The Newer Metaphysicals

Fragmented Complaints Of Overly-Emotional Metaphysics No.412 (Or On God Being A Question Of Ontology And Not Of Teleological Nitpicking)

2012-02-02T02:30:00.003+01:00

When will discussions, notably with prominent physicists and religious figures - or most notably between these two groups - begin not with some terribly static ecumenical notion of god as Natura naturata, but rather (at least) as Natura naturans ? Seriously, when? Or hey, if not Natura naturans (if your prior spinozism was not as deeply ingrained as mine) then at least as anything else besides an infinite causal series or first-cause or other such teleological nonsense...

Stephen Hawking is the most terrible current publicity-whore perpetrator of this rhetorical ploy, namely that "God" does not exist because, thanks to String Theory and M-Theory and Quantum Mechanics, we can now give a beautiful and magnificent and relatively really quite possible mathematical extrapolation of first-cause (everything out of nothing).

But of course this causal reality, while a wonderful and exciting mathematical achievement, of course resolves no fundamental ontological or ontic or metaphysical question whatsoever, because, may we all please finally agree, god is a question of ontology and not of cause.

"God was not needed to create the universe." Well, yes, but doesn't everyone agree on this? God (or all that is) was not needed to create itself (that is all that is), which would be an utterly useless and tautological causality. But this first premise, accepted by all - thank you - does not even begin to talk about the real question, about the real ontological mystery, less about "the beginning of what is" than with "what is itself", "that something is". And the utter miracle of it all! The overwhelming incomprehensible miraculousness of being itself...

(Yes, yes, pantheism, I'm unapologetic about it, let's move on...)

That's right! You!

(And in case you think this devaluation of cause is anti-spinozist of me, I'm wrestling with this, but my understanding is that divine causality for S. is of the "immanent sustaining" type, that is not linear or chained or first-cause related, but much more a sustaining cause, a constant cause, but this is still fuzzy to me).

So the part which caused such controversy, namely the "or Nature bit" (only included in the Latin version) is really the least important part of the famous proposition: "That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists". It is rather the confluence of necessity and being which liberates the question of God from its reductive teleological chains of "if A then B" conditionals, freeing it out into the infinite waters of divine and ever-present substance...

Oh God it's late now... Bed.

"You Put That Spear Away"

2012-01-29T13:50:00.000+01:00

Ah colonialism... How deep your painful roots run. Perhaps the most revealing, extraordinary sentence uttered these last ten years in Australia's confused quest for reconciliation with its past.

It could only come, of course, from a white police officer adressed to an aboriginal Australian:

"You put that spear away."

The Shame of Aesthetic Disconnect

2012-01-24T17:30:00.000+01:00

A non-lit or literati related moment to express some utter, utter aesthetic bafflement, namely:

How in hell does Shame not get an Oscar nomination while Midnight in Paris does?

Midnight in Paris?
Yes Michael, that was the look on my face too...

Yes yes meaningless arbitrary institutional back-pattings with no sense which don't mean anything motivated by economic extraneous ends plus American film institution trying to promote "solid family values" sceptical of anything sex-related or otherwise disturbing or going into deeper layers of what it means to be a human being etcetera etcetera but still: Meine Damen und Herren, still, HOW - with no hyperbole whatsoever - may the literally worst film of the last decade (at least), which for its DVD release could be most appropriately retitled Pretentious drawn-out maudlin saccharine vanilla navel-gazing (by a ridiculously out-of-touch film-maker who made three great films about thirty years ago) into a non-existent industrially processed tepid nostalgia about a "Paris" nobody has ever seen, visited, dreamt about, fantasised about, or would ever, ever want to, how does that film, yes, good God, that film with Carla "Quelqu'un m'a dit" Bruni playing a tour guide in the Rodin museum (just read that sentence back slowly to yourself trying not to black out from your brain going into neurological arrest in the face of the sheer incomprehension of its surrounding world...), how does that film, with the most slobberingly mind-numbingly characterless performance from Owen "one-dopey-facial-expression" Wilson, get the nod, while the just beautiful, layered and generally moving performance from Michael Fassbender, well, does not... Bested by a film able to make Marion Cottilard look like a hollywood automaton of adolescent pouting à la française...

(This post has far more italics than usual, but italics are the font of aesthetic disconnect...)

Anyway what was I saying? Oh yeah: on a lit-related note, my take on Chris Vitiello's gorgeous Irresponsibilites is in the new Galatea, and I forgot to link.

Just don't go telling me it doesn't match up to Ted Kooser... Please don't...

Literature Blogs and Videos: An End to Excess

2011-12-07T11:23:00.001+01:00

Can we make a collective literature slash poetics blog new rule? Namely: only twenty percent (and I think this is being pretty generous) of your blog's content may consist of embedded videos on or about or of writers and poets.

This video content on lit blogs phenomenon is just reaching a ridiculous saturation point. And this is coming from someone who edits a journal and archive of video poetics...

But most of this indescriminate embedding is not of true hybrid works, or collaborative video/poetic praxis.

What I'd like to see is video content used well, and sparingly, and with reflection...

This is mainly because a fair number of well-known literature blogs, which I used to find stimulating places for conversation and analysis, have now apparently become places to simply embed content of recent readings (I won't bother naming names, it's obvious enough).

I find two sentences more interesting in the context of a blog than videos of poets reading. In a recent trend, these vids are increasingly filmed readings of poets and writers who have recently passed away. Especially in this context of a homage or obituary, isn't it far more moving and personal to actually say something? One line, one word even, anything. At least say something about the video!

I understand that people don't have all that much time, or even any time at all. Especially when a blog has been running for so many years. At times, for various reasons, I've left this space silent for 6 months or more.

But silence (or spatial absence) is surely better than "[person you've vaguely heard of] reading last night at the [place you've vaguely heard of]" embed.

This is not meant to be snarky... I just miss those places. I miss those lit blogs I used to love.

Linh Dinh's Letters to a Young Poet on the MFAs

2011-12-01T11:38:00.009+01:00

Linh Dinh's current headbutt of the American MFA system is necessary reading, tackling exceedingly pressing questions, both economic and aesthetic. You should read it, and the ensuing discussion, even if it hurts you. Comment box extract from Linh:

The MFA writing racket was in full swing when I was in college, but one does not need expensive degrees to become a poet, only to teach. In fact, many poetry professors are lousy poets, or no poets at all, though their students don't know that. Students make lots of money for these programs, so the primary job of these so called professors is to flatter the students, keep them paying that tuition with loan money. Some students do go to school for free, so they're not being hustled out of cash, but they're still swimming in that smarmy and dishonest atmosphere. As I said in a lecture at Penn, many poets praise everybody, people above and below them, because that's how you gain allies. Again, there is no correlation between an expensive degree and becoming a poet. In many cases, it's the exact opposite. MFA programs are theme parks at best, and factory farms at worst. If you want to be a writer, then study the works of the best writers. Learn from Vallejo, not some unctuous and insecure poser at some college. You'll learn by reading and rereading, by writing, and by living and mixing with ordinary people. Get out of the theme park and, short of getting killed or raped, go to the wrong neighborhood and enter the wrong bar. Listen carefully to how people talk. If you can't get a poem out of that, then maybe you're not a poet after all.

It says it straight. There are, however, aspects of which I'm sceptical. I'm worried for instance about opposing to the MFA model a romantic ideational praxis, one that values itinerancy, disconnection, bar-talk etc., when I've often found such periods of itineracy and disconnection in my life to be precisely those moments when poetry becomes impossible (because of immediate needs or simple psychic-metaphysical desperation...) Now, when all is better again, words shine and the world opens... And the "ordinary talk" of people? Does this exist as a concept? The risk of wordsworthian wish-fulfillment is present here too, and we need to be en garde...

I'm also sceptical of the idea of "being" a poet or not... The subjective identification seems wrongheaded to me, and crazy pressure for kids... What are we supposed to do to be poets?

These are my quibbling thoughts, but my thanks and belief with Linh that this critical revision is the right road, remain...

Perhaps the urban wanderlust experiences gave necessary perspective? Contributed to poetic and other realities? Certes. But only as much as reading comfortably in an armchair or a conversation at a friend's party or an amphitheatre lecture or a long train journey or reading so long your eyes hurt... It all swirls and mixes in the bubble bubble and toil, and attributing an axiological priority to the moments of disposession can also, perhaps, skew perspective towards a false quest for excess? This is my suggestion. I've known this, at least...

I've never taught poetry "workshops" - yes, awful term, pick up your hammers and clag kids - I teach literature and rhetoric and languages in public institutions - I'm aware of inevitable hypocrisies in my position as well, just to pre-empt the "thanks for pointing this out" - though in the current academic job climate I've been tempted to try. In France, such ateliers are at least economically different (though my scepticism, or even outright rejection, regarding the effectiveness or utility of their praxis remains). France has more or less free public universities ("more or less free" means still expensive for many, maybe 600 American dollars a year for an undergrad degree, which is only cheap when compared to the anglosaxon fee debacle of the US, UK and Australia: £9,000 pounds a year Cameron? To be paid late? Oh sorry my bad, that's fine then. What? For the rest of my life? Arsehole).

So France is a different matter, though it is disturbingly moving towards a broken and revoltingly unjust Anglo model (though note that the French seem more willing to fight this to the death, ah les grévistes !). Let's pray we can fight it, or slow it, or destroy the fire-spitting Gamera of Sarko's "La Princesse de Clèves ne vaut rien!".

This said, students' social access to these universities, but especially the Grandes Ecoles, is obviously determined by myriad socioeconomic factors (it's exceedingly hard to get into the ENS or Sciences Po without having been to an exceedingly good Prepa, and thus having the cash or contacts or connections or geographical Parisian location to go to Henri IV or Louis le Grand...). Not many comp lit students from the cités...

But back to the workshop model, this weird new 20th century invention so at odds with the entire history of poetics... I just worry about my American friends beginning or completing MFAs.

Really, have you thought it through?

Do you really want to do this?

The Pitcairn Islands... and Rhetorical Metonymy Measurements

2011-11-30T13:01:00.001+01:00

According to this bizarre and more or less utterly useless web thing J-P.M referred me to - though of course, dear poetics readers, you naturally incline towards all that which is teleologically null, thus defined by "intrinsic and not extrinsic" value (cough irony cough) - the most appropriate real-world geographical analogy for The Newer Metaphysicals is the Pitcairn Islands.

Pretty...

(But weirdly like a bad Star Trek set, for that fight scene for instance... Anyway.)

Of course this thing was bound to please, as I'm generally fond of rhetorical metonymy which is supposed to clarify measurements and ends up obscuring them immensely ("Richard Serra's most recent sculpture is the size of fourteen elephants or 234,000 dragonflies" etc.).

Pleasure then in the images abounding now from google images of Pitcairn, this weirdly idyllic utopia I didn't know existed. Bathe in the warm seas of ridiculousness, in all its weird grammatical glory:

If thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com were a country it will (future? no) be bigger than the Pitcairn Islands with 50 people. Daily: 51 visitors. Let's put that in a perspective (okay, which perspective should we put it in?) : 51 of the 1,966,514,816 internet users daily visit thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com (encouraging? depressing? ambivalent) There are at least 26 Bugatti Veyron's required to transport all visitors of thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com. (I presume this is for inane publicity and I am simply blindly adding to the ravenous machine). If all 51 daily visitors take (preterit) each other by hand (definite article) you will (what's with the future!) get a straight line with a length of 0 kilometer. (Plural. This line of no length though is almost a sphinx-worthy [or heraclitus-worthy] enigma...) We (who?) estimate that this website use (third-person present -s conjugation) 1 server(s). The average use of electricity of a internet server is about 2.400 kWh a year. This means that the server(s) of thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com will consume 1,728 kWh every year. Looking at the average cost each kWh with a price of 0,23 cent per kWh, the cost using electricity will be $397,- a year.

