Review of Judith Bishop

My review of Judith Bishop has just gone live over at Cordite.

"Poetry, being that form of discourse where justifications are often, and thankfully, less important than the larger ontology and autonomy of the work, it is no doubt sometimes reductive to ask of a poetic: why is this element here? What is its general justification? Its greater goal?"

In other news, I'm doing a brief interview with Charles Bernstein here on Saturday. I hope I will find something to say

Manning's Election Promises (For American Friends)

.
I cannot keep my promises to you.
I cannot keep my promises to God.
I cannot promise I will eat more healthily.
I am just a human being
and sometimes I see how
full of faults I am
that it scares me.
I cannot promise that I will act responsibly.
Nor can I promise that I will live the way I ought to live,
nor live in a way you think worthy of me. I cannot
promise I will not disappoint you,
break your heart and destroy
everything
we made together.
I don't want you to vote for me my precious
most sacred thing that has ever graced
the face of this destroyed earth.
I just want you
to hold me.
.

Dear Joe

Epistle For Joe The Plumber

what clogged or leaky

diction is neither affordable

in our democracy

nor in

any aristotelian extent

useful in the buying of my business . . .

if all this then besides

being

not absolutely

true in a modern sense

of captatio benenvolentiae

nor in the sense of i wish i could

“bomb more”

nor

even regarding

those overpriced locking faucets

fixed from that time when i didn’t even

own a chair . . . all i’m saying then i suppose

is that i will find a cure for autism and

I’ll keep repeating it to that one

because i have the scars

to prove it

The Flow

So much of the history of Western rhetoric reads like one big hip-hop face-off.

Hermogenes steps up to the baton-mic, eyes off his opponent-in-eloquence, checks his inventio of coherent topoi, launches into an elocutio of structured dispositio, with just enough memoria and pronuntiatio to beat down the opposing mo-fo flows:

Merciless like a terrorist hard to capture
The flow, changes like a chameleon
Plays like a friend and stabs you like a dagger
This technique attacks the immune system
Disguised like a lie paralyzing the victim
You scream as it enters your bloodstream
Erupts your brain from the pain these thoughts contain
Moving on a n**** with the speed of a centipede
and injure - ANY MOTHERFUCKING CONTENDER

And what are you going to say to that, you calm and collected Aristotelian logicians?

All of which I kind of like, if I must be honest. Ah the history of eloquence! Isn't it our claim to our own techne? I cannot use a trowell, and so cannot build a firm wall. I know it can get out of hand. Sometimes you just desperately want the rhetors to take off their bling. I'm talking about the poets too. Old-school over the over-produced?

Which is why sometimes you want MC Solaar, or an Aristotle of our times.

Gushfest!

Do admired poets and writers inspire occasional giggling popstar helium-fandom reactions in you ? That’s the subject of today’s talk.

So the other night, last week some time – ah how the nights blur together in the cut and paste masquerade-parade of a PhD double-scare-quote opus! – I was at one of my favourite Belleville nighthaunts, Aux Folies, (which is on the road winding up the hill to the alleys of the 19th and the agora on the Buttes), when who should be seated next to me but Monsieur French Lit-star of the moment, Jonathan Littel.

American-born, francophone-anglophone, winner of the Goncourt, winner of the Prix de l’Académie française – not that that one means anything (it really doesn't)– but most importantly author of one of the only French-language (are you ready for it?) « masterpieces » of the 21st century. Oh yes, dearest friends, you’ll hear about Les Bienveillantes soon, if you haven't already, as soon as the English and German language translations come out, and Littel is the new subject of over-arching Cornell PhDs, with quotes on alternating pages from Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt.

Had seen Littel several times before, in more official contexts : once during my time at the Ecole normale, in a heated, and constantly pretty hilarious debate with Kristeva and other French lit-luminaires – Soupault lounging in the front row, with at one point people yelling out disagreement from the pit.

