read other people doing. I'm very open to being influenced, and steal forms and tones from people all the time. A parasite! Beware.

Tina Darragh:

Well, I do like to transcribe dictionary pages by hand - making columns on legal paper - and then go back later and type what seems to flow from those - "numb by numb by numb" was written that way. But then, having multiple screens up on the computer is fun, too - to be logged into one of the online dictionaries & copying out segments from there to intersperse with language from a text I'm reading or some paragraph I've already written. There is an online labor law dictionary that has the most amazing word write-ups - long narratives about how words have changed over time. So I guess I'm half 'n half on this one!

Frank, I agree completely, jealousy and competition are two different things.

The task of keeping the two things both defined and checked takes some courage, in a sense. I mean if a friend is really just a "friend" and the jealousy is more of the plate, then we need to have the courage to salvage (meaning work it out, show them what's going on), or if that's not possible, step away. I'm all for stepping away from people at this point in my life if all they want to do is lie, cheat and steal. In the end it's their problem for not seeing how friendship can help build poems in the way you mention Frank.

One of the things I'll always remember about La Tazza is the day that one of those newspaper articles was printed with some group of Philadelphia poets I don't even know about slammed PhillySound in an interview, and you said Frank, "La Tazza is a scene, but with a small 's,' so show up, and you're it." This is where the idea of mutual aesthetic comes in, shared ideas, in other words, friendship from these things. I mean, isn't that HOW friendships are forged in the first place? So, there's friendships among poets, who write and read and share and hammer out new places for one another to take their ideas and poems, and that's not a bad thing, and it's certainly not something that exists to shut out others, or to demean what they're doing. But it's perceived this way. And it's something you just have to confront, or live with, or live with while confronting. It's so silly, and it seems like such a fucking waste of time. A big fucking waste of time.

Or is it a waste of time? Sometimes if I can be patient enough to step back at such moments it seems like it's THESE VERY conflicts where the things I am writing about (or in some cases TRYING to write about) come alive, almost like the conflict exists as a huge micro(macro)scope for the poem's way to life beyond the page I'm scribbling. It's like a friend some years ago said to me, "I need to go away for a while to a Buddhist retreat, get away from these people at work, and really BE with my karma." And I said, "Well, I'm no Buddhist, but isn't your karma what you're BEING with these coworkers you have so much grief with every day?" Where am I going with this? I don't know. Oh...

...Will, one of the things you had questioned was the quote of Anselm, quoting Alice Notley. That's important, because all tone was lacking in my use of that. In the end, what she had been saying that for was to point out to her son that conflict has its merits, that love has a way of existing in many forms. That's what I heard, when I heard it. And it's funny, him telling me that quote in the first place, because it came at a time when there was a lot of bullshit going on around me with poetry. It was a good thing to hear.

Let's keep this thread going, it's got so much more gas in it. I don't have the time to go into much more this morning, but there are a bunch of things I want to question, and share.

NOTE: I've received a couple of e-mails from others, responding to this conversation on competition. If you're interested, send me either permission to post your e-mails, or maybe you want to send a different one? It's up to you of course.

CAConrad

I've always competed with my friends. I didn't think of it as a bad thing. And I'm not talking about competing for prizes/accolades. I'm talking about the poems. I know if I'm reading with a good group of poets I need to bring my A game. And if I don't have it, I'd better get it. Not for ranking, but to be able to deliver the work, like I know my friends can. Maybe I'm lazy otherwise, but reading great work written by a friend/poet gets me off my ass.

Sometimes I'll say, "Damn. She did it. That's how you write political poems that won't be obsolete next week!" Or maybe it's "Okay. His poems have the music I wish I had." I'll go back to the poem-lab & work on that. Maybe I come out a stronger poet for getting blown away.

As for the acrimonious personal business- poetry is life, not an idealized back-rub. Members of your community will help you, hurt you, shake your hand & knife you. Sometimes it will be the same person, depending on the day. I agree that those who put down/shut out others to glorify their own imagined place are lacking in confidence, as well as integrity.

But jealousy & competition are two very different things.

- Frank Sherlock

Conrad and others--I have much to say (I think) about competition, although I'm meeting you (Conrad and some others) for drinks in fifteen minutes so I'll start and not finish. Gore Vidal said that every time a friend succeeded he (Vidal) died a little. This is what you (Conrad) would like to see divorced from poetry and poems. What Anselm said is wonderful but I have to ask: care about what? If it's care for the self and its success then you have Vidal. And I think this kind of care is still a necessary one because it seems to be what we are as material selves, as matter that needs continued sustenance. Not that we are nothing more than matter, and this is what I will leave unwritten for now. But if it's care for poetry with Anselm, then this is also a necessary thing for poetry. You wouldn't have such a poet as Bernstein or Silliman, for instance, if you didn't have their suspicion that the O'Hararites, in the guise of Second or Third Generation New York School, had become, I don't know, unsatisfactory. Hegel writes that to make something you also have to overcome something, you need the resistance of marble to sculpt marble. One of the larger problems with the arts today is something that Adorno has identified: that materials are given as pre-forms. What separates pop-music (i.e. Spears) from music-music (i.e. whomever).

[OK I'm back from Dubies; it was pleasant, interesting]--So a poem or a poetry is the refractory material that must be worked (not just your poems but others' poems; writing is intertextual.) We can compete here and it is necessary. What is good for the poem is good for the poet, however. It leads us back to the former form of competition. Conrad, I think you want the most from the possibilities of mentation, but it is dangerous to think of the mind as greater than the body. A deconstruction of these terms might give us something like Nietzsche: mind is a fact of body. On the other hand, yes yes, the schadenfreude of former friends sucks. It's rude and unnecessary. I'd like to invoke Eric Hoffer again here, to dismiss these unkind folks. He writes in his journal:

Unused Talents: Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. (1955)

I know you work and work hard, Conrad. I've only ever felt to compete with another poet (in the former sense, Vidal's sense) when I haven't been working as I should. What I can do anyone else can do. And likely vice-versa, in terms of poetic material success. I shame myself and have wasted my time in senseless competition. We should all know this.