Or in other words, about the cost of a one-way boat ticket to Pitcairn...

Vivaldi in the Villa Medici - Il Favorito e l'inganno

2011-11-28T12:23:00.002+01:00

One of the ripened fruits of our time at the Villa Medici...
Moving to see once again these places where, so strangely, we lived...
For those who know those involved, enjoy the game of recognition.

Ticking

2011-11-17T02:32:00.001+01:00

The patience required to write, to continue struggling on, to let time tick on - this is often under emphasised. I am presently impatient. I need to find or refind this patience. This is said without pathos or pity. In an economy where less and less books are published, where less and less are bought... Only, the simple fact that one cannot think of effect, of product, far less "outcome", that this is liberty, and that such terrible utilitarianism is damaging... And yet a certain pragmatism is required in order to continue, to join another page to the previous, to dream of readers, of an eventual reception, which may or may not occur. Which means that all this feels sometimes, rightly or wrongly, like a dark night. And yet what sacrifices are we prepared to make? I am not prepared to sacrifice all, or even much. I would like my writing to be an organic component and proponent of experience, of event, and not the sacrifice that needs to be made. Sacrifice becomes then an unmeaning precept. And patience replaces it: though it is so much harder, slower, glimmering...

Apollinaire

2011-11-17T02:24:00.001+01:00

My brief study of Apollinaire's Alcools in the collective volume of Atlande's concours series is now available.

Pinoappli

2011-10-28T13:19:00.000+02:00

Orlando

2011-09-28T23:20:00.005+02:00

Before the veiled and scattered lights of Saint Brieuc and the sea farther off - bad Woolf syntax parody sic and intended - I began reading Orlando this evening, the only book by Woolf I've never read.

This is due to an adolescent obsession. This omission was, at least consciously, unplanned.

But it is revelatory. I realise I had relegated Woolf to the status of an early-age engouement, to a precious if ridiculously overly researched undergraduate paper on Walter Pater's influence on a Decadent axiology of taste (or something...)

I have intense memories of that paper - of the emotion accompanying its composition, not its content - as well as of all my initial adolescent forays into novel-writing, which read like 300 page long Woolf pastiches, full of islands and salt winds, men gazing out to sea in the brunt of salt winds, attics, empty rooms in old vaguely patrician manors (which I had never seen, and still have not), and the sea...

(To those reading this now who hate Woolf with a passion, who find her convoluted, pretentious, vague, excessively and heroically bourgeoise, half-baked, at once sentimental and weirdly cold... I understand. There are few novelists for me more divisive, more taste-reliant, than her, and though I half admit each and every one of these aspects, I love her books with an undying passion).

And so reading Orlando now, after 8 or so years without having touched a book by Woolf, well, the boy comes surging back... How beautiful it is! And how bizarre! Have just traced the pages of the mythical Great Frost, where country boys are weirdly frozen in mid-action throwing stones at frozen and still crows... In its aspect of repressed fantastique, there is a certain magic realism here so much lighter, less winking and irritatingly self-conscious than Marquez...

And its infinitely complex sexuality! Sensuality rather. Both. With the morphing and reshapings of gender, such terms as homosexuality become extraordinarily reductive, unable to describe the synesthaesic interplay of these polyvalent bodies: when Orlando first glimpses Sasha skating so gracefully on the ice, for instance, and is distressed at falling in love with a boy, as only a boy could skate with such gracefulness (we are told), and then the revelation of her femininity, which allows Orlando (socially speaking) to desire her, to fall in love, but which seems also almost a let-down to him, as if Sasha's initial apparent masculinity had been the pinion of a machinic desire which, though lessened by her female reality, required this reality as its cultural cachet, as the thing allowing the kisses to occur... Thus her femininity required the initial "incorrect" impression of masculinity for her femininity to emerge as an infinitely powerful sexual construct...)

And I haven't even got to the point of the "true" gender change (or so I remember from some half-forgotten articles and the book's back cover which I glimpsed).

Orlando seems at once deeply woolfian and utterly unwoolfian.

I did not know Woolf could do this. All of this. The fantastique and the morphing corporal realities and the sex! The goddamn sexiness of the whole thing: all violet ice and blue lace, and the tree roots hard against a shoulder like "the spine of the earth", and a sexiness overcoming hetero and homo divides, into a sex of the earth almost, of infused life living through its own, constantly transformative, desire ...

I am only 40 pages in.

I will be leaving Orlando in Saint Brieuc, by the sea, taking different books on the train back to Paris. It will be right to read it here on a small and often desolate coast, in a smallish town, in an attempt later to find windy attics and men struggling fiercely against cold Atlantic gales towards an almost invisible island, far off...

De Retour

2011-09-18T04:14:00.007+02:00

And so to Saint Brieuc... And away from the muddy Thames... And the return to Paris after what often felt like exile. Don't get me wrong, the year was fine and all. But back home now among the boulevards. This presence even of the word "home", this little lighthouse, calling for a decade of more, revolving its steady beacon, cooing sirenesque...
Note The Newer Metaphysicals has changed. Change is a fine thing
I'll try to end the silence then... After so many months.

Ends And Beginnings

2011-03-09T17:54:00.001+01:00

I sent the final manuscript of Homo Sentimentalis to John and Alan over at Leafe Press yesterday. A big moment. I had to decide to stop touching them, like a child endlessly fiddling, and thus irritating, the ears of an ageing puppy. Or some other similarly awkward simile.

Insert your own.

In any case, the first poems of this book date back, I believe, to 2005, meaning they have travelled with me across various stages of my life, and various cities, from Paris in the spring to Italy in the summer to London emerging greyly from a long winter.

Weather is not to be reduced via hermeneutics.

***

Secondly, some kind appreciation for The Newer Metaphysicals by Dianna Hancock:

The posts by Nicholas Manning appeal to the reader. Not only is he a good writer but he is not so sesquipedalian that it is too difficult to comprehend, but would appeal to most academics. The posts are not overly loquacious, but tend to be written with a distinct, articulate manner. The voice is immediately evident. I feel almost as if I know who he is, though I’ve merely begun to dabble in his writing.

I had to look up sesquipedalian. What is the name for a rhetorical device that is itself what it's describing? I love these, in any case. Thanks Dianna and happy to electronically meet you.

Love And Language: A Conversation With John Bloomberg-Rissman (2)

2011-02-10T13:37:00.000+01:00

Laura

John, thank you so much for this.

Firstly, and most importantly, deepest thoughts and prayers and hopes going out to you, Rose and all else during such a crucial time, I do hope you're all holding up and are okay: this is indeed the practical application of love, and there is no more important predicate to the following remarks than this.

I got to thinking a great deal about these questions, extending my thought process during the long composition of Homo Sentimentalis. One way of thinking about these ideas is that an emotion, in this case love, often seen to be such a "high" emotion that it is no longer "just" an emotion, but rather a thing gifted with its own ontology and autonomy, is perhaps best viewed not as a "product" of interactions, but rather as the continuing interactions themselves.

Our vision of love becomes problematic I feel if we see love - and this is reflected in the history of poetics since perhaps the 14th century - as a construction where individuals loved often matter less than love itself.

We have a tendency (in the street and in advertising and in novels and in poetry and in psychology etc.) to use the following type of
sentences:

"I am looking for love."
"Children need love."
"I fell in love with X"

As you suggest, this auonomizing of love is an unusual cross-over of the bio-neural-psychological approach and the philosophical (Platonic agape over eros).

"I am looking for love" is the sentence though which most clearly posits love as a value or experience which exists independently of the people who experience it (which more precisely exists above the people who experience it, and is hierarchically, transcendentally "superior" to them).

I think we need to be sceptical of this.

But even in the sentence of the type "I fell in love with X" the prepositional construction "with X" follows the main statement (the predicate "I fell in love") which is thus given primacy.

X as object matters not so much here as the action or experience of love, a hierarchy reflected even in this syntax.

We may feel that this separation of Love, and of many other emotions, from the people experiencing them, and the act of these emotions gaining the status of independent values, is problematic.

In the cultural relatavism perspective, some historians of course argue that this "concretisation" of love and its separation from the subject feeling it (Dante does not love Beatrice, but rather Beatitude, or put diffferently, Dante loves love itself) occurred
progressively up until the Renaissance, was rebelled against during the Enlightenment, but then took hold again through the victory of diverse Idealisms and the failure of a partyicular type of Enlightenment rationalism.

My sense is that it may indeed be a problem when emotions or ideals become values separated from the people feeling them or idealising them.

The problem of love being made a value separate from or above people's interactions doesn't mean we need to accuse "love" of being a mere sociological or biological (two related forms of reductive relativism) construct. It may simply mean that we need to make emotion a construction of interactions again, we need to take Love down from the stars and put it in the glittering space between people, instead of above them.

This idea has unusual and perhaps radical consequences though. As in this perspectives, we should not want "love", as if love were an autonomous concept or value with its own ontology, but should wish to negotiate a space of communication, exchange and intensity with other beings and the world.

If this interaction is what we call love, that is fine, but if this is indeed our new definition of love, then we "owe" nothing to love, and we "owe" nothing to someone who loves us, and nobody can "deserve" or "not deserve" our love: all these terms ("owe", "deserve"), etc., are related to the value-concept of Love as a separate entity, and the value-concept of love appropriately creates notions of ownership and propriety: we own the person who loves us, and vice versa, because love owns us, ultimately. And this is, in my mind, a terribly dangerous type of servitude.

When feelings own us and we serve feelings, we can perhaps think of this as the transformation of feelings into values.

Moreover, the myth of us being powerless before love (or any strong emotion), as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and Petrarch and certain voices of Shakespeare in the sonnets are powerless, and which is a central myth of the European novel and European poetics (myth in the sense of an ideal, as a thing we should aspire to, as a positive powerlessness like that before God) simply does not correspond, I suspect, to the organic and biological realities of emotions or how we live them.

"The transformation of feelings into a value had already occurred in Europe sometime around the 12th century. The troubadours, who sang with such great passion to their beloved, the unattainable princess, seemed so admirable and beautiful to all who heard them, that everyone wished to follow their example by falling prey to some wild upheaval of the heart." (Kundera, Immortality)

Kundera's critique, which I find largely just, in spite of all of Kundera's other flaws and failings, is thus a critique of idealism and idealisation, which later (and more problematically) equates the idealisation of unattainable romantic love to the idealization of totalitarianisms, to a sort of political ecstasy and hyperbole similar to the love-hyperbole or love-ecstacy: "every time it is necessary to stuff people's heads with glory to make them die more willingly?" (Kundera).

Another passage from Immortality may be particularly interesting here.

"The tear in Laura's eye was a tear of emotion Laura felt over Laura's determination to sacrifice her whole life to stand by [his] side?"

This self-conscious tear at one's own self-conscious loving sacrifice is horrendous! This is when emotion becomes "Laura looking at Laura feeling" or even "Laura looking at Laura feeling looking at Laura feeling looking at Laura feeling" etc. (And of course, this first name is infinitely significative here).

This type of autonomy of love (love as value, love as concept) thus engenders an interesting paradox: although Petrarch never ceases to say Laura is "unique", and is the only worthy object of love, and is the apparent"object" of the Canzoniere, Laura is really not so important an object as love itself. It is not so important that Petrarch loves Laura in particular, for through Laura he loves something else. Thus the constant prevalence of metaphysical metaphors and the situation of their love in a universal schema of distance: stars, musical spheres, the renaissance hyperbole tropes of grandeur and immensities, etc. The hyperboles of the comparisons (Laura is as one star, or the brightest among all stars, or she is all stars, or she is the origin of all stars, etc.), indicates to us the fact that it is not Laura so much who matters here: she is everything only because everything is her.

