I grew up in a neighborhood where most of the parents worked in factories or trades. The closest anyone came to a professional occupation was Ann Boyle next door who worked as an executive secretary for Bell telephone and, through the great benefits of that monopoly, was able to retire at age 55. Anne never married, but she had companions and an ample glass of scotch at the ready on the front porch. She lived with her mother and brother, did not have to pay rent, and became rich through stocks. She was my first “student” in so far as I helped her write papers when she decided to return to school and procure a college degree. I can still remember getting slowly sloshed on scotch while helping her structure a ten page paper on Martin Luther King.

Anyway, professionalism which I see as a way of life, almost a religion, never laid a glove on me. Neighborhood aesthetics, especially in that industrial/post-industrial world, were very different. Springsteen, writing of Jungle land, sang: “and the poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all/they just stand back and let it all be.” This ain’t exactly true. It is true they don’t write it down, but the poets in “jungle land” are like signifying monkey, or the Irish barroom philosopher, or the folk story teller. They talk shit. They keep things lively on the corner. They are known for being “characters.” They often survived the factories and , earlier, the chain gangs, by being the tricksters–the comics, and poets, and, occasionally, the scapegoats, of the neighborhood. I was one of these people. I was the guy who told whacky stories on the front porches, or on car hoods, or in back yards on my block. I was known for being crazy. I was known for being smart. One of my many knick names was “Wild man Weil.” Another was “Mr. Encyclopedia” A third, due to my always mildly disheveled appearance, was “Scurvy Joe.” I was known as someone who could talk shit. I also played songs and wrote my own. When I was 18, on my birthday cake they wrote: “future songwriter.” This is how art is expressed where I came from:

1. You are one among others, and you assume the role of poet only by their general proclamation–not by awards, not by standards, not by credentials, but by popular acclamation from the people around you.
2. This does not give you special privileges. You serve a valuable role, but, sometimes, you are the big mouth who gets clobbered, or the nut job who is singled out and mocked. This is the double face of the trickster–half god, half animal, and very rarely allowed to be fully human. You are coyote, signifying monkey, the prophets who says the truth, even at the wrong time, the one who does not “fit” perfectly.

You are rewarded in the following ways:

1. People will keep you around even when you are not very good at your job, or very strong, or even when you are a bit of a scoundrel. They will keep you around because you provide a cathartic safety valve to blow off the steam for their frustrations, their sufferings, and their sense of drudgery. You make life a little more than it is in opposition to those forces which make life far less than what it should be.
2. You are holy. You are marked with a sign. You are holy in the sense that you are ground set apart–again, not by “achievements” (the way of the professional and the middle class) but by your role in the life of your community. The hero leaves the village to bring back fire. Unlike the hero, the neighborhood poet never leaves. You are the trespass that stays behind, that affirms but also confronts the community by being an “affront,” a difference within it, an aporia within it. To an industrial and post-industrial rust belt city, this character is on every loading dock, in every barroom, on the street corner. He or she keeps things lively and also keeps things real, and this bears absolutely no relationship to the tenets of professional art or poetry–and that includes slam. Slam will never take the place of the trickster because it has already become too coded, too fixed, and too much a part of the professional commodity machine. It is as immured in the slick and the packaged as academic work. It will never speak for those who have no real voice. It will never be the barbaric yawp. It has destroyed spoken word which had such promise, but all that has promise is constantly destroyed that it might be born again.

And so, my final, and truest distinction between the aesthetics of neighborhood and those of the professional: the professional is incapable of sacrifice in the sense of dying and rising from the dead. He does not share in mythos. His sense of success is not about glory after death; it is also not about being “present” to his community. It is about prosperity and achievement now. All is meant to be measured towards a sort of prosperity. The “Event” of death, and, more so, the event of resurrection are to be avoided at all costs. These are tacky to the professional. The professional is post-mythos, post-seasonal. It can never die and it can never be re-born. It is established. It has a process. That process recognizes “excellence” and achievement in an utterly different way. There are gatekeepers and they decide who is and who is not “good enough.” They act as a priesthood. They are the intermediaries between the professional poet and his
professional audience–most of whom, if not all of whom are fellow practitioners. There is no life here, but there is process. Occasionally, this process takes on the intimacy of the neighborhood and a certain true communitas is possible. This is rare. It is even frowned upon. To “profess” in the ancient sense was to be one who was paid for his rhetoric–his professing. He evolved from the neighborhood poet and rhetorician, but, with the rise of printing, rhetoric and form were downplayed and speechifying became frowned upon.

I am a speechifying, rhetorical, neighborhood poet. I am not a professional. Professionalism seems morally wrong to me–spiritually sinful, not because I think professionals are wrong, or sinful, but because I believe I was called to bear witness to something other than professionalism. This witness may now be only to some extinct community of factory workers and the children of factory workers, but I don’t think so. I believe I served this function for my students. I also served it for my factory workers. I cannot serve this function in the realm of professional poetry because it is exactly this function they detest. Professionalism is based on a standard, on a decorum, on a series of measures. It is based on “Schools” and patterns of networking and schmoozing. It is Ivan Ilyich over and over again. It is making me sick. It is killing my soul. I am very grateful for a job. I am grateful to support myself, but I wish it did not come at the price of being who I am. It is very different than the raucous form of being that made me love poetry. I never confined poetry to poems. Poesis exists in how you talk, how you move, what you say when you teach. My whole being was poesis, but in both the professional academic realm, and the faux- populist realm of slam, I am not allowed to exist. In these realms, the
poets have no season, no earth, no wind, no element. When these things appear, and threaten to make a perhaps event (in the sense Derrida used “perhaps” and “event”) this perhaps and this event are immediately framed in such a way as to convert them to the purpose and use of the very professionalism to which they attempted to act as exception.

Post-industrial poesis, neighborhood aesthetics

Poetry is real value labor. It does not see itself as set apart from the life and work of the community from which it arises. The poet has other jobs, most of which he usually performs indifferently because his or her true job is to express and bear witness to the community in which he or she suffers and lives.

This real value labor does not accept perceived value aesthetics. There are no gate keepers deciding who and who is not worthwhile. The poet of the neighborhood rises from the open reading. If he or she is singled out, he or she is singled out not by experts, but by those among whom they have lived. It is a word of mouth kind of thing.. It is what is sought in the midst of seasons and in the weather and the truly local–not by national presses, or awards, or credentials, but by a local sense of that poet’s inner necessity. That poet was created by his or her community. He or she can only be destroyed by that community, and he or she can only live if he or she remains in contact with the principle of that locality, that membrane of being.. This locality is rooted in purpose–in, as I said, real value labor. As such it is far more malleable, complex, and shifting than the typical definitions of poetry. It may be the right word at the right time in a crisis. It may be the perfectly apt joke, the comeback, the story told at the right time to the right person. Unlike poetry proper, it is far more situational. It fits the occasion of its utterance, but remains pure in a sense by “talking shit”–talking and speechifying, and inventing verbal worlds for the sheer hell of it, beyond the immediate purpose. It is born of purpose, but deviant from purpose in so far as it seeks life, joy, energy beyond the merely functional. It tends to be flamboyant and hyperbolic rather than understated. It tends to be rhetorical and mythic rather than factually informative and understated. It tends toward the ecstatic, the brutal, the ferocious, the beautiful, the sentimental. It is more invested in brio than in nuance. It does not trust the flawless because its chief moral purpose is to expose the falsely perfect.

This is the closest I can come to explaining the world I grew up in. I do not flourish on the professional poetry scene.. I can’t get by on my “talk” because only Irishmen from Ireland are allowed by professionals to get away with that, and even then, the Irish poets they admire are most often somber. What can I say? I feel lost. To exist in the kudos section of the universe is, for me, a construct of hell. There are no street corners, no barber shops, no factories, no true places to bear witness. The professional has triumphed. God fucking help us.

Crude

H2
its smothered
O

circling
for sense

there is none

three-eyed
or blind

delirious
with repair

eventually
or now

_________________________________________________
Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His writing has appeared in jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review and Poetry. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works: the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the late poet Carrie Allen McCray’s Ota Benga under My Mother’s Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voice.

 

Brian: My favorite aspect of your novel, one that other “Armageddon” narratives mostly miss, is that the sky may fall, but still nothing is more terrifying than one’s own death (or even one’s own life).  I guess this is a statement posing as a question.

Colin: I like this.  Thanks, Brian.

Brian: A writer friend and I debate over concept v. character. I don’t consider your book to be a “postmodernist rewrite.” But some might. Did you envision this book in that light? To what extent do you see yourself as an “experimental” writer?

Colin: I don’t view it as a rewrite so much as an interpretation, and a loose one at that.  Obviously I pick and choose which elements from the Book of Revelation I’m interested in working with.  I set down a frame on a particular section of a particular translation and worked with those elements. I’m working with the material much in the way that the characters are.  I’m responding to a  limited set of external stimuli, drafting a story in response.