Anyway, was with my friend, the infamous Goguenard – now down in la France profonde, teaching English to the French kiddies – and Gog was making fun of me for my school-girlish Beatles mania. Man, I was intimated! I really wanted to ask for an autograph. But Littel was with some writer friends, smoking a cigar and drinking martinis or something. At one point they were talking about Gallimard. I think Gog stopped talking to me after a while, seeing as I wasn’t paying attention to him. Told this to other people afterwards, who just rolled their eyes at me, like I was an idiot, and my behaviour incomprehensible. Well yes . . . But some literary figures, whose work I have a deep thing for, do have a popstar aura for me.


Above all, however, I didn’t want to do this, which is perhaps one of the most sublime examples of unrestrained, semi-hormonal gushing at a cultural hero I’ve been « fortunate » enough to witness.

I mean, yes, it’s MORRISEY, but it's still pretty damn funny :

« I don’t mean I’d beat on your chest, that’d get me into trouble, I mean I’d beat on my chest, aha ha aha aha aha !»

« Quite a few girls on the street said you were quite fit. I’m not disagreeing ! »

« I’m your campaign manager ! I’m your campaign manager ! »

« You must have people come up to you saying : “I’ve named my children after you!” »

What, are there heaps of children in the U.K. called « Morrissey » now ? Really?

Anyway, Morrisey looks pretty uncomfortable, even though he gets out of it by taking the piss. Poor guy. It must be a touch surreal to be talking to a scenester with an enormous photo of your head stuck to his shirt . . .

Would have been amusing to do this when someone like Hejinian was here. I’m not even an enormous Hejinian fan (more a big to strong-middling fan). She did a really beautiful reading though. Very intimate. Met her briefly, she signed a copy of The Language of Inquiry. Perhaps it would have been a nice piece of failed Andy Kaufman subversion to gush : « God, your poetry’s just so GREAT. Really really great. I love your books, well most of them. You’re so hot ! I mean your poetry’s hot. No you’re hot! You must have people come up to you saying : “I’ve named my children after you!” I’m your campaign manager ! I’m your campaign manager ! »

So please do share stories of the time you met Olson in the sixties, and got him to sign “MAXIMUS OF TYRE” across your chest . . .

(Oh and by the way, Morrissey is THE actual physical reincarnation of Antonin Artaud. I just thought you should know . . .)

John Ashbery vs. William Logan: new forms of an écriture automatique ?

Was vaguely amused, bewildered, irritated - as usual in equal measures - some time back to read Logan’s mostly incompetent take on Ashbery in the New Criterion. I thought though that, this time, I would write about it, as I’ve recently read several blog posts where people make the argument that, disagree or not with Logan’s opinions, at least he is a critic who “writes well”.

Oh really?

William Logan writes well? That’s news! I often don't mind his opinions. And I’m more or less happy that there is an acerbic, Friar’s-Club-Roast guy out there, dealing out the “yo mama so big” schtick . . . You know, why not? It’s all running colour on the greyer strands of hagiographic double-layered tweed.

But please do not tell me that William Logan “writes well’! Apparently we’ve lost some perspective on what good critical writing sounds like?

So let’s dive straight into some recent examples, such as this, from Rob Mackenzie, on his interesting U.K. blog :

“Sometimes, [Logan] hits the nail on the head. Other times, even when I disagree with him, his reviews are at least brilliantly written. They entertain and provoke and, when he gives a book a hammering, you have to think out why you agree or disagree. Many people think reviews are boring to read, but you could never say that about Logan’s.

From the above link, [Logan] on John Ashbery:“Perhaps I’m not the only reader who thinks that, while scribbling down far too much poetry in the past fifteen years, Ashbery lost the cunning of his sentences, which sometimes dodder about as if they’ve forgotten their subject. Were he unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit. Besides, he long ago created a world nonsense surplus—with a nonsense mountain somewhere in Belgium, like the EU butter mountains of old.”