This is even clearer in the Divina Commedia, where the metaphysical schemas are even more clearly laid out. Dante's Beatrice is not simply a woman (if she is a woman at all) but rather Beatitude : as Beatitude she incarnates "Good".

Beatrice and Laura on their distant balconies or constellations are thus like cables allowing one to get up to love. For Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina this model seems all too applicable: it is not Rodolphe or Vronsky who matter in any way shape or form, but rather love as a type of experiential ideation.

"Liebe ist kein Gefühl. Liebe wird erprobt, Schmerzen nicht. Man sagt nicht: "Das war kein wahrer Schmerz, sonst hätte er nicht so schnell nachgelassen." (Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: "That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly). Wittgenstein, Zettel, #504, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 89, 89e.

So this is where Wittgenstein and Badiou meet, or do not.

Is love a feeling?

To get at this, I want to say first that the social or aesthetically constructed nature of a feeling or an emotion does not render it null or without an ontology of its own. This constructed nature may perhaps best be viewed then as simply our way of interpreting a particular emotion at different moments over a historical continuum. Of course, our interpretation of an emotion influences the emotion itself, and vice versa.

This is evident in the following typical, but I think in reality fascinating, sort of exchange :

X: I don't want to be with you.
Y: But I love you!

We often brush off this type of exchange as ?normal? but what is being said is in truth very strange. It is here that we see that love has been set up as a value or a concept of such power that it should convince the other person to love as well. Here, the two people are the servants of love. Y loves X, X does not love Y, but the thing X is betraying is not Y, but rather a third party, Z, where Z = Love Itself.

This is when Love has become distanced from the interaction of
individuals, when it has ceased to become a living, organic product of evolving interactions. Love thus constitutes here a third party which is above and between both X and Y, but which is not them.

These reflections though do not imply that love or any other emotion is an entirely "social construct" or "did not exist before Petrarch" or other clichés of a New Historicist tending to simplistically destroy the bogey-man of universality. It is simply to insist on one thing: if love is a separate value or concept it can more difficultly resemble a negotiation between beings, because the beings are each negotiating with love, and not with each other. Perhaps they are negotiating with each other through the grand idea of Love, but often it may in fact be that it is Love itself, and not the Other, who is being talked to.

Love then is not a resource.

It follows that "How could I ever have loved X?" is a meaningless question, as what we call love in this situation is simply the name given to the deeply profound and complex human and spiritual interaction we had with X. This is not to reduce the importance of such interactions: on the contrary it is to increase their importance, as nobody "finds" love, we can only create love with another, or others: a sort of ongoing praxis.

We do not discover love like an object or sparkling jewel we subsequently say we either "have" or "have not" (though you would think it were this when we say "Children need love" or "I don't have enough love in my life?"). Rather the creation and construction of love becomes possible with another being who is also involved, or is willing to be involved, in such a complex interaction.

Interestingly, does this mean the "lighting bolt" is impossible? Not at all. It simply means the lighting bolt is not the sign that love has been "found" but rather that we have found someone with whom we feel love could be created.

The lighting bolt is thus the experience of looking into the future. It is not an experience of the present. It is an experience of fantasy, of the construction which could take place. In "love at first sight", we do not see a statue or idol which we may worship, we rather see a sort of fertile field where a garden may be made. It is the garden which does not exist yet which creates our wonder: it is our sensation before the spreading future which we call love.

My feeling on this then, and I am as always still feeling my way:

Love is thus not an autonomous entity with its own ontology. Love is a profound space. It is a space where a sacred interaction and negotiation may develop.

Best wishes John, to all,
Nick

Love And Language: A Conversation With John Bloomberg-Rissman (1)

2011-02-10T13:10:00.002+01:00

Thanks, Nick.

I would have responded yesterday but most of the day was spent at the hospital. Daughter Rose is pregnant with triplet boys. Triplets never go to term. But if they are born too early they will have lots of perhaps permanent health and developmental problems - if they live. Rose is 29.5 weeks, which is too early. She needs to get to 32-33 ... Thursday night Rose went into labor, and hence to the hospital, in a kind of emergency way. Turns out they are keeping her, probably for weeks, to ensure that they can keep her from going into labor (via magnesium sulfate and other muscle relaxants) til the boys are developed enough to be born. So, as you can imagine, kathy (wife) and I have been rather busy, either on the road or at the hospital, which is about 40 miles from here.

I tell you all this as it is entirely relevant, I think to the discussion. Any parent and soon-to-be-grandparent going through what we're going through would look at you in disbelief were you to say that love is nothing but a linguistic-cultural trope. But you would be in fact at least partially correct. I mean, what's happening to Rose is **typical**. Otherwise, how would the hospital and its staff know what was happening to her, and how would they have developed the tools and the language to to deal with it?

I think (given this experience, and something else I'm about to write about) that love, and its language, is indeed just as those lines from Petrarch/Manning would have them. But, and this is important, I think the problems begin when we try to separate the linguistic-cultural from the natural-biological, as if human culture were somehow an unnatural island in the midst of an otherwise entirely natural world. And if we didn't try to separate our own experience of love from the typical human experience of love (which, art at least would tell us extends as a fact beyond the western world). I think that there are plenty of reasons why the separation of the personal from the typical takes place, and they too are bio-neuro-psychological, as well as economic etc.

Anyhow, I wonder if you are familiar with Alain Badiou's work, and his discussion of love as one of the four authentic events (the other three being art, science and politics) (see below for more on what's meant by an event).

[Note: on my way to Badiou I stumbled upon this, a comment appended to a Nina Power post (I love (!?!?!) Nina Power by the way) by one "Christoph": In love as elsewhere, it's true that the basic "semiotic entity" (Eco) is anything that can be used to live. Even an orgasm. Communication is love, and love is communication. As Luhmann has said, "we are often unable to answer the question "Do you love me?" but we cannot answer it by silence either, which is why it is advisable not to pose the question in the first place."]

Anyhow, Badiou (below, IT = his Infinite Thought, which is in fact a long difficult wonderful read), as cribbed from a review here.

Spaces of Experimentation:

"Truth is the central notion of Badiou¹s philosophy: truth is what disturbs\\ destroys\\ interrupts the order of knowledge or politics. What is true forces us to commit ourselves to some new idea or new world of ideas. Truth occurs in an event to a subject, and it cannot fold itself into preformed or known categories. It proceeds in the subject in an act of faith on the one hand, but (being unknown and therefore unsayable) proceeds by chance and adhering to the lessons of the event. What is unnameable thereby becomes a kind of clean slate upon which the singular event and subject force their existence, generating something new in the face of the unknown. Hold on(!), I hear you say: what about Badiou's ontology? And what does he mean by Œevent?

Badiou understands mathematics as ontology : maths speaks of or writes being (IT: 10). From this point of departure, he is able to draw on set theory which he argues makes no claims concerning the nature of being, nor concerning the adequation of its categories to being² (IT: 13). Indeed, Badiou¹s ontology is subtractive; it speaks of beings without reference to their attributes or identities. In effect, all qualities are subtracted.

Already it is clear that there is a disconnect between ontology proper, the formal language of set theory, and meta-ontology, Badiou¹s ranslation of set theory¹s axioms and theorems into philosophical terms. This review does not dwell on set theory however, and is instead more interested in the notion of event which recurs throughout the book.

Badiou has a dramatic view of the event. For him, an event is a major historical turning point, or moment of rupture in time and space, which brings something new into the world² (Bassett, 2008: 895). This is not the same as an ordinary event, such as a birthday, a sporting event or even death ; it is a totally disruptive occurrence (IT: 20) which is rare and unpredictable. Interestingly, although he employs the notion of rupture, Badiou is keen to stress that events cannot easily be recognised within a
given state of affairs and thus have no well-defined location.

Badiou suggests a certain fidelity to the event whereby it is named and believed to exist. He argues that ³not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in² (IT: 5). Thus, an occurrence becomes an event to the extent that it is injected with subjective significance. Put differently: the singular truth, arising in an event, happens to (or calls into being) a subject."
...
I can't wait to go through your book again, this time with a new and infinitely sharpened eye.

All best, cheers,

John

Coming In 2011...

2011-02-08T12:58:00.004+01:00

What the critics say...

Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide in Verse to Modern Emotional Intimacy is probably the greatest single-poet book of love poems in the field of “avant” American poetry since For Love, by Robert Creeley. True, it's not that there have been a lot of them (thanks for that, Langpo), but even if there were, Nicholas Manning's tour de force would have to be at the top of the specialized genre. Why? Well, because he takes all of it in. By which I mean, lest I be misunderstood, he takes in all the pulsing tradition of Love Poetry. Verily, it is a strange and ecstatic book. For you will find, just for starters: Creeley getting well-sucked on throughout, Edna St. Vincent Millay getting cuffed and whipped, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning forced to wear rubber chaps and gloves, Pablo Neruda getting put on all fours and made to squeal like a pig by Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare getting Kenneth Koch shoved into his mouth and made to shout his willie is overplus. And that's not even including what gets done to the Bards of the Lake District... Though there’s a lot of sentimental courting and romance herein, too. The funny thing is, this very funny work is by no means easily identifiable as Satire. In fact, bursts of technique and song here--sometimes to rival Keats, sometimes Dickinson, sometimes Zukofsky (take a look)--will make you swoon. But the ultimate mastery of it all is how the work road-tests ideational hyperbole and excess, prodding how far the over-the-top sensibilité can be driven. No question if Nicholas Manning had been among the gods in NYC in 1961, he would burn for us now from their really amazing firmament. Which actually leads me to the other comparison I wanted to make, which is with someone I previously mentioned, and I'll end with it: Nicholas Manning is the greatest and most sublime maestro of the love-poem-made-hilarious-and-mysterious since Kenneth Koch.

– Kent Johnson

Spread the word! Let your friends know! Let their friends know! Let my friends know!

Love will never be the same again.

Favourite Rhetorical Figures In Action No. 314: Aposiopesis

2011-02-07T20:11:00.001+01:00

Aposiopesis
Breaking off suddenly in the middle of speaking, usually to portray being overcome with emotion.

You just have to love the Greeks. I mean they taught this stuff.

I just love that they taught this stuff.

This is also not surprising:

Rhetorical Analysis: Glenn Beck's "self-sanctimonious"

2011-01-31T13:42:00.011+01:00

Today's object of rhetorical analysis is the infinitely complex syllogistic structures implied by Glenn Beck's intriguing neologism "self-sanctimonious", used in the following instance of argumentative energumen:

You self-sanctimonious, self-important balloon head, America has had enough. Do your own homework.

It is difficult to imagine how English had survived so long without such a complex, antinomical notion.

But let's try to get at the crux of it.

self-watermelon

To be "sanctimonious" is of course to display a sort of hyperbolic piety, wherein excess is problematically associated with the idea of falsity. To affect holiness or "above-it-all" spiritual blitheness is thus central to the non-reflexive version of the term.

Once used in a reflexive context, however, the notion becomes infinitely more complex, and Beck is right to subtly indicate the deeply paradoxical interplays at work here. As to display false piety to oneself is to be immediately a divided subject, a sort of diffracted or fragmented ontological entity. Beck is referring here to a common revision of the unified, transcendental subject which emerges in post-Enlightenment thought, with the general evolution of the mind-body problem from the empiricists on. Beck's explicit target here then is of course the transcendental idealists, Kant and Schelling in particular, for whom "self-sanctimonious" would unfortunately have remained a meaningless idea.