As for the “experimental writer” thing…I’m going to go ahead and say I would accept being called as much by someone else, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it about myself.  In a literal sense, Revelation is a long-form experiment.  In one sense, especially early on, I was balancing a variety of narrative modes against one another to see the effects.  But I also feel like “experimental” has become a way of describing a certain style of work that resists recognizable trends in “realist” fiction.  This is going to date me a little, but I think of a band like Modest Mouse and how everyone would always describe them as “indie,” even long after they were on a major label.  It had more to do with their sound than anything else.  There’s a certain “indie” feel to it.  This is done all the time.  Bands have an “indie” sound, or writers have an “experimental” vibe, even though most of the work that’s out there being called “experimental” is as heavily codified and traditional as what people often call “traditional” (by which they most often mean “realist” or narrative).

Brian: This is interesting. I focus on what some call “unnatural” narratives. That is, anti-mimetic strategies that stretch the reader’s cognitive parameters. Problem is, “unnatural” strategies, such as, say, the experimentations of postmodernism, are very quickly “naturalized,” or incorporated into a set of parameters readers have come to expect. Do you feel pressure to challenge those parameters? Are we always trying to be one step ahead of incorporation? What does the MFA workshop, which wants you to be able to sell your books, say about this?

Colin: I’m interested in working with the expectations of the reader.  For certain projects, I’ll engage with familiar tropes or narrative modes, recognizable genre ticks, references of one kind or another, etc., and use them in specific ways.  Of course, it’s impossible to predict how people will ultimately respond to a provocation or proposition, regardless of the thought and care that went into it.  And I’m also interested in this.  I find it fascinating and extremely useful that you can introduce elements of the “familiar” by opening a story in a particular way, or saying a particular thing at a particular time, and yet every reader will have a different set of associations to a “familiar” thing.  So what you’re really doing is loading the work with a moment of recognition.  It’s a tool in the toolbox.  The thing is, the “parameters” you’re talking about, what tricks are “naturalized” or “familiar,” those are shifting all the time.  So it feels pointless to me to challenge them directly.  Rather, you can use them to enhance or complicate the work in some way.  I gave my grandmother a copy of Revelation because she was very excited about the fact that I had written a book and someone had published it, etc.  But I talked to her a few months later and she said she had to put it down because she felt she wasn’t familiar enough with the Book of Revelation to read it.  Her plan was, and I suppose still is, to reread the biblical version of the story in order to prepare herself for taking this book on.  Now if you’ve read the book, you’ll know that’s entirely unnecessary.  Maybe it would enhance your read in some way, but everything that needs to be there is in the book itself.  At least in my opinion.  But I’m interested in the way her expectations of the book shift due to a structural conceit.  If she ever returns to Revelation, studied up and thoroughly “prepared” for the material, the questions at the center of the book will be as present as they would have been otherwise, only maybe she’ll feel them more deeply because they will resist the information she’s brought to the book with her.  Where, she might ask, is the God I’ve come to know?  Why is the believer in the same position as the non-believer?  What/where is salvation?  But this book is not the Book of Revelation.  It’s not even a re-telling, really.  It’s something else entirely.  It functions on its own terms, even though it incorporates and uses a variety of familiar narrative modes.  Alternatively, if I had attempted to write something that was a direct challenge to those modes, I feel like it could no longer be said that the work functions on its own terms.  I’m tempted to say that if I wanted to “challenge” the Bible, I would just hand out copies of the Bible to as many people as possible.

But back to your question, I think we want to innovate.  That means different things to different people.  Most people want work that explores new ground, digs a little deeper, maybe, or addresses something abandoned or untouched, or recasts the die, etc.  This is as true of the “experimental” writer as it is of the YA novelist.  So, as you’re making work, it helps to know what you’re ambitions are.  And I think young writers tend to feel that more than know it.  No one in my MFA program was too concerned with me selling my work.  In fact, when I pressed faculty for information, everyone seemed just about as confused and unsure of the game as I was. I won’t go into it here, but it’s obvious that the face of publishing is changing and has been for some time.  The people I listened to most at school were those who encouraged me to make the work I wanted to make, and trust that if I kept at the whole publishing thing I would eventually land on my feet.  At the very least, during those desperate nights when you feel you’ll never make it as a writer, that no one will read your work, let alone pay you for it, that your “career” is a joke, etc. (we all have these nights, right?  Or maybe some poor souls feel this way in the morning…), but at the very least you’ll have a folder full of work that you love and that means something to you.  That’s not enough for everyone, but at one point it was something that kept me going.  It got me to this point, where I’m a little more comfortable with myself.  I don’t ever think you can shake the fears, the doubts, the reservations, but you can make it to a point where they’re no longer driving the car.  This is something a teacher of mine once told me, another thing that stuck, that you’ll never get rid of fear and self-doubt, but as long as you don’t let them take control, you’ll be alright.  They can even be useful.

Brian: That’s beautifully put. Thank you. We have Marcus’ whole life in a slim volume. Did you always envision this book as being relatively minimalist? Why did this approach speak to you the most?

Colin: I knew the book would need to be spare.  I wrote a lot more than is included and edited it out or set it aside knowing it would never go into the book in the first place.  I drafted the in-between scenes and most of what (in the book) happens off stage.  For example, the letter Marcus is obsessing over in the second chapter, I have that written out and saved in a folder on my computer.  The exact wording of the letter is irrelevant for the book, because for that scene what matters is not what the letter says, but the way Marcus is reading the letter.

Also, throughout the book, I wanted a clear sense of how things had moved in the characters’ lives.  I needed to be able to write each new chapter as if it were continuing a story, rather than picking up at some random point and beginning again.   I was interested in a story that feels clear and direct and yet is full of gaps.  The book is a kind of distillation.  There is a story here, but it is obviously not the “full” story.  In fact, I’m skeptical of the idea that there ever is one.

I’m interested in examining our relationship to the unknown, but I didn’t want to be withholding without purpose.  I think the gaps introduce elements of the unknown without tendering purposeless obfuscation.  The gaps make the world feel bigger.  I heard a story once, and I’m likely remembering this wrong, that when Gil Evans was working with Miles Davis on the album Sketches of Spain, Evans wanted to include “quiet” in the composition.  Not silence, but “quiet”.  The way he went about it was to instruct the players to play a large instrument (like a gong) softly.  So, it was actually a fairly loud sound, but it created a sense of quiet because that loud sound was loaded with the possibility/sense of an enormous sound.

But there were a lot of things that made this approach important.  Another major one was speed.  I wanted the book to move quickly, or to have the feeling of something that is moving quickly.  This isn’t an articulate way of saying this, but the book needed a kind of “woosh” to it.

Brian: Is this because death “wooshes” us?

Colin: Oh god, if we’re lucky.  I hadn’t thought of it this way, though.  Life certainly does from time to time.  David Byrne had it right.  And here’s the annoying part of the interview where I include a hyperlink to .

Brian: There’s some interesting textual variety here. Why fill up the page sometimes, sometimes not? Is there a relationship to poetry there?

Colin: I suppose so, in the sense that I was interested in graphic interruptions.  I think the white space on the page guides the way we read and can dramatically alter our interpretations of and engagement with the text, and that’s something many poets are concerned with.  Certainly more than most fiction writers.  But I’ve just finished two books of poems and that feels very, very different.  It was something else entirely, really.  For Revelation, I was interested in certain moments standing alone, or inserting gaps here and there.  Slowing things down or speeding them up.  I wrote the book in standard paragraphs, and it wasn’t until we were editing the book that I spaced it out like this.  Once I had done it I immediately thought, oh, this is right.  This is perfect.  Then I had to edit everything all over again.

Brian: How long did you work on Revelation, from the first intuition of the concept to the final edit?

Colin: I wrote the first draft of the book in a month.  Or, about three weeks.  During that time, it was practically all I did.  I sent it to readers then and spent a few months editing.  Then I Quixotically sent it out to publishers and agents.  Mutable Sound got back to me in a matter of months.  We went for it.  Following that, I spent maybe three months editing and re-formatting the book.  I took it to Martha’s Vineyard and immersed myself in it in the way I had done when I first wrote it.  The book was published exactly a year after I finished the first draft, but I was sending them “updated final versions” up until the last possible second.

Brian: Talk a little bit about your . Your site does some interesting things.

Colin: Ha!  My web presence.  First please allow me a tangential anecdote: about a year ago I was in Austin doing a reading at 5 Things!, a monthly reading series held down there.  At the time, Amelia Gray was involved in running things and she was the one who invited me to read.  After the reading we were all hanging out at Amelia’s and eating tacos and I was being drunk and Amelia said something about the fact that I had a kid.  When I said, I do not have a kid.  She looked at me a moment and then said, well you need to work on your web presence.

That’s been the resounding cry from all concerned ever since.  I recently started working with a publicist  (Lacey Dunham at Atticus Books, she’s amazing) in preparation for the release of A Long Line of Diggers, a pair of novellas I wrote that they’re releasing in 2013.  One of the first things she said to me after we introduced ourselves was, we should talk about your web presence.