(Jenn, I wrote something for you posted below this)

Will Esposito

Hi. I think Will posted the last post?

But at least I know you posted several ago Will, the one titled, "Chris McCreary, I know I know"

It took me a day to fully digest it, and I say this because I'm blown away by the direct honesty of the e-mail. Competition is something to talk about, in it's layers, and the layers that build from the layers.

On one hand it was great to see you have a full spectrum with all this, going right around to eventually understanding how high school cheated this jock. It's really nice to see this kind of honesty in print, out there, in the open.

Of course it's annoying when someone with a lower GPA gets into a school, a very good school at that, and you admit how it manifested into laughing at his failure with it all. That's a big thing to admit, and it's another thing for everyone to see it in themselves at some point and time and want to (hopefully want to) question.

Competition is something I think about a lot. What's it doing to us? Everyday kind of "doing to us."

And I'm the first to admit that I DO jump on board it by entering contests, etc., because I want money for time. But I also admit that I'm careful who I tell what I'm doing, mostly to keep the psychic waves down.

Competition almost never seems to serve without destroying elsewhere. And I'm really not being the one to do the Pollyanna dance with this, but I just want some conversation on competition, if anyone's interested besides myself.

Let me start.

This is without mentioning names, because my intention is NOT to harm others here. But I have lost friends with the little success I have had so far in poetry. It's true, and it's awful, and I feel like it could make me a paranoid person if I'm not checking myself, and checking in with others.

In short, a couple of good friends were generous in mentioning me and my work to a certain publisher, who in turn wanted to publish my book and not either of their books. They seemed pleased for me, but then cut me off. Completely cut me off. I mean, we're strangers now.

Poetry is such a little flag really, but it still holds all that carnivorous reaction, like it's Monday night football. These things at times seem primal, things we could trace to fighting over scraps of flesh in the jungle.

There has to be a way we can understand both how all this works in ourselves, and at the same time HAVE football games, HAVE poetry publications and competitions without losing our minds and our friends over it all.

How much weight must we put on our shoulders over these things?

To be perfectly honest, I've met a lot of assholes on the poetry "scene(s)" and I'm not even talking about one particular city, I'm actually talking about EVERY city I've visited. And these assholes all have one very big thing in common, and that is that they seem to be feeling like they're lacking, they seem to act like anyone else's gain is their loss. Do you know what I mean?

I'm NOT looking for a New Age hug here, I'm looking for some common understanding, some serious, honest observation, and tool building to ward off or get off such targets, and to move into and on with the better reasons we're all here doing poetry in the first place.

There might just be better perceptions of it all. I mean to say, once Anselm Berrigan said to me, "My mom said to me once that people fought at the Poetry Project because they cared."

CAConrad

Hi Jenn--Well that highschool kid was generous (if that is what you were asking.) He made good with everyone in that he was friendly, supportive of their positions and their doings, went to their parties; he’s still a best friend to me. What was wrong was that he thought football was important, like those poor kids in Hoop Dreams, and he thought this because all adults in that school, PTA, town thought it too. And yes, so right about good mentors. I can’t tell what a good mentor could be, because that would require some metaphysical position unavailable to me. A good mentor is good only because what is good is good in the way of belief.

If you extend the realm of other practices that look like or act like games, then you can include financiers, entrepreneurs, professors, all of whom are well paid. This class might be larger than the class of professional athletes. I would claim that these people are better educated than athletes, but that’s just construing education to academic ends. Athletes educate their bodies, after all. And I hear Kasparov is an asshole. So I think Chris is right. Power corrupts. I just don’t think he or I should worry about it too much. At least not retroactively. It’s impossible to be powerful forever. Every Bush becomes a Trent Lott, a Newt Gingrich eventually. You just have to keep the next Bush from being a Bush. Or something like that, which again begs the question that I have some metaphysical scheme to make that determination. But I think in Bush's case I do.

Oh well. But isn’t talking about all this fun?

Oops, forgot to sign this

Will Esposito

Will :

I'm a bit loathe to jump in here, b/c it's such a tangent, really... I think your feeling that this highschool football guy got cheated is generous. & I like the idea that every kid needs a Mr. Miyagi, in theory anyway.

But I'm having trouble with the leap to Kasparov vs. Iverson -- isn't Gerry the exception here? I mean, I'm pretty confident that we can rattle off a dozen obscenely paid sports heroes for each geek made good, yes?

jenn mcc.

"Comcast is now like a newspaper. Protected by the First Amendment, a newspaper can drop your favorite comic strip or columnist at will. Only with a newspaper, if you don't like what you see, or don't see, you can go somewhere else. But if cable is your information lifeline to video and the Internet, you've scant choice. Worse, being a content provider, a cable company can now block an Internet site they don't want you to see. And it's all perfectly legal." --from Bruce Schimmel's article KING CABLE (Philadelphia City Paper, Jul/2005)

This afternoon I ran into my old friend Duane, who was FIRED UP (I've always loved how Duane is fired up about something!) about the new article you see an excerpt from above.

It was an opportunity to spread the word on Philadelphia's tireless folks at MEDIA TANK, and the new-ish book COMCASTED, a book Media Tank has been supporting for reasons which become obvious once you delve into what both Media Tank and the book stand for/against/and with!

If interested, please read the above links to learn more...
CAConrad