In a state of postmodern diffraction of subject-hood however, Beck is right to posit that an individual identity may now be falsely pious with regard to him or her self, this self then being falsely pious in return, thus instigating an eternal circle of mirrored fake piety - a holy serpent eating its own tail - wherein the subject is continually fooling (and irritating) another diffracted aspect of itself into believing its competing mirrored components are attempting to seem loftier and "higher-than-thou". This endless cycle of rhetorical irritation is thus metonymical in Beck for the more generalized state of a delocalized postmodern subject, whose feigned or true "piety" may no longer be located either within the subject or within "external" (that is extra mentem) space.

"Self-sanctimonious" can thus now assume its place as rhetorical construct next to other recent terms such as "self-coffee" or "self-watermelon" (which are of course instances when "coffee" or "watermelon", as singularized episteme, are consumed not by a unified transcendental subject, but by a series of mirrored post-derridean identities, each one participating in the palimpsestic, eternal erasure of eating).

Another common example of this trope is also the increasingly popular "self-potato", a term used to refer to the consumption of root vegetables in a state of post-Kantian subjective dispersal:

Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo?

2011-01-06T15:40:00.001+01:00

Great thanks to Andrew Shields for his link to these, they are extraordinary. The Waldo one is perhaps my favourite, infused as it is with a palpable existential dread. It is an entire division between the multifarious proliferation of experience on the one hand, and the sad singularity of perception on the other, that Waldo allows us to see. The impossibility then of any appropriate account of reality in its expansivity and endlessness, the problem of choice, and the unicity of a lost and wandering modern subjectivity unable to convey or to recreate his experiences through images, word, or art: "His only link to friends and family a litany of dreary picture-postcards sent from arbitrary locations." Waldo then may be the ideal incarnation of the uprooted, delocalized, post-Enlightenment subject, his fixed smile never fooling us, for we know we are dealing here with the Holderlinian 'distant God' (and not Nietzschean death), that through this dark glass of teeming chaos and vision we have become, each and every one of us, the detached God, the uncomprehending God, the lost and searching God ourselves.

But then, to rival this, we have psychoanalysis instead of phenomenology, in perhaps the most engaging reading of Madeline one could ever imagine:

"This is an obvious metaphor for menstruation and sexual maturity."

Every Diploma Must Lead To A Job

2010-12-23T15:49:00.005+01:00

The French Education Minister Valérie Pécresse is on the cover of the always deeply reflective and never insipid Challenges Magazine this month, with yet another extraordinarily enlightening statement, proving once more that Pécresse is truly one of the most inspiring humanist thinkers of our time. Her discerning and original thought this month, eloquently formulated, is the following: "Every diploma must lead to a job"

Such wisdom! Such clarity! In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus carita! Pécresse is truly the Erasmus of our age.

What I mean of course is that the wondrous thing about Pécresse's deeply thoughtful quote here is that it is in line with so much thinking of the great Western humanist tradition, expressed in manifold forms at a variety of different apogees of culture and society: Byzantium, Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy, the heights of Dutch Humanism, Reformation England! The list of artists and scholars who similarly expressed, in myriad tongues and multiple dividing but united forms, that "all learning must lead to a job", is almost too numerous to enumerate.

But let us try, dear readers! The Newer Metaphysicals, being wicked, may not rest! As, after all, Valérie Pécresse consistently reiterates how highly she values those highest expressions of human thought and feeling contained in our Humanities, and this broad and deep learning is evidenced in the immense encyclopedic knowledge we hear echoing in the cathedral of her spacious phrase: "Every diploma must lead to a job."

I hear the Sirens singing among those mere iambs! Oh Valérie, what sweet music is such verse, so full of learning. But let us look at its sources. Her statement is of course, as all of you would have recognized, almost a word for word reprisal of that famous saying of Pater in his majestic Studies in the History of the Renaissance, namely:

"The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Oh and also everyone got jobs out of their degrees" - Walter Pater

Such paterian prose! Such majesty, which Pécresse's silver tongue may also lickingly channel!

And of course, many more extraordinary humanists, thinkers, philosophers, poets and theologians may be called upon at ease out of the depths of the mind of the learnèd man as a reference and basis of these words.

Let us quote some more:

"I am more afraid of my own heart than of the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self. And also I have a one-year intensive Masters Degree in Business Management." - Sir Thomas More

Oh More, never a finer self than this self has ever so selflessly been seen to exist! More now, but not More:

"All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul, which is shaped primarily by 6 month distance-learning internet courses in Marketing and Management." - John Ruskin

Marketing and management! Oh Ruskin, such sweet alliterations! Let us hear more!:

"All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent, and they obtained the money for this ideal by entirely elimnating their Sanskrit, Vedic and Religious Studies departments." - John Ruskin

And now let us lean from the heights of our floating knowledge-clouds above the warm Italian coast during those highest years of humanity, to hear the thoughts of gentle Leonardo on the necessity of "every diploma leading to a job":

"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous, except of course diplomas that do not lead to jobs" - Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo, how was such truth contained in but one mind, or one pen? Or let us turn to the Dutch wise-one, who also extolled, during the famous lutherian debates, the need for practical, rapid and results-based university courses:

"By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him, or of highly accelerated Human Resource courses combined with basic Business English" -Desiderius Erasmus

And lastly, a brief final word from Erasmus, though with this one The Newer Metaphysicals has taken less liberties in our translation:

"Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed." - Desiderius Erasmus

Of course, Erasmus wrote that in the 15th century, so its sentiment is obviously, by now, well out of date.

What A Luxury

2010-12-16T01:03:00.000+01:00

New! John Most In The Continental Review

2010-11-18T00:14:00.001+01:00

John Most's captivating video poetics is currently being featured at The Continental Review.

NEW! Kate and Max Greenstreet In The Continental Review

2010-11-12T15:02:00.008+01:00

This may be one of the most beautiful works we have ever had the privilege to feature at The Continental Review. As Jordan Stempleman eloquently put it to me while we were deciding (not a very difficult decision it must be said) to feature Kate and Max's 28 minute piece:

"Completely illuminating, compelling. This video is amazing in its ability to blur through the making process of art and poetry... Greenstreet's explanation of her process is so unrehearsed, so naturally available--silence and uhhh, "relax, would be my answer." Just wonderful."

I hardly have much to add, except that it would have been hard for me to imagine such a perfect fusion of lyrical beauty and pragmatic groundedness in the context of a single poetic vision, the proof, if any were needed, that both states may coexist in harmony within the poetic register, and within our aesthetic practices more generally.

I entirely agree with Jordan in that the pragmatism of Kate's descriptions of her praxis is like walking out into the cold to take the deepest of breaths: a feeling of how it really is to write, rather than any obfuscation of false transcendence. Perhaps rather a true transcendence then, which is strangely closer to the earth.

"Then I go inside to have lunch."

An absolute must.

Stay tuned over the coming weeks at TCR for new work from John Most.

The Continental Review

Notes From the Old Country

2010-11-12T14:47:00.002+01:00

London is the sort of city that creates adrenaline, that is so full of such intensity you can feel lost in it. This is a good sensation. Each new city brings with it as well a new set of poetic horizons. I am realizing increasingly as well how drawn I am to the old European triangle of interactions: Paris, London, Berlin. The interaction of these three starkly different cities seems vital and real to me, while America remains, up until now, a site of stimulating virtuality. In short I am still unsure precisely the context from which my American poet friends come from, and if indeed this context exists beyond a glittering screen.

This will of course change in the near future, especially in the light of some rather exciting developments linked to The Continental Review's increasing exposure. Stay tuned for some announcements on this point in the weeks to come.

Until then, I'm settling in to a new office and looking forward to the first 70 student lecture this coming week. I've also enjoyed reactions to the recent conversation on Dorothea Lasky's poetics, in all their generous and bizarrely vitriolic tones, all of which may be found below.

NEW! Sawako Nakayasu in The Continental Review

2010-11-11T14:49:00.001+01:00

The Continental Review

NEW! Dana Ward in The Continental Review

2010-11-11T14:45:00.002+01:00

The Continental Review

Finally

2010-11-04T17:13:00.002+01:00

The Critical Imperative: On The Absence Of Analysis While Reviewing Dorothea Lasky

2010-09-21T13:18:00.012+02:00

Below is my comment on Michael Thurston's deeply critical review of Dorothea Lasky's Black Life, which Ron Silliman, Mark Scroggins and others have engaged with.

***
Dear Michael,

Negative or critical reviews are fine, even laudatory, but one must analyse! Don't you think? I am asking this question in good faith: I would be very interested to hear if your view of the critical imperative is somewhat different. In other words, isn't it necessary not simply to quote a relevant passage in support of a hermeneutical idea, but to analyse its working, at least somewhat, in order to support your claims. This is what I feel to be rather absent from your engagement here. Mark Scroggins has noted that you are "clearly trying to make sense of what sort of aesthetic criteria within which Lasky is operating". This is the claim I'm not so sure about! I say this with good will, and am trying to get at the core of the critical problem here, so let me explain.

My personal hypothesis regarding Lasky's collection is very different to yours, namely: of course Lasky is playing with a variety of lyrical and rhetorical personae! Though I of course respect your right to your opinion on this Michael, it worries me greatly that you have analysed very little the passages you quote here as evidence for your opinion that Lasky is demonstrating a singularly transparent or unselfconscious use of language: that she is, in brief, utterly unaware of the irony or proclivites of her own ambiguous speaking position (or the respective positions, in the plural sense, of her interlocking masks). This absence of textual analysis in your piece seems to me a possibly egregious error. As what you take to be unwarranted hubris and energumen seems rather to be an explicit playing up of established tropes and conventions.

Put differently, I feel that what you take to be unwarranted hubris here is quite clearly ironical and rhetorical play. I wonder Michael at how you could so quickly presume this tone to be non-equivocal and didactic, when there are so many textual markers which point us to the amusing game Lasky is playing here regarding notions of poetic address.

In any case, let me very briefly attempt to do Michael what you do not do here, namely: give an appropriate analytic account of the rhetorical functioning of these lyrical subjects' own positionings and self-definitions. Here is the offending passage from Lasky which you quote:

I am a great woman, I have the wiles
That make the poet
But I am also gentle
And when I kiss a man I really mean it
Have you felt this too, upon my kisses
That I gave you in the nightsky
As your eyelashes hung over the moon?
Or were you too young to see it too,
My little feverish butterfly

Firstly, do you think "Lasky" 's statement "I am a great woman" here is truly to be taken at face value? Surely not! Do you not think that it perhaps echoes and plays with certain established forms of rhetorical and poetic address from Romanticism on, and may thus rather be read as being in direct opposition to the ecstatic consecration of poetic utterance present in Baudelaire's journalism, Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria, etc.?

Secondly, I believe it is rather clear that the ethos or persona of this voice is explictly playing with established gender biases and representations, more specifically regarding the common definitions of a female poet or "feminine" language generally (though a "great poet" I am also "gentle" and passionate as I "kiss" men etc). We are thus made to reflect on the pertinency of such a misogynist view of poetic identity, and the ambiguous interplays this introduces regarding the status of such poems' self-conscious declarations.

What follows in this strophe perhaps must subsequently be read as a playful, and in my view very amusing (not to mention very pretty) reworking of traditional tropes and clichés of poetic lyricism, recalling some of Apollinaire's more enjoyable uses of hyperbole. In this sense, "your eyelashes hung over the moon" is an intelligent reworking of common Petrarchan tropes, present as much in Italian Renaissance poetry as in Louise Labé.

Though there is indeed some textual analysis in your review Michael, it seemed to me to be primarily interested in what you take to be grammatical or syntactical errors or inadequacies, and in no way concerns the ego and hubris of lyrical address which seems to be your central point of contention against Lasky's collection. Thus, in spite of the grammatical analysis, is it not problematic to not analyse that aspect of the collection you feel to be the most problematic?