I mean, to be honest, it is primarily jokes with myself.  That’s about it.  I just thought to write, it’s all a desperate attempt to be funny…but that’s not entirely true because if I’m posting something, it’s almost always because it’s making me laugh to myself at that moment.  So I guess it’s kind of selfish…

The website is a pride of mine.  My friends Rebecca Elliott and Heather McShane helped me do the code for it.  They helped me realize what was a very specific dream.  It does exactly what I wanted to do.  It is an extension of my outlook in certain ways.  It is a random assortment of images that are related to my work in specific ways and excerpts and stories and interviews and what have yous.  There is no way to “successfully” navigate it, meaning the only way to potentially ever access all of the material is to keep going back and trying over and over again, although you’re just as likely to get nowhere or cycle through the same thing over and over.  Like I said, it’s random.  I imagine it’s terribly frustrating to many.  But I find it immensely pleasing.  (Not frustrating people, mind you, but the site itself).

Brian: That’s why I love it! These are interesting moments you describe, when folks who want to market you “need to talk to you about your web presence.” How comfortable are you, in general, with the prospect of marketing yourself, or, altering aspects of what comes naturally for you for the sake of marketing?

Colin: Thanks, Brian!  I get the idea and use and even necessity of an “artistic persona”.  I think it’s not only a marketing tactic, but also a tool for guiding readers as they approach your work.  That said, I’m a terrible actor.  So my “artistic persona” or my “web presence” has always just been an extension of my normal, social self.  An exaggerated extension, sure, a distillation, but one that, as you say, “comes naturally” to me.  Lacey is an amazing publicist and we never did wind up making any serious changes to the website or any of the other ways I’m using the internet: social media sites, etc.  After we started working together a little more closely, I think she got a handle on where I was coming from and things started to gel for both of us.  She might not have even been concerned initially, but rather looking to make sure we were on the same page.  And I think we are.  I’ve been called “strange”.  The work is “strange”-seeming, at least to some.  And my web presence is certainly “strange” in particular ways.  But I think once you see the whole picture it starts to make a certain kind of sense.  So, in answer to your question, I’m fine with the idea that artists or writers might work to present themselves in a certain light, I think we’re all doing this all the time anyway.  But I think it’s important that the presentation/illusion be in some way a part of the work, or that it help us to better understand the work or inform us as to the terms on which we are to engage the work.  However, in terms of serious alterations to the self, I’m just not a savvy enough fellow to stray too far from home.

Brian: Some very exciting things are happening for you in the near future. How do praise, fame, etc. affect your work?

Colin: There are some exciting things happening, yes!  Or things I’m excited about, at least.  There will be the book of short stories Animal Collection out in September 2012 (Spork Press) and then two novellas will be released by Atticus Books in 2013, as I said earlier.  I’m excited for all of that and to tour and on and on.  As for the second part of your question…I’ll need to see your sources.

Brian: What about the not-so-near future? Do you have ambitions for bigger projects, different modes, more experimentation, etc.? Do you feel the need to evolve as an artist?

Colin: I just finished two new projects I’m really excited about.  The first was a book of poems collaboratively written with another poet, Ben Clark.  It’s called Kate Jury Denton Texas.  Most recently, I finished a book-length poem.  Right now it’s called And We Will Stay That Way.  These were the two “ambitious” projects on the horizon this spring, but now they’re finished and out in the world being read and hopefully they’ll soon find a home.  I’m also about halfway through a new novel that is doing some strange things.  It’s a lot of fun to work on, but it feels very odd moving back into fiction after being so heavily steeped in poetry for the last few months.  To me, every project feels singular, though I’m sure you could locate patterns and identify developments in style, etc. if you were to look closely after the fact.  I’m interested in making work that is exciting to me, and part of what excites me is examining new ground, or the same ground in radically different ways.  I don’t feel pressure to “evolve” as an artist.  Or, if there is a pressure I feel, it is not on those terms, necessarily.  I feel pressure to keep myself interested and fully invested in the work.  But I don’t look at it as a progression as I move from project to project.  But if I were to use the language of a linear progression, I would say I work “backwards” as much as “forwards,” and of course “side to side”.  As I see it, I’m sifting through and rearranging a network of constantly shifting ideas and associations.  It’s a mess up there and out here.  Each project is a momentary organization of a set of needs, ideas, impressions, etc.   Let us look to the T-1000.  Ideally, each book would enter the world like one of his blades or needles, exacting and perfectly fitted to a specific use, and yet the full effects of the introduction of that new element are unpredictable.  That’s one of the motivating factors behind sharing the work, I suppose.

Sigh.  That is the second time in two days I’ve brought up Terminator 2.  Something is wrong with me.

Brian: Well, I don’t see too much wrong with Revelation, or with the way things are going for you. Thank you so much

“Formal choices are never without ideological implications.”
Marjorie Perloff

From the title on of Jennifer Karmin’s “aaaaaaaaaaalice” (Flim Forum Press, 2010), we are falling—crowning though sentiment and buckshot language splayed across pages. “aaaaaaaaaaalice” is a book grappling to hold on to meaning in the self-fomenting chasm that is our condition. In this way, sentience is a pain.

The book oscillates, like its speaker, between a traveller’s snapshots of exotica and an authorial responsibility to the readers’ experience with a crafted effect. In the tatters and wobble between sign and signified, the book struggles to make sense of the phenomena of experience. The book may be a performance score toward a diaristic and playful childlike freedom or it may be a series of exercises pulsing between apophantic closure and menu aperture.

Because I cannot read Jennifer Karmin’s “aaaaaaaaaaalice” for you, I want to insist on one thing: I want to insist that the book is not both a LANGUAGE text and a commodity but that it is between a LANGUAGE text and a commodity. The book is between a self-conscious Fluxus score and a distraction in the wax museum of the dream-life. Indeed, how can any experimental reading be anything other than the between experience of (1) the cutup language that points to the readers’ alienation from themselves and (2) the immersion in the placebo of closure?

One thing is sure (well, for rhetorical effect, it is): those who read poetry attentive to its medium will take pleasure in the different motives and motions animating this book. After all, why read if not for pleasure taking? Another sure thing: experimental readers should read widely, as Karmin does: from non-sense literature to Postmodern Physics.

For what seems to be a few very good reasons we hate to have our vocabularies extended. One such reason is that urbane and modern industrialized readers are lazy, so used to abhorring and going in dread of inconvenience are we. It is hard work to learn new words, even if we were to add such new words only to our passive lexical backwoods where many shadowy terms loaf seeing the light of use but rarely.  Perhaps, on the main unwittingly, we also detest distending our word-hoard because we intuit that new words bring new worldviews.

New words are like spinach for our mind’s eye. We may agree with poststructuralist philosophers that authorial intention is unknowable but then how do we square that with recent neuroscience evidence that the RTPJ (Right Temporal-Parietal Junction) is responsible for interpreting others’ intention and therefore vital to our moral judgment of their actions?

So how might experimental readers write about Tibetan yaks, as Karmin does, in English to Anglophone readers without tokenizing the yak and the yak’s milk-drinkers?

liza comes to talk
grandmother follows
smile gold teeth
many questions
for usa (80)

The more obvious delight of experimental reading presents with the ignition spark motion between the estranging assortments of address and the escapism of storytelling. The more often overlooked pleasure of reading experimentally is that such reading expands the readers’ vocabulary and therefore what is possible, between poetry and the other genres of knowledge such as philosophy for Charles Bernstein, the natural sciences for Forrest Gander, or the medical sciences for Paul Celan. In place of a hermeneutics of reading, as Susan Sontag’s ghost might say, we need an erotics of reading.

The following is from a series of Pi Poems, or Cadae—the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi (3.1415).

Pi is a transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter approximately equal to 3.1415926535897.

In poetry, it has been used as the basis for a syllabic form that obeys the following distribution of syllables and stanza lengths, resulting (by line length) in a kind of sonnet:

xxx __________(3)
x ____________(1)___________ } 3
xxxx _________(4)

x ____________(1)___________ } 1

xxxxx ________(5)
xxxxxxxxx ____(9)
xx ___________(2)___________ } 4
xxxxxx _______(6)

xxxxx ________(5)___________ } 1

xxx __________(3)
xxxxx ________(5)
xxxxxxxx _____(8)___________ } 5
xxxxxxxxx ____(9)
xxxxxxx ______(7)

 

from Cadae: The Pi Poems

1

The music
stopped
for a moment

then—

when we began
to savor in its absence silence—
started
again, maybe a bit

louder than before

or maybe
we only heard it
as such, a sudden intrusion
we had previously not noticed
and this is what disturbed us.

2

No matter
where
the city gays

there

confess their scene is
a sad huddle of hopeless bottoms
each one
wishing for some dream top

to plough him senseless—

an Eden
understood only
by those first barred who with an air
of almost tragic boredom insist
their loss is epidemic.

3

Imagine
some
body you would

love

to fuck then try to
find this body somewhere in the world
and while
you look and encounter

as you are bound to

encounter
one disappointment
after another imagine
just how thin and stripped of incident
your life would be otherwise

________________________________________________
Tony Leuzzi is a writer and teacher living in Rochester, NY. His second book of poems, Radiant Losses, won the New Sins Editors’ Prize. In November 2012, BOA Editions will release Passwords Primeval, a book of interviews with twenty American poets.