Brilliantly written? Sans blague! Let’s first start on the level of absolute base offensiveness: “Were [Ashbery] unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit.” This is not only utterly disingenuous – a sort of bizarre school-yard insult couched in an ambivalently aggressive subjunctive – but deeply insulting, above all to those of us who’ve lost people from the disease, and seen the pains of it from close-quarters. My basic point though, beyond this being, well, rather twisted, is simply that it’s a case of extremely bad – at best rather incompetent – critical writing. Why didn’t Logan just all out declare: “His lines limp to the end of their enjambments like a paraplegic without his chair?” See, we can all construct sadistic little tournures. They’re not difficult! Toujours est-il, they should never have been written.

But this is what really surprises me about this sort of move on Logan’s part: his acerbic repartee simply isn’t true. It doesn’t contain any semantic value. Simply put, no person with Alzheimer’s, at almost any stage in the disease’s progression, would produce texts similar to Ashbery’s semantic or tonal disjunction. This is just not at all the type of cognitive phenomena the condition brings about.

Imagining Alzheimer’s bringing about a hip surrealist, occasionally non-referential poetics, is just, then, a non sequitur. It is entirely devoid of sense.

This is, however, where my talking about Logan’s insults in this rather semantic way begins to seem like a ridiculous, overly positivistic endeavor. Because Logan never meant his statements to be picked apart like this. He says things . . . because they sound good. Because he feels they sound good.

This is a very negative thing for a critic to do. But these are curiously the cases then of Logan’s own problems with language: those in which he often simply seems to get into a syntactic or imagistic or grammatical mess. Take Rob Mackenzie’s next quoted example of Logan’s “fine writing”, this time regarding Frieda Hughes:

“Hughes is a perfect example of what happens when a poet, though possessing none of the art necessary to turn a plain old messed-up life into literature, is the sun in her own Copernican system (she puts the Sol back in solipsism)… The poems don’t make you like Frieda Hughes. They make you afraid Robert Lowell’s children will take up poetry, too.”

Sorry what? William, do your figures de style actually function here? Did you check them over? Why would poems by Lowell’s children be necessarily similar to, or worse than, Robert Lowell’s? Sure, when you first hear it, you think it coheres. It doesn’t. The heads of the schools for Roman rhéteurs would have beat you up, man, for such slipshod metonymy, anacolouthe, syntax and semantics.

Truth be told though, John Latta picked apart this “sound good” technique of Logan some time ago, and John did it much more ably than I ever could. Thus, I quote John’s resourceful dissection amply, and hope he won’t mind my doing so:

“[Logan] relishes the clever jab, critical writing reduced to a series of ho-ho zingers whilst it skitters here and there like a crawfish, backpedaling, leaving a slurry of wayward and incomprehensible tracks, effaced (he wagers) by each subsequent crack. Logan’s poems, in comparison: listless, spindly, overgrown and -work’d hothouse things . . .

Consider the review of the new Mark Ford-edited Selected Poems, by Frank O’Hara . . . Logan’s review moves dartingly: after calling O’Hara “a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly” (a perfectly ignorant remark: male fireflies “shine” bioluminescently at variable rates, flying in search of female mates. Periods of spontaneous synchronicity occur—whole hundreds in a field flashing in unison. On a hot and busy summer night—up to fifty or so light ups (blinks) per hour can by observed—reminding one of the golden years of cigarette consumption in the Cedar Tavern . . .)Logan generally proceeds with the archest of manoeuvres, attempt’d pummeling by one-liners. O’Hara sounds like “Wallace Stevens at the
soda fountain”; he’s “elated as an eel” (?); he scatters “exclamation points like penny candy”; O’Hara’s lines are “broken like breadsticks” (?); he want’d the poems to look “easy as a sewing machine” (?); O’Hara’s genius was “to stop
trying to have a point” (a little like re-packaging “Selecteds”); one poem “sounds like Ezra Pound on happy pills.” Showy lines, mostly; on examination, idiotic. (Why say lines “broken like breadsticks”? What could that possibly mean or add to anything? One supposes Logan’s proceeding by sound, music—br, br—something I mightily “counsel”—here it simply clunks, queerly inept. Logan tries (repeatedly) to kill two birds with one stone: riddles the “piece” with innuendo, slights to the left, slights to the right. So, “late Ashbery” gets a smack-down—the “insouciant nonsense” he made into a “charming anti-literary manner” is compared to something “O’Hara soon grew bored with.” So the minor school of stand-up comics (the perfectly harmless Billy Collins-infect’d glad-handers and wits; in another “age” they’d be the genial bonhommes of stereo showrooms) get they minor come uppance: “O’Hara never condescended to the reader, unlike some slapstick poets now.” Allen Ginsberg, in a gratuitous aside, proves “slightly lugubrious about sex.” The poor bloggers, too, associated with O’Hara’s purport'd “preoccupation with the trivial, with the nothing of life that is nothing” (?), get blast’d for good measure: since O’Hara “began to make poetry from whatever happened around him”—“today, he might have written a blog.”