I don't mean to be offensive then Michael, but I must honestly say that the impression I had when reading your piece is that what you present us with here is akin to a less experienced reader of poetry than yourself taking a given text at face value, without ever posing crucial questions on such text's identitarian and rhetorical functioning.

The poetic artifice of Lasky's reflections here (whom I do not know by the way, I thus feel my opinion to be more or less personal), implying myriad ambiguities of poetic status and poetic statute, perhaps seems to have passed somewhat over your head.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Analyse this . . . poem

"Literary" Correspondence

2010-09-20T02:21:00.007+02:00

The Newer Metaphysicals receives some bizarre correspondence.

I felt like sharing.

Here then is a selection from the weird and wonderful basket of the past year or so's mailbag.

By the way, if you happen to see your own emails here . . . don't email me again, only angrier: your presence among such illustrious company simply means that, even though I may not always have replied, I found your correspondence either touching or extremely funny, and as philosopher Alan Alda once put it, when people are laughing they're generally not killing each other.

Also, I've left profanity in. It adds to the charm effect. Sensitive little language kittens are advised to refrain.

***

On Thu, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:29 PM, xxxxxxxx@mail.comcast.net wrote: 

So what is your fucking problem w/ William Logan? Maybe you and socalled postavant wutang crew could stop talking about things you dont understand. Your reviews are far more agressive than Logan's ever have. I wonder who the real agressor is.  

On Thu, Oct 09, 2009 at 4:56 PM, nicholasdotmanningatnormalesupdotorg wrote:

Hi William, thanks very much for your email. I usually like your criticism! I thought I'd made that clear several times. I had a few major disagreements with one or two of your articles (yes, the Ashbery one). But I don't think I deserve quite so much poor grammar as that present in your last electronic epistle.

Best wishes,

NM

On Fri, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:11 AM, xxxxxxxx@mail.comcast.net wrote: 

I am not William Logan. 

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 4:11 PM, nicholasdotmanningatnormalesupdotorg wrote: 

I know. It was a joke.    

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:16 PM, xxxxxxxx@mail.comcast.net wrote: 

You are an idiot.  

***

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:12 AM, xxxxxxxx@googlemail.com wrote:

Hi, do you consider videos about dogs for the Consequential review??

Thanks, 

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 5:12 PM, nicholasdotmanningatnormalesupdotorg wrote:

Hi! No. 

Best,

NM

***

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:12 AM, xxxxxxxx@yahoo.fr wrote

Hello Nicolas, 

We met at your reading at Shakespeare and Company and I talked with you about poetry (and a book on Zionism I'm selling) I think you remember me. I don't know are you with a girl at the moment? Coffe? Let me know but I might be in Japan next week. 

***

On Fri, July 23, 2010 at 3:42 AM, xxxxxxxx@pop3.libcom.com wrote:

Dear Sir or Madam, 

I am a widely published poet and wish to submit you material for your editoral board at The Continental Review. A question: would it be possible for me to submit my poems and for you to film materials to go along with them (such as landscapes etc.) I'm unsure whether you have available this sort of production crew. Looking forward to hear from you,  

On Fri, July 23, 2010 at 11:02 AM, nicholasdotmanningatnormalesupdotorg wrote:

Dear xxxxxx, 

Thanks for your query. I'm afraid we're not going to go out and film material to accompany your poems. The TCR production crew currently consists of me, Jordan Stempleman and a cup of coffee.

Best, 

NM

On Wed, July 28, 2010 at 9:22AM, xxxxxxxx@pop3.libcom.com wrote:

OK thanks. My poems are attached as rtf file.  

***

On Sat, July 31, 2010 at 6:22AM, xxxxxxxx@mail.eclipse.co.uk wrote:

Dear Dr. Manning, 

Would I be able to order your book Social Policy direct from you? I can fix you up via a paypal transaction if that is fine.

Best regards,

On Sat, July 31, 2010 at 11:59 AM, nicholasdotmanningatnormalesupdotorg wrote:

Dear Mr. xxxx 

I believe you are confusing me with another academic, Dr. Nick Manning, who is a sociologist at the University of Nottingham. 

All best,

Dr. Nicholas Manning 

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 4:17AM, xxxxxxxx@mail.eclipse.co.uk wrote:

Oh Sorry! Do you have a link for Social Policy?? Thanks alot.

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 281

2010-09-14T01:14:00.001+02:00

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognises as his own.

-Salvatore Quasimodo

All of which seems to hang together, at first, unless of course such interior feeling turns out to be, say, something rather niche, like “bestiality” or “the overwhelming desire to eat spiders”, in which case one's own desperate and lonely subjectivity may in fact be more emphasised than assuaged.

This is all very Tolstoi, as it's a fine line between “nobody understands me” and “everyone should understand that I like to wash myself with house-paint”. This is to say that the old saussurian distinction between langue and parole, communal forms and personal expression, is not to be easily brushed away.

It's all very well, for instance, to think, as our non-hunchbacked Italian master does, that poetry effaces a mythical line between the communal and the personal, the interior subject-scape and the big scary exterior world, except when such a distinction proves to be useful, pulling us back to shared values which in the end serve to demonstrate that no axiology can ever be entirely personal (that an entirely personal axiology, like an entirely personal language, in fact resembles madness).

So make love to animals, eat spiders and wash yourself with paint if you will, just don't expect to fall back on poetry to make others understand why you do this.

And if this thought saddens you, underlining as it does poetry's multifarious limitations, just remember: in the end you'll always have the internet to find people, out there, just like you.

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 276

2010-09-11T14:02:00.006+02:00

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

-Robert Frost

Frost has a way of giving definitions to poetry that are almost always disturbingly violent, sometimes even bordering on the pathological.

Like this one.

But what is actually being said here? Even if we take the idea of “taking control of life” to be a positive thing (which I'm really not so sure it is), surely none of us want to strangle it?

Whose life? My life? Life as a separate ontological entity? Life as a synecdoche for "all the bad stuff outside of my body"?

"Poetry is a way of strangling life" sounds less catchy.

I may be reading too much into this, but given the fact that “life” is often personified as a maternal or feminine figure, Frost's definition may even start to resemble a sort of twisted misogynist hate fantasy.

“Poetry is a way of throwing existence down on a bed and doing anything you want with it” is a phrase which, though far more disturbing, is in the end not too different from the content of the charming tournure Frost gives us.

I'm just saying.

I may be reading too much into this.

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 266

2010-09-10T22:07:00.000+02:00

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is thus completely revolting Carl, if my morning's experiments are to go by. Remark, for instance, that it is impossible to get the weedy taste out of the dough batter, and the subsequent mouth-burning is an experience comparable only to the most recent Ted Kooser collection.

Hyacinths and biscuits? I really have no idea Carl what you are trying to say. I'm sorry, I'm trying to be honest here. Do you mean something homely and something colourful? Do you mean something nice and something not so nice all at once, a sort of Ol Dirty Bastard remix of My Favourite Things? Do you mean poetry is about good and bad stuff simultaneously? If that's what you meant then you probably could have just said that, though I admit it sounds less rhetorically effective than your weird opposite-objects analogy.

Moreover Carl, how many of these “Poetry is X” metaphors did you actually write? It seems I am always tempted to make fun of you here, even more so than the other inane “poets who define poetry”, and I wonder whether it is simply because you seem to have gone around all day, like an under-worked New York stand-up, observing that “Poetry is a bit like a cab, they never come when you need them to come, and then when you don't need one there's like 25 of the things!" Who are these people?

This said, these Forrest Gump analogy moments are perhaps revealing, to the extent that many poets seem utterly incapable of stating what poetry is without saying that it is something else. You don't see many IT professionals saying “IT is a bit like growing a garden, you have to make sure not to pull out the flowers with the weeds”. (Whereas this same meaningless Hallmark phrase works charmingly well for poetry. Try it.) No, an IT professional, if you ask him or her what he or she does, will just say, “I do IT”, and then if you ask him or her what that is, he or she will say “You know, IT”, or maybe “You know, computers”.

All I'm saying is that just because your particular techne frequently uses metaphor, simile and analogy does not mean that you must define said techne in the form of a metaphor, simile or analogy (this would be like asking a gardener what a gardener does only to have him go off to do some gardening, without ever answering your original question).

In conclusion, poetry may very well be like a box of chocolates, but in the end one may be too developmentally challenged, or too traumatized by one's experience in the Vietnam war, to know what said box of chocolates actually is.

Poetry is like . . .

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 249

2010-09-09T19:04:00.000+02:00

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

- William Hazlitt

Oh yes Hazlitt, absolutely, the birth of a child or falling in love or the most intense moments of one's friendships bla bla bla yadda yadda, it's poems that are worth remembering!

The interesting term here is really “worth”. Worth remembering: interesting idea. “Poetry is all that one remembers in life”, though a fascinating sort of mental illness or psychopathological condition - “He can't dress himself anymore, but he can certainly recite the entirety of Byron's Childe Harold!” - sounds somewhat less romantic (and also Romantic, but that's another question).

Regarding this intriguing term, “worth” thus implies, firstly, that memory functions according to a sort of determined axiology; secondly however, and even more bizarrely, the word implies that we can control such axiology (as in, when opening the fridge door in the morning, one could say to oneself “I certainly won't be deciding to remember opening this fridge door for the rest of my life").

It also presents the rather charming scenario of Wordsworth whispering to himself “I totally should remember this moment, right now, when I'm looking down now on that Abbey, I mean right now looking down at it, right now”, at the precise moment when he is looking down on that Abbey, and thus being caught in an eternal mis en abime mirror effect of deciding to remember the poetic memory you're remembering to remember to poetically remember to . . .

Hazlitt's phrase is thus one of those disarming definitions of poetry which, apart from meaning absolutely nothing, actually presents a sort of ersatz nightmare scenario in which, if it were indeed true, not only would one not love poetry any more, but one would be confined to a sort of severe hellscape of deep mental illness in which the act of eating or walking would, because of poetry no less, have become utterly impossible.

And I think we can all agree that that at least is worth remembering to remember to remember, even if you've forgotten every really well-turned sestina you ever read.

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 236

2010-09-08T22:55:00.001+02:00

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

- Robert Frost

Christ, Robert, never has poetry sounded more like a fungal foot-growth (at best) or a steadily spreading ventral tumour (at worst) than in this little number. Perhaps “condition” had a slightly different sense in the time you wrote in (by which I mean, of course, some weirdly non-existent era during the 20th century where unspecified first-person lyrical speakers still rode into woods as a past-time and randomly chose dark roads as if Dante were yesterday).

So anyway, this sounds good, except for the fact that “to be a poet” has more or less been a profession from the very beginning, what with the mécénat (patron of the arts) traditions among the Romans and the more or less correctly paid Greek rhapsodes doing the steadily remunerated religious festivals' circuit.

In fact- and I know you know this, I'm just going over it, stickler for literary history as I am (otherwise known as the study of what actually seems to have happened, rather than what we tell people happened to make ourselves sound hieratic, portentous and above all that "dirty money stuff") -the idea of poets as non-professionals comes as a sort of myth very late on in the process, trickling down perhaps from the troubadours (themselves pretty much professionals at making themselves look non-professional). It's of course accentuated post-Renaissance, reaching a high point during English and German Romanticism (mad Hölderlin put up gratos in a tower overlooking the Rhine etc.) right on through to the swinging 60s.

So if for some reason you think the invention of Poetry as a field distinct from Philology, towards the fin-de-siècle, in the European universities, was the beginning of the end of a discipline, it's worth noting, whether you want to be all dreamy and non-pecuniary about it or not, that it was the beginning of the discipline to start with, meaning its end was its beginning, as Eliot may say.