 

Photo Credit:

I have found that all work, including the so called professional and creative work of teaching at a university, boils down to certain false indicators which we must endure. In point of fact, the factory may be a little more accurate: you can’t fake a spec. Doing a plate within two tenths of a thousandth run out over eight feet of stainless steel edge cannot be faked. It’s a spec. It is not wholly accurate but it’s within a range of accuracy far more precise than any sort of academic measure. But even with the finest technology, there is no such thing as zero tolerance. There is ever closer proximity to zero run out, but no complete absence of deviation. All measurement is approximate. As my teacher, the great tool maker, Joe Pilot, told me, “It’s just as easy to say everything is wrong as it is to say nothing is perfect. Error is the only reality we know, and the one thing we are least likely to forgive or admit.”

When universities only brag about their award winning students, they show themselves to be the same sort of collective idiot who preferred the operas of Meyerbeer over Wagner, or Rosini over Mozart. The measure of greatness is awards. By this measure, Pearl Buck was a far greater writer than Eudora Welty, and equal to Faulkner because, hey, she won the Nobel prize. The measurement of greatness is: 1. Awards 2. The word of mouth of one’s peers. 3. Posterity and duration. If one wins big enough awards, one’s peers side whisper that one has have gone down the crapper (awards seem to raise envy and lower estimates of talent). If one wins no awards, one is consigned to career hell. If one is still known after death, so what? You’re dead. I don’t think Mozart enjoyed his fame after death. Wagner was lucky enough to be embraced in his later life, but for a good 20 years, he was in the shadow of Meyerbeer who was considered Europe’s top opera composer. Wagner spent most of his time running from his creditors (literally). In a writing world controlled by academics, only awards matter, because it is the pathology of measurement known since the first grade. After all, these are A student types. I would define an A student as fitting the standard idea of a good mold almost perfectly. Originality, true originality, is not what A students are about. A students uphold the standard. In short, when university people say they want great writers, they are lying. What they want are writers who fit the mean of the highest standard mold.

Greatness is a an error that becomes the new standard. As my teacher, Joe Pilot told me, “you can’t see anything new that comes down the pike because your eyes have no frame of reference for it. You can only see it when it first starts to get turned into a standard mold, when its newness has already begun to wear off. You can only see it when it resembles something you have already seen. A truly original piece has got to resemble something in the past, or people can’t see it. The Greeks accidently invented the steam engine in 400 BC, but had no frame of reference for it, made a couple toys powered by it, and then forgot it. We didn’t see a steam engine again for over a thousand years–when the age of mechanics and Newton made that kind of thing imaginable. All genius, all originality is an error, kid. The world does not progress by excellence or correctness. An error that has an advantage to it is how the world goes forward. An error with an advantage, a fortunate sin, is how we always get to the next base. We move by a series of errors. We call them truth, or perfection after the fact. We are full of shit. It’s like a guy who trips on a stair, but is smart in his error, and turns it into a new dance step.”
I made an argument against award pathology. I brought up students who were not award winners, but who were making a true living in the arts (or almost a living) ten years after they were my students. I brought up those who are doing excellent work, who may not be winning the big prizes. I said a university must not base its reputation on award winners alone. It ought to rest more importantly on building a population of students and alumni who have the ability to see what is not readily visible, and who can create a milieu in which true greatness is likely to transpire–the holy accident which confounds all professional expectation because it is, after all, outside the schema of awards.

Universities should serve the fortunate accident, the judicious error, the mutation. They should do this by teaching students how to achieve the standard without believing it is a true measure. They should instigate and agitate for the “perhaps.” Creativity is founded on the perhaps. Perhaps this pratfall is not a stumbling, but a new form of ballet. Let us see what we can do. It is impossible to explain this to functionaries. For them the proof is always in the pudding. They never think that the pudding was some sort of deviation from the norm that the cook turned into a favorite dish.

The seven sections of Colin Winnette’s slim new novel Revelation correspond to the seven angels of the Book of Revelation. They bring with them fire, hail, receding oceans, bitter water, falling stars (and bodies, in a chilling moment), darkness, locusts, sinkholes, and, of course, those pesky horsemen. The seven sections also depict seven stages of the life of Marcus, whose love and despair we encounter intimately. These biblical calamities, very subtly rendered in unique and memorable visages, are backdrops to Marcus’ struggle, a reminder that life’s great apocalypse – its end – is always an intensely personal one. I had a chance to speak with Winnette about his work on this novel, his other projects, and the writing life.

Brian: Can you talk a little about your development? What authors and styles have shaped you? How has attending a program changed your outlook (or not)?

Colin:  Influence is a tricky thing to talk about.  I can say that Ben Marcus’s work was extremely important to me.  It still is, but at one point it totally saved me.  Or, reinvigorated me.  I was finishing up undergrad and I was in love with writers like Beckett, Proust, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, these iconic figures who did what they were doing so masterfully that there seemed nowhere to go at all after that.  That was also the result of my age at the time and what being in school can do to you.  I didn’t realize it then, but I had a pretty narrow vision of what it meant to be a writer and what one could do with fiction.  But then I picked up Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women and I was just totally blown away.  It was an entirely different approach to working with and examining language than I had ever encountered before.  Those books led me to Gertrude Stein and William Gaddis and all of these authors who were breaking language apart, yes, but also reclaiming it, making it do new and fascinating things.  And, I mean, they had been doing this for a long time and in different ways, and here was Ben Marcus doing it still in his own way and just killing it.  So I suddenly felt very free again.  It’s interesting the difference between grad school and undergrad.  In undergrad I was constantly being told what good writing looked like.  It looks like Carver.  It looks like Chekhov.  It looks like Pynchon (and indeed it does!).  It looks like Austen.  Etc.  Workshops were little help because they were often the same kind of thing: I think you should do this, or I think this should happen, etc.  Initially I lacked the confidence to assert myself.  Then, when I gained a little confidence, I asserted myself by just ignoring pretty much everybody and only listening to the 2% I thought made sense or seemed to come from a good place.  I started to tune a lot out.  So I left undergrad fed-up, but with a lot of energy.  I wrote and worked and traveled and didn’t write and two years later I went to grad school with a much different attitude.  I used that time to write as much as possible.  I listened to people and read as much as I could, but took the whole thing less…personally, I guess…than before.  I took it seriously, but I knew the conversations we were having in class were often selfish in that we were all interested in enhancing our work by discussing the work of others.  Helping one another wasn’t exactly the point, although we certainly did help one another from time to time.  And I should say I think all that’s great.  The two most important things grad school gave me were time and a sense of purpose.  I felt encouraged to work and I had the hours in the day to do it.  Or if I didn’t have them, I made them because I knew my time was limited.  I taught myself how to make time to write.  I was writing a lot on the train and in bed my first year.  I wouldn’t let myself sleep until I had done a certain amount of work.  I’m not sure I would have had that kind of discipline at first if I weren’t in a program.  Now, it comes much more naturally.  I had to learn how to kick my own ass.

Brian: I found that the discipline angle served as a wheat/chaff scenario in my own fiction writing classroom. The students who wrote well were the ones who put the time in. Is that level of focus and concentration waning in the generations that come after us? Is it something that can be taught?

Colin: Obviously practices vary.  The kind of disciplined work ethic that worked for me in the past just wouldn’t work for everyone.  It’s very personal, I think, and the method I described is one that fits with the way I am, in general, about many things.  I can be rigid and extremely hard on myself, especially when I’m working on something I care about very much.  And it doesn’t even work for me all of the time.  In fact, being too disciplined or too hard on oneself can often be a hindrance, and can drive one to resent something that should ultimately be pleasurable and thrilling.  So another thing I had to learn was to not be so hard on myself all the time.  It’s a balance, I’d say, something I’ll be perpetually tweaking.  But can discipline be taught?  I think yes and no.  You can’t make anyone do anything, really.  Or, who would want to?  But you can give them (and I assume we’re talking about students here) ideas about what to do.  In a classroom setting, I think it’s important to emphasize the variety of ways that people have worked and will work.  I think it’s important for young writers to write often, even if it’s bad.  Especially if it’s bad, maybe.  Just write it all out and use up all your clichés and lazy sentences.  For me it was like I just poured all of this garbage out onto the floor, but in it were these little pieces of rubbish that I actually kind of liked.  These nuggets I could polish and be proud of.  Seeing it all messed together like that, it was easy to start understanding the difference between something I thought was good or attractive or effective and something that wasn’t.  There’s a process of learning to identify what interests you and what you’re trying to do and what helps you do it.  But that’s just how I do things, you know?  As a kid, I was the one who poured all the Legos onto the floor then went digging for the pieces I wanted.  I needed to see it all at once.  But I had a lot of friends who were much cleaner and more deliberate in their selection.  And we both eventually built whatever it was we were building. There’s no right way to do it.  You just have to do it.

Brian: Ben Marcus and Adam Levin speak highly of Revelation. How do mentors shape your work?