I’m not sure I agree with John that Billy Collins is “perfectly harmless” – “does poem feel earned ?” – but we’re sure on the same level regarding the rest. I mean: “Elated as an eel?” En effet: what the fuck? “Broken like breadsticks?” How about “cracked like peppers” or “slit like a purse by a pickpocket”? “Exclamation points like penny candy” ? How about “Question-marks like a man on a unicycle?” “Easy as a sewing machine.” Or “Difficult as making a four-topping pizza in a warm Portuguese cafeteria with mad Marinettis on the radio” . . .

“On examination, idiotic”, says John.

Perhaps . . .

But there are problems, too, beyond Logan’s use of language, on the level of a critic’s perception. Exemple. Logan states that:

“Ashbery has become too self-parodic not to be his own joke (“So why not, indeed, try something new?/ Actually, I can think of a number of reasons./ Wait—suddenly I can’t think of any!”), yet that joke lays waste to a lot of the poetry of the past half-century.”

This is absolutely a valid opinion one could coherently have. But, first problematic critical gesture here: the apparently banal, but recurrent, conflating of lyrical persona with psycho-biographical identity, so that the enunciation here becomes, for Logan, entirely that of John Ashbery the man, with no scare-quotes. Some conflation is no doubt warranted here: but it is at best, on the part of Ashbery, a sort of equivocal or very ambiguous conflation, and not nearly as immediate or direct as Logan is implying. Ashbery is not simply asking, as in Logan’s reading: “I John Ashbery am wondering if I should be doing something new in my poetic.” This is, however, more or less the stunning reduction which Logan applies. As for Logan’s second point: “that joke lays waste to a lot of the poetry of the past half-century”. Isn’t that precisely the point of the “joke” in question? But, to quote Latta again:

“One of Logan’s problems is that he apparently’s got no ear whatsoever for tongue-in-cheekiness, or cheekiness tout court. He reads the back cover copy of Lunch Poems (almost assuredly written by O’Hara himself) wherein the poet’s seen “strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon” only to pause “at a sample Olivetti to type up 30 or 40 lines of ruminations” and straight-facedly declares it “most unlikely.”’

“World nonsense surplus”? William, the surplus is entirely yours my friend. In fact, it is more like a nonsense mountain somewhere in Belgium, like the EU butter mountains of old. And above this mountain, from his cosmopolitan heaven, Frank is grinning down at us, delightedly, through arching arabesques of his cigarette-smoke, making wisps of stratus in the lower skies . . .

But it is at this point, ironically, intriguingly, hilariously – in such bizarre back-flips of some poisson soluble or écriture automatique – that William Logan, in his diction as much as his imaginative fervour, begins to resemble no one else so much as . . . John Ashbery.

Which makes me, if I must be honest, as elated as an eel.

For this is truly the point where John, bending over a wounded William, takes off his mask, looks down and says: “William, you are my son!”

Who Is In Switzerland In November?

This will be fun. How often do you get to read with friends? How often do you get to read with friends whose poems you love? (Quite often perhaps, but anyway . . .)

Thankyou, Andrew Shields.

Please feel free to contribute as well to the ongoing discussion on workshops and poetic praxis, below. (I know there are many lurkers to this blog. Ah yes, what strange worlds you reveal, google analytics. Throw the hat in the ring).

It's 3am in Paris, I'm going over a famous Capablanca endgame and drinking dry martinis. In case anyone wanted to know . . .