So while praising the non-professionalism of those free-wheeling, wumbum smoking troubadour cads and cadettes, just remind yourself of the opening of Virgil's lovely Eclogues with its heartfelt praise of the largesse of Augustus.

The Current Atmosphere of Poetry Blogs

2010-09-01T15:36:00.000+02:00

What Is Poetry? Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 228

2010-08-31T20:58:00.005+02:00

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see- it is, rather, a light by which we may see- and what we see is life.

- Robert Penn Warren

Poem

Dear Robert, is poetry the art of making definitions of poetry so impossibly obtuse that no-one really cares what they mean by the time they have reached the end of them? If so, bravo. Or rather, is poetry making maddeningly muddy and murky maelstroms of mixed alliterations and assonances so that mundane meanderings may be made to make one sound mystically (if mendaciously) profound?

Also, last time I checked I could see poems. I know it sounds cool and Novalis-like to say that poems are sorts of ethereal, ghostly transcendental objects which, like gases or the people who actually vote on reality TV shows, can never truly be seen, and rather float in a sort of metaphysical dreamscape between being and non-being, speaker and spoken to, but last time I checked neither you nor I nor anyone else could abracadabra poems into being, via a deft Jedi mind-trick, concentrating our crystal energies on an unmoving fork and willing it to bend.

So wait, poetry is not what we see and not what we see with but rather the light situated between what we see and what we see with? This whole visual metaphor for describing what poetry is: it is, I know, a bit of a recurrent cliché, but admirable you'd once more have a go at it. The problem is that, reading your musings, one would think poets don't see normal nightingales but rather poetry-nightingales, meaning that they have penetrated into the very noumenal substance of the nightingale and, in the midst of some moment of ecstatic energumen, seen what the nightingale “truly is” (a fucking nightingale).

Conveniently, what you term “life” here is equivocally undefined. And yet this word is not an uncharged signifier: it really does carry, Rob, a rather heavy semantic weight, and may require from you at least a semblance of greater precision if you want to avoid the “touching calendar” accusation. I mention the touching calendar accusation simply because your definition of poetry functions well with other favourite calendar subjects:

“A puppy is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, a puppy is not a thing we see- it is, rather, a light by which we may see- and what we see is life.”

Adorable.

But Aristotle was perhaps right in thinking that a definition which may be applied just as coherently to another thing cannot be an appropriate definition for the thing it was meant to define in the first place.

Or if it was not Aristotle who said this I am saying it to you now, Rob, in order to prevent you, in the future, from writing such treacly gibberish.

Achiote Press

2010-08-31T20:49:00.003+02:00

I recommend everyone to check out the new site for Craig Perez's wondrous Achiote Press, which now includes archives and extracts of every chapbook published by this budding shrub.

What Is Poetry? (Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 221)

2010-08-29T01:48:00.005+02:00

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth Power."
-Paul Engle

First of all, “The Nth Power” here sounds suspiciously like some early eighties Dutch electro-dub group, or perhaps a hip Paris club in the centre of the Marais which nobody can ever find, and where at midnight a recorded announcement invites you to “Raise Up To The Nth Power”, upon which the ghosts of Marina Tsvetaeva, Ezra Pound and Eugenio Montale come out from nowhere on the higher balconies and start grinding it out to a random Pet Shop Boys' song you'd long forgotten even existed.

But in spite of the fact I may have just found a name for a band if I ever form one, it is difficult to see, in the midst of such an apparently syllogistic equation, the precise relationship which the categories (or predicates) of “ordinariness” and “Nth-poweredness” could ever feasibly entertain.

For if “ordinary” language at some point switches into “Nth Power Mode”, and thus like the Power Rangers forms a much larger, fully agglomerated, walking laser-shooting linguistic behemoth, necessarily 7 times more powerful than each word was separately, does not such language cease to be “ordinary”, infused as it now is with exponential Nth Power Poetic Potential? Or does it rather retain, in spite of its new Nth Power Poetry Behemoth status (and in a more Wordsworthian vein), a sort of mystical ontology of “linguistic ordinariness” which no-one, not even a silvery mechanical Mallarmé-As-A-Dinosaur, can ever hope to destroy?

Ordinariness

On a more practical level, “raising” the sentence “Could I have mayonnaise on that second kebab please?” or “Darling could you get me some of my cream from the pharmacy?” to the level of Nth Level Poetic Power would seem to take some doing. Many have tried, and this is perhaps the reason why the Wordsworthian tradition, in modern poetics, so often seems the direct precursor not only of Tristan Tzara and pretty much all of Dada, but even of Gary Sullivan and my Flarf friends.

I hope you're all still following me here.

In any case, all this may simply make us suspect that what is actually meant by “ordinariness” here is what poets like Engel often truly mean by “the ordinary”: that is, things like barns, birds, peasants tilling fields, cups on windowsills, sinks, windmills, churches and rainbows. All of such things being, of course, in no way ontologically “normal” (or even phenomenologically for that matter), but rather defined as normal by a disciplinary lexicon.

It thus follows that if the phrase “Could I have mayonnaise on that second kebab please?” is to be considered “ordinary language”, and we were to “raise it” to its Nth Power (because, of course, “ordinary” language must be “raised”, otherwise it's akin to equating poetry to the speech of your local bus driver, and heaven forbid etc.), the phrase would magically agglomerate, with much Transformer-like screeching, to become: “The Azure! The Azure! The Azure!”

Mallarmé fans will of course feel deeply reassured by what “Nth Poweredness”, when it all comes down to it, actually means.

In conclusion, were we to reformulate Engel's words, and in doing so cut out all the total bullshit, we may be able to save the following useful dictum:

“Poetry is . . . language . . . ”

Things I Would Love To See in Contemporary Poetry Criticism Just For The Sheer And Necessary Originality Of It

2010-08-29T01:12:00.008+02:00

1) Someone to write a damning critique of dear Paul Celan's poems in a William Logan “everything sucks” violent vitriolic rant style, published in The New Yorker or The Times Literary Supplement, thus engendering around four months of defensive Letters To The Editor which would make me simultaneously giggle and subscribe.

2) Someone to use the term “School of Quietude” while referring to random objects on The Antiques Roadshow or while judging some newly troubled adolescent on American Idol, just to prove that another contested poetics term had now fully entered the wider lexicon.

3) Someone to refer to Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes' poetry without subsequently telling us that they were, well, with the other, and that it really didn't turn out well.

4) Someone to come out with overwhelming evidence that Kent Johnson did not in fact write the Araki Yasusada poems, and for this person not to be Kent Johnson pretending to pretend to be someone else.

5) Someone to eloquently accuse The Best American Poetry (or The Best Australian Poems or The Greatest Norwegian Verse or whatever other mindless yearly anthology you can think of) of being both too conservative and too radical in the same issue.

6) Someone to overturn the entire history of Australian poetic modernism by claiming to be either Ern Malley or his sister Ethel Malley, and to wield the birth certificates to prove it.

7) Someone to have obtained the agreement of every well-meaning American poetry critic to solemnly swear never again to use such phrases as “a truly American voice”, “a voice of the American experience” or that such and such a poet incarnates “the voice of American poetry”. Just as critics in other countries never say that a poet is an exemplar of “a truly Norwegian voice” or that he or she incarnates “the Norwegian experience”, so it may be a good idea to refrain from such bizarre jingoistic hubris, and commit to poetic life à l'internationale. Moreover, in case readers of The Newer Metaphysicals doubt the frequency of this truly mind-bending lieu-commun in American poetics, try inserting the phrase “voice of American poetry” into google, surrounded by the quotation marks, and sit back to quietly peruse the utterly baffling results). If you are in agreement with this motion, please sign the comment-box petition below.

And by the by, if any reader of The Newer Metaphysicals can actually manage to do any one of these things, and to post evidence of its existence beyond the realm of my idealized dreamscape, I will invite said reader to a dinner on me in a restaurant of their choosing, in London or Paris, valid until some random midnight in 2012.

What Is Poetry? (Manning Makes Fun Of His Elders No. 214)

2010-08-28T20:06:00.001+02:00

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”
– Walt Whitman

Never has a definition of poetry sounded so much like the end of an overly long acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV awards. But of course, when Kanye takes your mic away to say your Best Alliteration Prize should have gone to Charles Simic, sure it's a bit humiliating, but at least you know you've made it.

And if by “great audiences” Whit means “Emily Dickinson's own head” or “some random dragonfly or crescent moon” for Li Po, then you have to admit he's right. But if the definition of a "great audience" is rather the circle of bi-curious – bi in the sense of both art and economics – bankers and lawyers who alimented both Eliot's and Steven's early careers, then I think we need all agree that MTV reaches out to a more diverse (and in the end discerning) demographic.

After all, it's enough to write the poem in properly turned trochees, and quite another to dance to said poem in "one of the best videos of all time", and I just thought you all should know that.

Autumn Cleaning

2010-08-23T16:25:00.004+02:00

In the general bustle before the move to London, The Newer Metaphysicals has received something of a new year makeover. With the object of an increasingly globalized poetics, and an increasingly globalized weblog, our collective travels will thus now be mapped.

Please complain if you do not like it.

Also, I have been cleaning out not only 7 years of Paris papers, but also my poetry blogroll. The addresses to the bottom right should now be correct and updated, taking account of both dis- and appearances.

If not, this is the post in which to complain.

Sincerity and Rhetoric in Modern Poetics

2010-08-18T02:33:00.003+02:00

For those interested, and who may read some French, I have just received word that my doctoral thesis has been made available online from the University of Strasbourg.

Before hopefully appearing then, at some point, in bound form, my full PhD may be consulted here.

How the time passes . . .

Jennifer L. Knox and Heather Christle

2010-08-12T09:20:00.007+02:00

Two wonderful new videos, by Jennifer L. Knox and Heather Christle, have just gone live at The Continental Review .

When I asked Jordan Stempleman to come on board as North American editor for TCR, I could hardly have dreamed of the succession of beautiful videos he would bring to the world. The work Jordan has done in setting up an increasing flow of new video works and readings is extraordinary. Thankyou J.

Given the success of this initial editorial integration, I would also love TCR to become increasingly international. The national, and often rather parochial, limitations of our contemporary poetics often concerns me. The Newer Metaphysicals receives visits from 5 continents: this is why, if you are a poet living in another part of the world, in Asia, South America, Africa, or the Middle East, or simply a specialist (or wild enthusiast) of another land's or language's poetics, we would love to hear from you regarding possible associate editor roles.

My email address is available in the profile on the top right.

Please give us some time to respond. This holds true as well for submissions of poetry videos: sadly, with the sheer quantity of submissions to TCR, it is not always possible to garantee a response. I know this irritates some people - "the least you could do is tell me you don't like my work!" - but well, you know . . . we do this for free.

The Continental Review

Fragments From The Pisan Notebooks

2010-08-03T14:35:00.003+02:00

From the high walls, descending into the garden of the palazzo. A flock of six small birds, perfectly blue, flit above the central fountain. Neutrons. They dip into the waters, then rise, then raise higher the implications of their flight. Into the shadows of the leaves . . . The high mounds of earth protect still the walled city. (“In 1944, bombs all but destroyed the once famous frescoes, leaving traces only of scenes depicting The Triumph of Death”). But no . . . This is Lucca . . . A statue of Venus in the central fountain, these thin avenues, straight, under the ancient conifers. And in the corners, fruit trees, frightened and hidden, wrapped with dressings of overpowering mint.

I entered from over the western walls, climbing easily from the dusty slope over the low unguarded parapet. I was not seen. I fell down into the shade of the leaves who, seeing such mischief, whispered and giggled. Sunlight . . . A small child plays on the girl’s lap in the ticket booth. When visitors approach she cries “Giardino o Palazzo!” The main entrance gives out onto a shady, narrow Luccan street. (“Certain scenes of A Portrait of a Lady were shot in this classical . . . ”) I am eyed with deep suspicion. Then . . .