Colin: I’ve always had relationships with other writers and artists.  For me, it’s essential.  I’ve also been blessed enough to attend schools with curriculums that involve one on one meetings with faculty, so a lot of my education occurred in that intimate kind of setting.  I learn a lot from other people.  Or, really, I learn everything from other people.  And I love people very much, so it’s always a pleasure to get together with someone whose work I admire or who is really insightful and engaged and talk through things and get to know one another better.  Having Ben Marcus respond to the book was really one of the most thrilling things that ever happened to me.  He’s a champion and I owe him a lot.  Adam Levin teaches at SAIC, where I earned my MFA, so I had the opportunity to work with him both in class and as an advisor.  He has an incredibly active mind and cares very much about fiction, so our conversations were often incredibly invigorating.

Brian: Do you have any interest in teaching your craft?

Colin: I love talking about fiction.  And I love talking about fiction with people to whom it really matters.  People who have a personal connection to writing.  Often, but certainly not exclusively, you meet those people in an academic setting.  You meet people who are trying to figure things out for themselves, trying to better understand their work, trying to improve, and so it can be a wonderfully open and productive environment.  It can also be a hostile and competitive environment.  It’s a mixed bag just about everywhere, I think.  But I’m optimistic.  I’m happy for the good when it comes.  I’ve had a number of teachers who really inspired and encouraged me.  The bad experiences tend to melt away and the good ones still drive me years later.  One of the best gifts a writing teacher can give, I think, is the sense that the work of a young writing student is as important as the work they themselves are doing.  It sounds obvious, but I think it’s much more difficult than most people realize.  I’ve had a number of teachers who did this, but one of the first was Brian Morton, whom I worked with at Sarah Lawrence College.  While our opinions about fiction were occasionally at odds, I always felt that he approached the conversation as earnestly and attentively as I did.  He was studying, his mind was always working, and he was kind and generous and honest.  He was an early guide, but also an attentive friend.  It was a gift.  My interest in teaching writing would come from a desire to give other young writers something like this, because it meant so much to me.  And still does.

Brian: You manage the imagery from the book of Revelation so gorgeously and subtly in your novel. How did this idea occur to you?

Colin: It was really very sudden and intuitive.  Honestly, I was first attracted to the idea primarily as a constraint.  I had no idea why, but it just occurred to me to write a book that was seven chapters long, each chapter of which would be invoked by the sounding of one of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse.  And I knew each chapter would jump forward radically in time, so that the book covered the entire span of a character’s life.    It wasn’t until I had written the first draft of the book and was beginning revisions that I really started to understand what was interesting to me about using this structure/content, other than the fact that it gave me the push to begin the work as well as a set of loose guidelines to move the project forward.  It’s something I say all the time about the book, that it was a sort of exorcism of certain narrative modes I was steeped in as a kid growing up in a small Texas town, as well as the models of “great writing” I was beaten over the head with as a young writer.

Brian: How important are constraints for anything that you work on? This is, to me, the delightful irony of experimentation. You exhibit freedom and limitlessness through the very limits you impose on yourself.

Colin: I was extremely interested in working with constraints at one point for many reasons, one of which was exactly the reason you detail here.  I followed and studied the Oulipo, and other artists working with constraints, like 60s/70s performance artists or musicians, and many working today.  I’m interested in the idea that we are always working with constraints, only some are more apparent than others.  When I sit down to write a work of “fiction” on my MacBook, in Microsoft Word, a vast number of decisions are made for me before I even begin.  One’s limited knowledge of the tradition in which they’re working can also be viewed as a series of constraints guiding all of one’s production.  Making the conscious decision to impose constraints is a way of acknowledging and engaging with the constraints that are already in place.  There’s a quote from one of the more famous Oulipians, Raymond Queneau, in which he says, “…inspiration, which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery.  The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant.”  It is also a way of knowing more about what you are doing before you do it.  For me, it is also a way of incorporating one’s limitations into the work itself.  And, as you and Queneau point out, the marvelous thing is the way in which engaging with limitations or constraints, be they self-imposed or otherwise, can actually be liberating.

Brian: Most other narratives of this type depict a man-made apocalypse and thus morph into social commentary. Some would argue that even the end-of-days apocalypse is man-made, due to sin, etc. What causes the events in Revelation?

Colin: Yes.  Exactly.  It’s funny no one’s thought to ask this so directly before.  The quick and easy answer would be to say there is no answer.  Or, we don’t get to know.  This is something the characters in the book are struggling with, or trying to ignore, or successfully ignoring.  I’m much more interested in the ways we come to understand, deal with, or not deal with traumatic events in our lives, rather than tracing any kind of causal relationship, casting blame, etc.   I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves.  I think examining those stories brings us closer to an understanding of what it means to be an actively living/seeing/perceiving thing.

Brian: This is a good point. Your answer clearly applies to Marcus. We don’t get to see the ups and downs (mostly downs?) of his life actually happen to him. We’re always, at the beginning of a section, thrown into some sort of aftermath, or dénouement, of another major life change. You have a taste for, as you say, the way we re-present these moments to ourselves, after the fact. I find it would make for a very interesting film. Have you thought of this book cinematically? Does thinking cinematically help you?

Colin: I think it’s hard not to think cinematically at this point, at least when writing a book with such clear scenes and imagery.  I certainly pictured every scene I wrote in my head as I was writing it.  And movies have dramatically impacted the way I imagine things.  This is true of other work I’ve done as well, that the work relies so heavily on the concreteness of a certain image or gesture that I have to really picture it before I can write it.  I have to see it and look all around it and check it for weak spots.  I’ve been so effectively trained by movies and television as to how one looks at and around a thing, that my imaginative eye often examines an imagined thing in these camera-like sweeps and zooms.  I am a slave to the machine.   But I think you’re also talking about the narrative itself here, and I would have to say that in constructing the story I wasn’t thinking at all cinematically.  I also would be interested in seeing a film that moves in this way (I’m sure they’re out there.  In fact, I’m sure I’ve seen a couple without realizing it).  I think most movies emphasize the moments that this book tends to leave out.  We are attracted to stories with high-drama and with rising tension that moves toward a rewarding climax because it makes the events of our lives seem meaningful.  I am not belittling this method of storytelling.  I love it, in fact.  And I’m interested in it.  I’m interested in the ways we construct meaning.  And I think we always draft the narrative of meaning after the fact.  There is a quote, though I cannot remember who said it, that thought occurs in the wake of experience.  This idea has been stated in one way or another by many, I’m sure.  And I like that.  If it’s something that’s been said over and over in myriad ways and contexts, that seems right.

 

Assumption, The

Climb, the
Premise, the—

What drama
_____of the size of signs, of sighs
Seized at zero.

A dry soul is best
_____because combustible—

But to stand
_____beyond witness, burying the sun

_____or else writing fire
_____along a circumference of unclosing

—this is my faith & my reason.

I enter history
As a secret agent or stone effigy

_____dedicated to communism
_____but eaten away by music.

My chorus
_____vacuum-crowded, I
_____beg to begin—

If now
_____is a precipice, then
A human voice predates the universe.

Everything sends, never to receive
This message

Premonitory to a shriek—of
Shredded
_____immensité the vocable, irrevocable
_____Proof.

_____________________________________________________
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010) and translator of the German fantasy writer Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron lives in Berkeley, California, and plays the theremin in the dark ambient quartet Cloud Shepherd.

THEthe Poetry and are teaming up to share poems across the oceans. This collaboration introduces new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks will celebrate poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between.

The Red Room Company is a not-for-profit poetry organisation founded in 2003 and based in Sydney. Their mission is to provide professional commission opportunities to contemporary Australian poets, particularly emerging voices. They present poetry to the wider community in engaging, unusual ways involving film, audio and installation. Since 2007, The Red Room Company has delivered Papercuts, their national poetry education program for primary and secondary schools. In 2010 the poetry education program was extended to Correctional Centres.

Still, the close reading. Fine. You will have your blasted close reading. However, I will conduct this reading on my own terms. I will shuffle, and play the cards at my whim, sometimes to my detriment. First though, a word on why and how I’ve resisted the close reading.

“The Waste Land” begs a different criticism. My initial interest in the poem sprung from the seeming impossibility for anything clever to be said about the poem, and yet everyone went on assigning it, sometimes with a tone of reverence normally associated with religiosity: “You don’t get it? None of us do, it’s a mystery! Work toward it though, it has its rewards!” That Eliot can be enjoyed without thorough understanding is entirely true. The danger, of course, is that Eliot may or may not be part of what we might call The McMansion Canon. This canon has the look and feel of substantial lodging, but was erected specifically for this appearance.

I have said that Eliot is not an elitist, but a nerd. I stand by this. What I failed to mention, however, is that often, in pursuit of the mastery of an idea or ideal (in this case, language) the nerd becomes the bully. An elitism by submission if you will. Indeed, Bill Gates, the patron (saint?) of nerds reminds us, “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”

Thus, in this age of the internet, where I take my rigor and turn it into something a bit more performative, something which (if I may deign (I deign)) engages the audience and recognizes that this act of internet writing is, as it occurs at the push of a button (thereby drastically cutting the gap between writer and reader), more similar to a stage than a page, it is not much of a surprise that Eliot is having something of a popular revival. The ability to split-screen, open tabs, tap hyper-links with a finger, express-order live performances of, say, an epic utterance that can be enjoyed in less than thirty minutes, etc., have enabled happy days for Eliot, precisely because he is so famously complicated. Notice that “The Waste Land” for iPad has been Mac’s best-selling book app, surpassing Marvel Comics and Twilight. “The Waste Land” has always begged its readers to multitask, to make leaps, to be both attentive and creative readers. “Garbage Picking,” this method where I invoke the poem and then collect its significant rubbish, was created for “The Waste Land.”

Upon arriving at the first line of “The Waste Land” proper we’ve read lines from Petronius’s Satyricon, Dante’s Purgatory, The Book of Common Prayer, and hopefully Miss Westion’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazier’s The Golden Bough. That’s six texts, counting “The Waste Land” itself, and four languages. And do not try to sell me that—ahem—garbage about the terms and circumstances that led Eliot to write the footnotes. It is an odd mythology this poem engenders: it asks to be read impersonally, and often the same readers who hold this fact to be sacrosanct are the readers who form all sorts of logics as to why Eliot included the footnotes: “He was being ironic, he was having a laugh at the people who said the poem was difficult, he was trying to buttress his reputation (it’s critical success was not guaranteed, after all).” No, the footnotes are a part of the text. If there is a personal fact from Eliot’s biography that is important, it is that he was a sickly child and spent his youth indoors, reading.

Let’s look at the excerpt of the Satyricon. I have a translation here:

I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered, “I want to die.”

A powerful and brilliant epigraph. It does a number of duties, two of which I will remark on. First, readers of Miss Weston know that the trope of the Priest/Healer runs parallel to that of The Fisher King’s hero, the hero who makes the kingdom plentiful by healing its wounded king. So “The Waste Land” opens with a priestess who wants to die. We then ask “The Waste Land,” what about you is a climate where the healer wishes herself to be dead? That Sibyl of Cumae signaled the coming of Jesus might also prove relevant.

Second, and you have to know the Satyricon to know this, Sybil of Cumae asked for eternal life without asking for perpetual youth. Above, when the boys question Sibyl what she wants, she has aged into a pile of dust. In a sense, she is neither living nor dead—thus, her answer, “I want to die.” The epigraph also implies that death would be preferable to an in-between state. This reading assists with lines like, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Finally we read the first line. “April is the cruelest month, breeding.” A famous line for good reason. It’s counter-intuitive. April is the Easter season, the time of rebirth! But based on what we know from the epigraph we might guess that the speaker has not yet earned rebirth. Is the speaker, who later turns out to be the Phoenician Sailor and the hero of the poem, like Sibyl of Cumae, a handful of dust in a cage, wishing to die?

Aside: Eliot takes shots at the Romantic tradition throughout this poem, and when the second line goes onto read, “Lilacs out the dead land, mixing,” we should read that as a slap at Mr. Lilacs in the Dooryard himself. Quick fixes and emotional blabber that solves nothing, that is how Eliot reads the Romantics. Eliot wants to go deeper, down amongst the roots of the dried tubers.

“I. The Burial of the Dead” is a ritualized invocation bringing the proceeding elements and themes of the poem. WWI is indirectly referenced in the first stanza. If the poem begins with the Burial of the Dead, what can the poem bring us? Note, in the Book of Common Prayer the initial passage is from John: “I am the resurrection and the Life saith the lord: he that believeth in me, though dead, yet shall live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” So belief grants eternal life. But what if, like Madame Sosotris (a play on a Aldous Huxley character, symbolizing Bertand Russell, famous atheist (and a close friend of Eliot’s then wife)) we do not find “the Hanged Man,” whom Eliot tells us he (Eliot) associates with Jesus. Are we then merely pieces in a game with rigid and very certain boundaries?

For a student of comparative literature, something very interesting occurs in “II. A Game of Chess.” A woman speaking to our hero commands him to think: “‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me./’Speak to me. Why do you never speak?/’What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/’I never know what you are thinking. Think.'” In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the master, Pozzo, commands his servant, Lucky,
“Think, pig!” Also, Eliot’s “East Coker” uses the phrase “The end is in the beginning.” Beckett’s corrective is in Endgame. Hamm announces “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” Hold on to this. I will argue that Eliot is, by lineage, more properly an ancestor of postmodernism than Modernism, and that the McMansion Canon too readily charted Eliot’s position as distinct from Beckett’s.

Can you find the sonnet in “III. The Fire Sermon?” I’ll give you a clue. It contains a veritable rape scene that highlights the name of the section by describing a cocky “young man carbuncular” and a typist who finds it easier to allow him access than to refuse. “The Fire Sermon” comes from the Buddha’s sermon on overcoming the flailings of pleasure. For Eliot it is not just the body that must be usurped; the other’s body must also be usurped.

The theme of water is the most interesting and most complicated theme in “The Waste Land.” Water, Miss Weston tells us, will restore the land, and yet throughout “The Waste Land” the hero will “fear death by water.” Also, the phrase “Those are pearls that were his eyes” sung by Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest suggests a transformation that might occur were one to drown. “IV. Death by Water,” the shortest section, is an invitation to hope against hope for redemption, that we might die and the hands of our redemption and be transformed. Death, for Eliot, permits life.

The final section contains the most convoluted denouement in the English language. “The Waste Land” ultimately tries to answer Miss Weston’s call for a piece of literature that combines the entire history of The Vegetation Gods and later Holy Grails myths, and we see Eliot’s belligerent, mechanized program of unity in the final eleven lines:

_______I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

_______Shantih_____shantih_____shantih

Now, what I am about to do is for your eyes only. The point of this poem is this brokenness, the stretching of the lungs too wide that it might inhale all of history, and resurrect its own story. The speaker is nuts. If there is an emotion in “The Waste Land,” it is that this command to multitask has driven her insane. But for our purposes:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Then he hid himself in the fire that purifies them
When shall I become like the swallow?—O swallow swallow
The prince of Aquitaine in the abandoned tower
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Give. Sympathize. Control.

_______Shantih_____shantih_____shantih

There is a concession. The poem suddenly reduces its lens to “my lands”; a second ago the speaker was naming every major European city in history, we’d been to Ganges and Jesus had appeared in the walk to Emmaus . . . and now one sits on the shore and the plain is arid. The land, or that which is exterior, has not been restored. It seems that the speaker shrugs in the face of defeat; an image of a city in ruin, but a famous child’s rhyme, a whimsical and simultaneously sinister gesture; and suddenly, English now, we see a narrative.

The Fisher King (“he”) has again disappeared, into the fire that purifies. (Remember Weston’s Vegetation God is dumped back into the river after there is no use for it.) But so when will I be transformed, made into the once ravished swallow that now sings? No: instead, I am the prince of my abandoned tower, my cage only, and I’ve collected what I can to ensure my survival.

At that moment, when the speaker is merely protecting against ruin, The Fisher King returns, using his guile to bring out the causes of his son’s death. And the cycle begins again. Give. Sympatheize. Control.

Formally “The Waste Land” is most similar to an Upanishad; it’s nature is philosophical, it is most effective as a performance, and it even makes not just one, but all Upanishads a part of its body. But it’s also special poem. It’s wildly irregular. And Eliot is a special poet. He is cool because his design and detail are radically weird. His work looks like nothing else. And I find that I can return and return and reimagine and reimagine.

But he is also an idiot. I take a hands on approach with the folk I admire. Eliot is entirely racist insofar as “The Waste Land” is granted its departures by entirely prioritizing the enactment of written culture over the spoken word. And, my friend lewis will help me here, but the ethos of art as luxury is bunk, too. Art is neither luxury nor rebellion. We’ll talk.

And if I may borrow from Eliot, my real gripe with “poetry is an escape from emotion” is that it is an inexact formula. Like O’Hara’s notion of “Personism,” in which a poem is directed to a specific recipient, thereby launching the poem into abstraction for the general audience (the intensely personal becoming impersonal), Eliot’s impersonal poem is the most personal. When Eliot says impersonal, he doesn’t mean inspired, he means necessary. To paraphrase myself, it is Frankenstein’s monster: Made of the component parts its master uncovered, and forever bearing that master’s name.

[Then there is this dream with its other bright edges]

Then there is this dream with its other bright edges,
a piece of paper spread over the flowering field,

thin as a reflection. You know what’s wound
tight there, wanting to undo.

Even when you don’t look, it is still there,

all brazen and sting, all blast-net of stars:

a single-walled room that is eating itself,

one big hole of hallway,
pale and crustacean. And inside it,

the milk-film bristles with light. Inside,

you keep filling with water,

and the water keeps filling with copies of you.

_____________________________________________________
Niina Pollari wrote two chapbooks of poetry, Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace 2009) and Book Four (Hyacinth Girl 2011). With Judy Berman, she is editing the essay collection It’s Complicated: Feminists Write about the Misogynist Art We Love.

 

One of the most dreamily sinister images in Dana Curtis’ Camera Stellata appears in the poem The Final Amnesia, which features an abandoned Eden drifting in space with hanged gardeners who “have decided to die/to give the roses/wings/the mint/dominion.” In the void of such lawlessness, “God’s Rapist” has begotten a miscellany of stars, planets, illegitimate black holes, and feminine “iconoclast[s] awhirl in stasis”…”each attempt to abort” drying their hair to thorns: the streams running from Christ’s crown those of Mary’s menses, or miscarriage: a kind of cosmic Handmaid’s Tale interspersed over Biblical prophecy.