Signore! Signore! How did you enter?

I have never left.

Fragments From The Pisan Notebooks

2010-08-03T14:09:00.004+02:00

Here, the Ligurian sea stretches before us. At different times in my life, I have described cliffs as azure, violet, indigo, lavender, jade and white. Colour, like myself, has been changing. Both are as light “passing through” (the eye).

After a fine morning, the weather has turned sour, and I shelter here in the little hollow dune we have dug, wrapped in my towel: its edges. The wind beats. I play with a leathery string of weed, dark green, whose balls of polyp I burst. The pencil scratches the humid page, and already there are gaping tears. One page I lost, absurdly, to the beach.

Are there cliffs here, or did I create them? Have you ever been to Liguria?

Do you know?

I have heard this sea called a “laguna”. It wraps around, a jade-encrusted shield, creating the rich and profitable bay. The source of all Pisan wealth, for eras without end, centuries of wind in canvas sails and colours announcing a ship’s affiliations.

(If only the colours of the cliffs did the same).

This . . . the only port along the entire coast, for thousands of years! From insignificant Genoa, up until Ostia. Like us, it absurdly accepted Empire. Portus Pisanus. Made, not discovered. It is dark beneath my blanket. The black sea, like a slug, rolls its endless bodies out. Why will my blanket not protect me, as Pisa is protected by the Ligurian bay? Where is my safe port? My chromatic standards?

As the cliffs change their colours, so too the names of history.

Colonia Iulia Obsequens.

Fragments From The Pisan Notebooks

2010-08-03T13:58:00.006+02:00

Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements.

In the morning, the sun rises. Sometimes there is rain. (Across the forest.) Sounds of the waking camp. The rain beats gently on the top of the grill, and I turn my face up into it. It drips down upon my cheeks, and flattens my hair upon my face. A strong wind in the trees. (My hair curls in arabesques upon my brow, though the light is empty.) The light is empty; and the landscape is always the same. Morning and morning. And evening . . . Dreams of Philadelphia. Garden. Porch. Of I don’t know. London, Brussels, Cologne, Pares The Alps, Venice, Granada, Tangiers. A sun rising again. Each new dawn. The world is made of eleven elements. There are eleven primary songs. Frank Wessels Weston. Hamilton. Three conifers alone on the black horizon. The rain beating. Now a new wind of pale evening (it chisels memory within my face.) O . . . I put my cheek upon the diamonds which the grill makes. (Sweet durmast and rose . . . ) A smell of cinders from the west. The line-up of morning trees, in the quadrant, with order and dismissal. The Bard without his e. Lone Pennsylvania. Reform the economy. Coleman’s Hatch of the bloody Irish. Three black trees. I will name the rain. Quia Pauper Amavi. Spend the winter. Provincia deserta! I put my cheek upon the diamonds which the world makes. The droplets draw creases in my face. Alabaster. Pull down . . . Suffering now: the new époque. The new year. Black branches upon the silver evening: iconograph, iconoclast. Rise, crow. My thoughts return to you . . . Fine weather of spring, and the rose light returning, out of the west: core of the implicit diamond. Metal. Conifers swaying across my eyes. Blinding. Maddening love! Exultations. Pull down thy vanity! Pull down . . . Three conifers . . .

Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements.

Dealing With Poet-Bullying : Some Survival Tips

2010-08-01T22:52:00.005+02:00

Given the current climate of the poetry blogoscape, and the present discussions regarding antisocial poetic interactions, The Newer Metaphysicals thought a simple, helpful primer (adapted from readily available texts) may be in order to help young poets deal with unpleasant behaviour on the part of the wider critical community.

Are you the victim of gossip, teasing, hurtful or abusive behavior from other poets or critics? Here are some things you can do to as a poet to combat psychological and verbal bullying. They're also good tips to share with a poet-friend who might be having such an experience as a way to show your support:

Ignore the poet-bully and walk away. It's definitely not a coward's response — sometimes it can be harder than losing your temper. Poet-bullies thrive on the reaction they get, and if you walk away, or ignore hurtful emails or blog comments, you're telling the poet-bully that you just don't care. Sooner or later the poet-bully will probably get bored with trying to bother you. Walk tall and hold your head high. Using this type of body language sends a message to the poet-bully that you're not vulnerable.
Hold the anger. Who doesn't want to get really upset with a poet-bully? But that's exactly the response the poet-bully is trying to get. Poet-bullies want to know they have control over your emotions and your poetry. If you're in a situation where you have to deal with a poet-bully and you can't walk away with poise, use humor — it can throw the poet-bully off guard. Work out your anger in another way, such as through writing it down (make sure you tear up any letters, notes or poems you write in anger).
Don't get physical. However you choose to deal with a poet-bully, don't use physical force (like kicking, hitting, pushing or spitting). Not only are you showing your anger, you can never be sure what the poet-bully will do in response. You are more likely to be hurt and get in to trouble if you use violence against a poet-bully. You can stand up for yourself in other ways, such as gaining control of the situation by walking away or by being assertive in your actions. Some older poets believe that bullying is a part of a poet growing up (even that it is character building) and that hitting back is the only way to tackle the problem. But that's not the case. Aggressive responses tend to lead to more poetry related violence and more poet-bullying for the victims.
Practice confidence. Practice ways to respond to the poet-bully verbally or through your behavior. Practice feeling good about yourself or your poems (even if you have to fake it at first!).
Take charge of your life and your poems. You can't control other people's actions, but you can stay true to yourself. Think about ways to feel your best — and your strongest — so that other poets may give up the teasing. Exercise is one way to feel strong and powerful. (It's a great mood lifter, too!) Learn a martial art or take a class like yoga. Another way to gain confidence as a poet is to hone your skills in something like chess, art, music, computers, or writing. Joining a class, club, or gym is a great way to make new poet-friends and feel great about yourself and your poetry. The confidence you gain will help you ignore the mean poets.
Talk about it. It may help to talk to an older poet, poetry guidance counselor, poetry teacher, or poet-friend — anyone who can give you the support you need. Talking can be a good outlet for the fears and frustrations that can build when you're being bullied by a poet.
Find your (true) poet-friends. If you've been bullied by poets through rumors or gossip, all of the above tips (especially ignoring and not reacting) can apply. But take it one step further to help ease feelings of hurt and isolation. Find one or two true poet-friends and confide how the poetry gossip has hurt your feelings. Set the record straight by telling your poet-friends quietly and confidently what's true and not true about your poems. Hearing a friend say, "I know the rumor's not true that you're a Quietist. I didn't pay attention to it," can help you realize that most of the time people see poetry gossip for what it is — petty, rude, and immature.

Error or Errancy ? How Do We Define "Mistakes" In Our Contemporary Poetics?

2010-07-22T18:04:00.015+02:00

What role do we give to the notion of error in our poetics, and in writing more generally?

This is a thought which I've returned to of late, faced as I have been with frequent "corrections" of essays, articles, of my French and Italian, and yes, of poems.

It is of course the latter category which proves to be most interesting. I must admit to having systematically rejected, from the very beginning, every single correction given to me which, quite honestly and entirely good-heartedly, aimed to improve my poems.

This was not, I feel, motivated by any ridiculous, misplaced egotism. Something else seems to be at work.

I am not talking of typos or misplaced apostrophes, but rather the apparent "misuse" of a word or concept, a term I had thought meant one thing, for instance, before a friend or colleague explained to me it did not quite mean this, but rather something else. Am I thus to remove said word from my poem because a majority of speakers of the language will read something I did not quite "intend"? Or am I to preserve the word in its original, "error-filled" state, as at the time of writing the meaning I gave to the word was the meaning it had for me, and thus represented a certain stage in my subjective life, in my experience?

Why should I necessarily, in such a case, bow to the whim of the "masses", of the rozza multitudine? (The masses being here, of course, almost everyone else who speaks English, and who did not make an error which was particularly mine, so mine that it was perhaps almost an inescapable part of my being).

This is saying a great deal of course. That "errors are a part of ourselves", apart from sounding atrociously care-bear and saccharine, could of course be used to justify a glittering array of disturbing ideologies.

But what I mean to say may only be clear with a brief case-study.

A good example of what I'm thinking of, in a poetic context, occured to me last year, from several different sources almost simultaneously, regarding the words "transcendent" and "transcendental". Now, I have an apparently shameful tendency to use these two very laden words interchangeably, whereas Kant, my philosopher friends tell me (and a certain student in Lille, thank you, really, for your correcting of a clumsy professor) defines them as strict contraries. In a university lecture, it is crucial to use these words "correctly", with full knowledge of their heritagen, and thus I do offer sincere mea culpa and admit my fault.

But I am far more reluctant to admit any fault whatsoever in my use of both these terms interchangeably in my poems.

This is really a very curious phenomenon. It posits, once again, a different axiology for poetic language and for designative or dialectical language. But it cannot be explained away by the old Sir Philip Sidney technique of "poetry affirms nothing, thus it cannot lie". It is not that I do not care that I made an error regarding these words in my poems. It is rather that I want to keep the error itself, as error, that it is important to me to retain it as a clear and defineable mistake. And these are two very different things.

As, perceiving my apparent error in my poems regarding "transcendent" and "transcendental", should I bow to Kant? (I don't even like Kant). Should I bow to the dictionaries who came after Kant, picking up this (really very useful) distinction?1

Am I being precious in thinking that such errors make up a part of my poems, that no-one can take them away from me? I suppose I felt, and I may very well be wrong, that such errors were an integral part not only of these poems, but of myself, in that they provide a small hole through which I could glimpse my own relationship to language.

They designate the space which exists between the personal use of the word (Saussure's parole) set against the community of language-users as a whole (Sassure's langue). And both langue and parole go together in making up the vast superstructure of language (langage).

Langue, langage, parole. Nobody can take my parole (the way I individually live each and every word and each and every speech-act) away from me. Is this not necessarily a part of language's beauty, this mitigation and compromise between the community and the individual? An entirely individual language, of course, is fine, but it would resemble "nonsense" for all other people on earth. Whereas an entirely communal language is, if not unimagineable, an almost nightmarish scenario, wherein everyone would understand exactly the same thing when every word is spoken.

In brief, the communal and the individual poles of language are like two different forms of hell. And perhaps our errors are ways of preserving the equilibrium between these two extremes, of affirming our individual parole against an overwhelming majority rule.

***
Another example. My French is fluent, though often I express myself "not as a French person would", as my beloved French tell me. (Often of course I express myself, as we all do, not as "an English-speaking person would", though it is more difficult to know precisely what this means). In these instances, my expression is not necessarily incorrect, but rather idiosyncratic. Other times of course I make explicit mistakes, which need to be corrected, and which I duly do. But I am conscious to carefully retain many of my phrases which, though entirely clear and comprehensible, resemble nothing any French person would ever have expressed in this particular way.

But the question becomes truly interesting when the difference between "idiosyncratic" language and the "obvious error" becomes irremediably blurred or effaced. When does an idiosyncrasy - otherwise put, a defining trait of one's expression, or even dare I say, of one's identity as speaking subject - become an error, and vice versa? When can one accept that one has erred in language if errance constitues, at least in part, an integral element of our (linguistic) being?

Often we "correct" the language-use of children. Often we say "sheep, not sheeps!" In other cases we will simply laugh, even encourage the adorable identity with cooing. When we correct such uses, are we unremittingly employing a totalized vision of our language, which we each retain in our minds, as a sort of symbolic form or ideal? The dictionary as set-in-stone reality of the word, for instance, often denies the particularity of subjective experience of language. It is this experience which poetry, on the contrary, often explicitly values.

So when should poets use dictionaries, and when should they burn them?