Female voices cycle through the narration, some truculent and young, recalling coming-of-age visions of “blood, vomit, loud sex in asparagus fields”, some sorrowful as Russian mothers striding among bombed-out ruins as chemical fires flicker on the horizon. Flames (as in war, as in zodiac, as in mythical salamander, as in creation and regeneration of the solar system) are a recurring image here, and music is Pythagorean/of the spheres. (Cemetery opens with the Shostakovich quote, “The majority of our symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone…where do you put the tombstones? Only music can do that for them”).  Ergo, Curtis’ poetry here is at times strongly reminiscent of translations of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, reading almost as if it had been composed in a foreign tongue and filtered back into an approximation of English. The effect is a language that’s both sparse and opulent, finding a home somewhere between the pared-down grandeur of HD and the epic generalities/sweep of Dylan Thomas.

From Salamander:

She said her death lobbied to be gruesome…she won’t live anywhere she can’t imagine

This is an apt overview of Camera, whose speakers are committed not so much to transcendentalism as to exploration within the parameters of their own doom. This is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, of course (as all existentialism is), but it’s a defiant, expansive strain that’s nobody’s fool or prisoner. Just as the heroes of Norse folklore (as in mythographer and scholar Edith Hamilton’s famous account) are heroic without hope of spiritual deliverance in any truly transformative sense, Curtis’ language is never so triumphant as when it comes into collision with the end of itself (“Look/the swans hit the water like ruined wine”). The nymph Daphne’s transformation into laurel tree was not liberation from her pursuer, but merely the next best thing. Similarly, in Entropy

The woods were never an escape, but I escaped

Trapped in roots and mushrooms.

There was never any her, not

Here, no longer, a little

Longer before the film of scum eats the pool.

“I died outside the garden gate/arranged the letters because I must be gibberish” is what we hear in Elegy, which begins “Shall I compare you to nothing?” In a place where history and time have yet to begin, zero is, by definition, the only possible comparison with itself, and time’s possibilities, being new, are endless. In Towards the Uncreation, Eve, having slain the serpent, invites the exiled back into paradise:

In her arms, no garden but a

 dead snake and she says…

Come

back and reveal

the equations and constellations

Retreat opens with the startling line, “As if I’d entered one of my own pores”. Here, learning “the true, luminous nature of digestion”, we pass right on through to On Her Blindness, which ends: “The mirror is a sea/feathered glorious”…a line reminiscent of Ariel’s “and now I foam to wheat/a glitter of seas”.

The book’s title track, Camera Stellata, is as much love poem to Astarte and/or Venus as it is love poem subverted into physics:

She hates me and I hate 

a horizon penetrating a blindfold…

She’s not the beauty I recall…

Pink is torn…pink trespasses the installations

 I design

A liquid event

 horizon. I just might

stroke her throat.

There is pretty much everything here: sex as anatomy, anatomy as physics, the “horizon penetrating a blindfold” as event horizon itself; the wormhole as the throat that might or might not swallow the venom of After Vienna, where the Akhmatovian speaker knows “the poisonbaths have failed to make [her] immune.” But toxicity is relative to the antidotes in the myths so scattered throughout the book: if Eden’s serpent were Snow White’s stepmother with her poisoned apple, help might just as well arrive in the form of astronomy’s white dwarfs wished upon…as stars…in the Disney song. As in For Seraphim Walking Dogs, original sin might have relegated us to “running errands past the cobra farm/but for every place we’ve been/there might be an antidote.” Camera Stellata, like the proverbial butterfly dreaming it’s a man, is (to our delight) finally a luminous cosmological prayer dreaming it’s an existentialist swan song.

In my last post, I modeled a way of holding a conversation with a text. I call this “pont-consciousness.” Pont means bridge in Latin. It is the genesis both of pontiff and pontificate. Used as a verb we make a bridge between disparate texts or things, trusting that the bridge may then be shorn up with the necessary research and attention to the main text. Universities always want you to use the latest research on a topic, just as lawyers site the latest precedents to make a case. If you’re bibliography does not cite anything but old books, old papers or essays, your grade will suffer. This is the myth of “progress” rearing its ugly head. It makes total sense in terms of science and historical research where empirical data builds on incremental discovery and findings, but it is falsely applied to literary theory since, here, the new is not necessarily empirical, but conjectural, and, very often, a creature of fashion rather than of “truth.” To an extent, “truth” is always a slave to the prevailing fashion, and god help you if you study Shakespeare outside the present fashion of gender studies or post-structuralism. All of this “rigor” and insistence on the new is the bias of false scientific positivism. Nothing new in this sense is necessarily “progress,” but rather a recapitulation or new wrinkle in the  basic mechanisms underlying fashion and its dynamic, but you must live in this world. You must comply. You must cite the paper written yesterday and ignore the excellent article from 100 years ago.  Of course, this system senses its own stupidity, and so it concocts canonical critical to go with the canon of literature.

In recent times theory has become a competing canon, with the theory representing a sort of Jazz fake book upon which the critics blow their changes. Often, these “changes” bear little or no reference to the  literary text at hand. Personally, I am not an enemy of this state of affairs. In the hands of a wildly creative critic, we get what amounts to a complimentary music side by side with the cannon. There is much to be said for creative criticism, and we could even make a case that Derrida and other famous literary critics of the last fifty years have composed some of the chief tunes of the age–not novels, not poems, not plays, but their own hybrid of speculative philosophy, of conjectural poetry, with its own rhetoric, style, and characters.

But in this post, I am going to be old fashioned: I am going to apply some of the stuff I gleaned from reading four paragraphs of Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa to a poem for which what Arendt  is saying proves fruitful: Blake’s  “A Poison Tree.” So first, the poem:

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

The genius of Blake is his playing out the location of private and public human activity to show their psychological truth and depth. Arendt says goodness must be hidden in order to remain goodness. Made public, it loses its force. It may remain useful as good works, but it has entered the realm of the public and takes on the diminished life of mere appearance, of “goodly seeming.”

Some of this is a very close cousin to Plato’s archetypes and sense of the pure. In another great poet, we see this played out as “unheard melodies are sweetest / pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.” The “pure” is not visible or audible, or known to the senses. Made visible, it loses its essence and becomes substantive. Essence can essential substance, and substance may substantiate essence but always at the cost of the pure realm of each. No man may see the face of God and live because the face of God is degraded by being seen, and man is lifted above his mortal life in its presence. Augustine, versed in Neo-Platonism, takes this further, expanding on Paul’s Romans. God sees only God. Insofar as a man is in a state of grace, God does not see his personality, but his soul which is made in the image and likeness of God. The body conformed to the soul, purified of sin also rises, but must be dead to all fleshly desires. It must fall down on the body of the crucified Christ, and rise up with the risen body of the same. It is, as Paul called it, a “spiritualized body.” God does not see sin because sin is naught–the nothing. When Jesus Christ is covered in sin on the cross, God turns his face from him. Christ becomes sin itself. Though Christ never commits a sinful act, he becomes the scene of sin on which the force of salvation through sacrifice and resurrection are played out (read Issiah 53). In order for God’s face to exist it must be “hidden”–implied only through grace and virtue. It is degraded by entering the realm of public or visible activity.

Arbitrary power may be shown publicly in the world only as ceremony, ritual, seeming justice, and seeming mercy. It must never appear arbitrary or it begins to lose its identity. It must remain visible only through signs of “order.” Blake is saying that wrath made public is the overt action of a covert intimacy. Making his wrath known to his friend, the narrator dissipates its force and ends it in the intimacy of renewed friendship. Hiding his wrath from his foe, the wrath becomes generative. It becomes a god, a force around which and from which all else proceeds. In the public sphere, in the world of appearance, this wrath is a beautiful tree and a great apple. The foe, being truly a foe, seeks to usurp this apple, and to make it his own. Falling for the bait of “goodly seeming,” he is poisoned and dies. In secret, the narrator has cultivated this wrath, watered it with his tears and fears, sunned it with his soft and pleasant wiles. He has hidden it under the terministic screen of “goodness.”

We can apply this to how normative systems subsume the energies of counter-normative systems, and “poison” them with their “goodly seeming.” When a system cannot destroy its counter-statements, it seeks to incorporate them, visibly or not. The counter first wears the blatant uniform of its “difference.” In the gay counterculture we find leather, fetish, send-ups and outlandish parodies of the straight culture. At the same time, those still “in the closet” wore the mask of the straight. When gay culture begins to win normative status and becomes “just folks,” it is depicted in movies as wearing Bill Cosby sweaters, attending the PTA, taking on all the concerns of the “straight culture.” At the same time, formerly gay semiotic indicators enter the realm of the straight.

Beyond the counter-normative and the normative, there is the pre-normative and the post-normative. Instability might be the only constant, but beneath it all lies the power of the arbitrary. This is what counter-cultural movements and all political revolutions risk: by over throwing the seeming “power” that oppresses them, are they merely eating from the poisoned tree of goodly seeming? And in relation to the “first,” the initial power of the arbitrary, can any true change be said to have taken place?

A further point: Arendt insists that the goodness must be hidden not only from the world, but from the one who enacts it. Quoting Christ: “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” If wrath is one of the activities that must be hidden in order to truly exist in its fullest, most pure sense, then it is even more potent and alive when it is hidden from the wrathful (passive aggression). Much neutral speech, politeness, and decorum hides tremendous violence. One can say that true wrath always needs a goodly seeming apple to be effective. The terministic screen of a passive-aggressive may be martyrdom and victimage (think of the mother in The Sopranos). “Who me? Mad? Of course I’m not mad. Why should I be mad?” But, in this poem, the narrator is aware that he has harbored a grudge and allowed his wrath to grow. He is deliberate, intentional. He lures his foe. In this case, the wrath remains covert, but not to the one who feels it. His outward appearance, his “soft wiles” draw the foe in. This apple is his “seeming” power, and his foe, being a true foe, seeks to steal it, again under the veil of darkness. The narrator and his foe are one. For true intimacy there must be not union but communion. The friend is “other,” but the foe may be seen as a projection of the self. The self, outside true relationship, splits off, and becomes a false “other” to its own tendencies. Thus a system in order to hide its worst tendencies must project them onto an “other.” This is the intimacy of opposition.

At this point I wonder what is hidden from the narrator but not the poet: the foe is the narrator, and the narrator is the foe. They are split off aspects of each other. They are one in their wrath. No relationship is possible, only union, and union is degraded to the dyslogistic register of murder. The union of substance and essence is the death of both substance and essence. The murdered and the murderer share the scene of the crime. They inhabit the same scene. When the murderer leaves the scene of the crime, he leaves a part of himself there in the defining act of his being. Here is the question: how often do we, in seeking the power denied us, the “goodly seeming” denied us, succeed only in eating from its poisoned tree?

Here’s a few creative things you can try to experiment with these ideas.

1. Write your own version of “A Poison Tree,” of feigning friendship for someone you can’t stand. This can either be creative non-fiction, a story, or a poem.

2. Read up on the psychological concept of passive-aggression and transference. Write a poem, story, or creative non-fiction piece in which these concepts are the overall theme, but are not mentioned overtly.

(This post was to begin with a quote that I remember as having been said by the filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard: “You don’t read a film; you watch it”. While trying to chase down the quote, though, I found it had disappeared so effectively that I began to doubt both the words and the person to whom I was attributing it. Regardless of who said it and whether they said it that way, here it is, the quote as epigraph:)

You don’t read a film; you watch it.

A poem, like a film, is a different beast. It is both an event and an object; which it to say, it occurs in time and it occupies space. It is music and it is drawing.

It may not be both things at once, but it has the potential to be either.  And both (though not necessarily, of course, at once. See previous sentence).

When poetry functions as music, when it is spoken aloud, when it unfolds in time, it trusts to memory. All music is memory. Poetry recited is, for the listener, a path unfolding where none existed before. A listener does not know what comes next; only the poet and the speaker know.

A listener may only have the haziest notion of what came before but there is no way of retracing her steps. Poetry spoken aloud moves in only one direction: forward. (It also ‘moves’, for the most part, from left to right, but we will come to that later).

The recitation of a well-known poem is to the listener what a recorded song is to a live performance. The listener has a particular way of reciting the poem and may be out of step with the ‘live’ version now being performed in front of her.

When a poem is read aloud, the speaker is an object who can be read. No: watched.

When a poem is recited, there may be more than one performer. may .

Poems on the page are not read; they are watched.

Poems on the page are read, but only after they are watched.

When I choose a poem to read, I first look for the ones that occupy less space. Or at least, ones that occupy one space: a page or facing pages. I view the poem at once, without reading.

Think of it as an aerial shot or a bird’s-eye-view of the poem. In saccades, I take in information about density of text, patterns and repetitions, empty space.

I am reading – no, viewing – Kazim Ali’s ‘The Return of Music’. (Kazim Ali, The Far Mosque, Alice James Books, 2005).

One poem over two (facing) pages. I catch the words ‘orange’ and ‘sapphire’. Then, in a cascade, the words ‘unfold’, ‘Unopened’ (from the next line, because my eyes slide down), ‘unsummon’ and ‘uncry’ (back to the previous line).

In my mind, I have attached the prefix ‘un’ to the ‘you’ in ‘you will’. As my eyes drift to the facing page, I am thrilled to see that what my mind made has been made again on the page. This line: ‘Unyear you will. Unyou you will.’

There are other thoughts I have before I even read the poem – from top to bottom and left to right, the way poems in certain languages are usually written and therefore must be read (what if a poem must be read in a different order?).

These other thoughts, such as: that I might have used the word ‘cascade’ above because this poem contains the words ‘course’ and ‘carved’ and ‘wends’ and ‘went’. Such as: is it really a coincidence that I picked a poem about music in order to demonstrate how I watch a poem?

Such as: the instant I use the word watch to describe an experience, I describe the experience in time. The object may not move in time, but time passes anyway. See: Abbas Kiarostami’s Five Dedicated to Ozu. It occurs to me that regardless of my wanting to separate a poem-as-event from poem-as-object, it is both, simultaneously.

As I read, I go back and forth, moving between the lines, refreshing my memory, reminding myself of what went before. I tell myself this is freedom because if I were listening to this poem, I would be bound by the pace of the speaker and my attention span.

(I remember that I am able to memorise poems only when I record them and listen to the recording constantly. Learning poems is like knowing the lyrics to songs: you know it without knowing when you learnt it.)

When poems are long, longer than two facing pages, I panic. I want to have a sense of its ending before I begin. I flip the pages to get an idea of how long the poem is.

(Pages are to minutes what distance is to time. I say, ‘It’s 15 minutes by bus.’ I don’t say, ‘It’s 3 kms from where you are.’)

While reading a long poem, the attention slips and affects the experience of the poem in the same way that inattention affects the heard poem. What occupies these gaps?

When I read a long poem – a book-length poem, say After Nature – I hold the book in my left hand and flip it as if it were a flip book and something would animate itself.

I expect persistence of vision.

I get end words from lines. The beginnings are firmly (with)held by my own hands.

Beginnings are only entry points. The poem-as-object has more than one point of entry.

I think of Jean-Luc Godard (again!) releasing the full version of Film Socialisme on the film’s website (now defunct). It was the whole film, but it was a speeded-up version, lasting 15 minutes or less.

When I flip through a book of poems to get a sense of what it is about, I think I am performing a blurb. Or do I mean a précis?

(I ask myself: is it possible to have a photographic memory for text in an unfamiliar language?)

I think: ‘This is impossible’. I decline to say what ‘this’ is.

In the Mahabharata, when the sages in the Naimisam forest ask Sauti to recount the events that form the epic, they ask him to tell them the story in detail. Sauti, in response, gives them a history of the versions of the epic and how Vyasa came to write it , ‘It is the wish of the learned in the world to possess the details and the abridgement.’

The poem viewed or watched, then, may be the poem first as précis then in full.

Can a poem ever be only read?

The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May

Upon seeing a video of a man in North Carolina firing his rifle
into a sign asking citizens to Vote Against NC Amendment One.

There are oaks that remember
what we would forget—the burn of the rope,
how a body takes on more weight
the moment it breathes its last, how
the earth below shoeless feet grows
hungry for the slaughtered. There are rooms
where paint has been rolled over
blood, where the body’s salt has been
vacuumed into bags of dust, where the veneer
of a nightstand still bears the imprint
of a living hand’s last message. Ghosts
of children and men and women hang
from fences, linger in the corners
of dorm rooms, courtrooms, churches.
This is how we deal with it around here, he said,
after emptying his gun into a plea for equality, and some people
were shocked by his quivering pride. I will try
not to think of him when I stand in a room
in DC and vow to love the man
I have loved for 16 years. I will try not to remember
that 17 years ago, a friend of mine opened his door
to a plea for help from the other side, only to be robbed
then stabbed to death with his own kitchen knife
because the thief felt threatened that my friend—
while begging for his life—revealed that he was gay.
I will even try not to think of my grandfather
who cannot forgive me for loving the man
who held me steady as I purchased the dress my grandmother
was to be buried in. I will try not to think of the memory
of these oaks, of those fences, of some rooms. I will say I will
and mean carry on loving you until death. I will
think of the dorm room where we first made love,
I will think of the fence around our house
and its roses that change color in the heat. I will
think of the Carolina oak who might just remember
the night we kissed in the first bands of rain
from a hurricane just making landfall.

_____________________________________________________
Daniel Nathan Terry, a former landscaper and horticulturist, is the author of Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), which won The Stevens Prize, and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His second full-length book, Waxwings, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in July of 2012. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies including New South, Poet Lore, Chautauqua, and Collective Brightness. He teaches English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Cape Fear Community college, and he serves on the advisory board of One Pause Poetry.

Note: This poem will also appear in the October issue of r.kv.r.y.