This is another way of posing the same question.

We cannot simply burn the dictionaries, no matter how much ardent avantists, in all centuries, have claimed we should. Dictionaries are an evolving, clumsy swamp of our communal idea of English, or French, or Esperanto, which we modify in tune to personal use. They are not a rule to be imposed upon personal paroles. They are a changing record of error, and error soon becomes ideal.

* * *

Often, when writing a poem, I will misread a word written in haste on the back of a stained café bill, and, deciding that I prefer the misread word to its "original", will decide to retain it. This is an "error" of process. It is not an error, lexical, syntactical or (infinitely more complex) aesthetic, pointed out by a third-party. This thus helps us to move towards an initial categorization: an error in reading, writing, transcribing, collage or indeed any other procedure linked to process, cannot be the same thing as an error identified in the text as received object, after the fact.

We are faced here with two very distinct things: process-error (often perceived as positive) and result-error (often perceived as negative), though of course the line of demarcation between result and process is, and must be, infinitely blurred.

But perhaps some separation is still necessary, unless one prefers to argue that process is result, and vice versa. Many poets, since at least Oulipo and the Surrealists, have sought to do this, but the problem is of course that at some point - perhaps arbitrary, usually not - we must decide if the poem has reached a stage of finition, in which case it constitutes an open field of reception and readerly interplay.

Note then that I am not raising error to a level of value which gives us a sort of joyous bacchanalian orgy of frea spelingz and fals freeedumz. Nor do I think error is very often positive. Most often it is no doubt negative or simply neutral, marking for us a point where we have lost contact with the living language as a whole. (Whether it is important to always be in touch with this communal, agreed version of language is of course another question).

I am honestly not in favour of an early freudian position, for instance, such as that of Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where apparent error (lapsus, lost objects, misreadings, etc.) turn out not to be errors in the traditional sense but rather, in a simplified summary, hidden sign-posts to truth. Subjective or unconscious truth, but a form of truth nonetheless. (Freud will modify this position greatly in his later lectures on psychoanalysis, where the latter ceases to be a way to "solve" problems or pathologies and becomes a mode of inquiry which promises no heuristic or positivistic outcomes).

I am not very interested in explaining (or explaining away) error in this fashion, (saying that what seemed error was in fact not error, but rather a different form of getting at understanding, a way of founding a new epistemology). This seems like a rather too easy answer. This seems to deprive error of its own ontology, and thus of its own potential value. What interests me more is not the hallmark-card notion that error does not exist - or that error is simply a part of a heuristic or "learning experience" which englobes it, and ultimately cuddles it to death - but rather the notion of error as a fundamental part of what makes each writing unique.

I would also argue that it is not whether we are "conscious" of poetic error or not which "redeems" it. Intentionality seems, as it usually is, another overly easy response. Ironic error or winking error is simply not error in any interesting sense: it is very often irony garbed up in the masquerade of the poetic wisecrack.

More and more poetics play of course with the errancy of error-making in the most complex of ways, not only incorporating such wanderings into the march of a particular line, but making them a fundamental part of an underlying praxis. The work of Alexander Dickow springs to mind here, in his blurred intersections between French, English, overheard trippings and grammatico-syntactic pratfalls. These reflections also came to mind recently while reading Manuel Brito's recent essay in Jacket on The New Sentence in Ron Silliman's poetics, in which Brito states:

Ron Silliman writes sentences in these paragraphs without apparent connection, plays with several words by omitting a few letters, and informs us of an experience peripheral to us [. . .] Why bother to debate if the hot fat is connected with the meat and slicing it has given him the pain in the thumb, if at the end of these two paragraphs everything changes and leaves us with a new perception on observing that “I cld have gone about this some other way.” The experience of reading Tjanting is unlike the detective role necessary from Modernism to the seventies in order to find out an ultimate final meaning, which usually revolves around the subject-author. Now as Barrett Watten states clearly in the introduction to Tjanting, what we call “error” disappears and the above quoted sentences considered earlier as idiosyncrasies are now essential mediating terms of the text. All this has reached the book by way of his notebook where he had collected momentary realities and thoughts immersed in his daily life.

What is interesting here is that Brito implicitly links such "errors" in this writing to a specific element of Silliman's praxis: namely, his use of a notebook as a sort of continuous "draft", wherein the "idiosyncrasies" of a mind's notations will eventually come to make up part of the fabric of the poems "themselves" (these final scare-quotes seem necessary in order to question whether the initial notes are already part of the error-laden "final" text).

Though Brito is no doubt correct in the case of Silliman to posit this error-effect (if I dare to use a conceptual sounding term) as a result of the actual writing process, it is in no way obvious that potential poetic errors are rooted in a praxis which encourages their formation. Why should notes in a notebook be considered more error-prone than a carefully worked over, formalized piece? Perhaps we would simply be speaking, in the case of these two different types of process, of different types of error, and poetic error may of course be as infinitely declined as all other tropes or figures of the writing in question.

“I cld have gone about this some other way” seems an important moment then regarding the potentiality of poetic error: its role as a break-out tool, all the more powerful when embraced.
Poetry sometimes feels (at least to me) like an undefined space of possibilities. Our structures, interpretations of forms, and chosen relations to traditions, limit this space, and thus limit the field of our error-making.

There are certain errors we accept, which become vibrant parts of our poems, and other errors which must be eternally lost, hidden or effaced, kept only in the state of a word hastily crossed out in a prior draft, most likely never ever to be pored over by some textual geneticist.

Do they thus abandon their error status? Do they thus cease to be erroneous, and become like freudian markers to a hidden ethos, a hidden "true" text beneath the one we thought we "wanted" to compose?

This position seems untenable. One would have to be a hardcore idealist to believe, in a hellenistic sense, that we are all carving blocks of granite merely to find the ideal statue which already exists beneath.

So no, I'm no platonist. I prefer to believe - I feel it is more beautiful to believe - that there is no such ideal statue, that our clumsy carvings do not attempt to discover a pre-existing form, but rather, to use the common organic metaphor, represent rather the constant appearances and dyings of overlapping forms, perfect and imperfect, beautiful and bizarre.

***

If a poetic error proves then to be something we must in the end keep, was it our error to consider it an error in the first place?

I like to think not. It is such an easy thing, in poetics as in life, to look back on error and consider them as simply positive roadsigns of a new and emergent epistemology. What if we sometimes need to take the wrong road, not to eventually be on the right road, but to discover that in reality no right road exists?

This idea more closely corresponds to my experience of poetic praxis.

***

1. "Kant opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning 'that, which goes beyond' (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.For him transcendental meant knowledge about our cognitive faculty with regard to how objects are possible a priori."

Ekleksographia - France

2010-07-22T12:12:00.002+02:00

The extraordinary new issue of Ekleksographia, edited by Alexander Dickow, has just gone live. It is an issue devoted, as Dickow puts it:

to Anglophone poets living and writing in France, or to French poets in translation, or to Franco-American writers, or to writers in dialogue with the French tradition, or to mediators of French literature in the Anglophone world, or to some combination, complication or confusion of these categories.

The issue also contains my (rather long) review of Joe Ross's captivating collection Strata, as well as some poems. Go see then, hypocrites lecteurs, what evil flowers the old continent continues to push forth!

London Bound

2010-07-10T12:20:00.008+02:00

Following a great many months of silence, The Newer Metaphysicals will be reborn this coming summer, a rebirth accompanied by the beginning of a new life.

This week, I was appointed Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London, on a one-year contract. The Paris era, which has lasted some 7 years, is thus for the moment over or interrupted, and London beckons, an extraordinary new city, with a multitude of new poetic horizons.

One of the major reasons for this silence from the realms of poetic interactions on the networks of glittering zeros and ones was a reticence I felt regarding what I could and couldn't say, given my role as "pedagogue". With students of mine reading The Newer Metaphysicals, anything personal needed to be excised or at least softened. With a position, of some responsibility at least, in the French university system, I felt it was no longer possible to write in such a public forum in the same way, or with the same honesty. Rereading many of the posts of this blog over its first few years, I was surprised at what I felt to be an almost equal measure of naivety and insight. I hardly even recognized the voice of some of my earliest observations, a fact which strangely convinced me, in the end, of the necessity of continuing such a forum, if only for such a record of an evolving discourse, and an apparently changing mind.

The poetscape has also greatly changed. Such constant points de répère as Tom Beckett's blog are no longer with us, others have emerged, other precious sites of avowal and reason are more or less alive or distant. Perhaps it is no longer the Golden Era of virtual poetic discussions, perhaps it never was, as some of us remember it, or perhaps we can create such a thing again, or for the first time.

In any case, with London at my feet from September 1st on, I will be making every effort to make this place alive again. The Newer Metaphysicals has perhaps lost a good number of its previous more faithful readers. But I would also like to think my future students at Queen Mary may find this place, that there will be no such division, as there has been in the past, between those who have been living with our contemporary poetics for many years, and those discovering it for the very first time.

Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames! that other bards may see,
As lovely visions by thy side
As now, fair river! come to me.
Oh glide, fair stream! for ever so;
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
'Till all our minds for ever flow,
As thy deep waters now are flowing.

Vortex

2010-01-15T19:50:00.004+01:00

How long I have been gone for.

I have traficked only in images. Became a being of pure Phanopoeia, and for being built of logos, this is paramount to hellscape. Dionysos made his present felt, dripped a liquor of forgetfulness from the licks of a higher waiting mouth.

Send that away.

Words escaped me, glittered mockingly on some horizon beyond a normal phenomenology. They escape still, but the mists are fading more each day, the web less wound round, the spider hidden.

Now with the days it must unwind more still, showing soon to the morning a working subject.

2009-12-25T14:43:00.001+01:00

Ten Top Trivia Tips about John Ashbery!

John Ashbery has little need for water and is capable of going for months without drinking at all.
More than one million stray dogs and half a million stray cats live in John Ashbery.
Early thermometers were filled with John Ashbery instead of mercury.
It took John Ashbery 22 years to build the Taj Mahal.
Edinburgh imports three thousand kilograms of John Ashbery every year.
The Eskimos have over fifty words for John Ashbery.
There are six towns named John Ashbery in the United States.
In the Great Seal of the United States the eagle grasps 13 arrows and John Ashbery.
John Ashbery will become gaseous if his temperature rises above -42°C!
A sixteenth century mathematician lost his nose in a duel over his love for John Ashbery, and wore a silver replacement for the rest of his life.

A Series Of Tubes

2009-12-01T18:28:00.008+01:00

Top 10 Unexpected Search Terms That Brought Readers To The Newer Metaphysicals

1) "niedecker" + "abortion"
2) what does gazeboed mean
3) how to apply minimal cologne
4) baudrillard stated that the matrix misunderstands and distorts his work
5) how do you pronounce celan?
6) life under 30 harder than parents
7) synthesia detected a problem and must close
8) qu'est-ce que le bonheur
9) where to collect insects in november
10) smoking females cigarette to cigarette light-ups

Literary Terms Defined - Postmodernism

2009-12-01T18:11:00.003+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 185 - POSTMODERNISM

Literary Terms Defined - Modernism

2009-12-01T17:52:00.001+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 117 - MODERNISM

Literary Terms Defined - Genre

2009-12-01T17:46:00.001+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 168 - GENRE

Literary Terms Defined - Realism

2009-12-01T17:38:00.002+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 152 - REALISM

Literary Terms Defined - Romanticism

2009-12-01T17:25:00.002+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 143 - ROMANTICISM

1500 Phrases Rhyme With The Word "Night"

2009-11-21T15:05:00.006+01:00

Literary Terms Defined - War Poetry

2009-11-21T14:35:00.003+01:00

Google Images Definitions # 117 - WAR POETRY

Literary Terms Defined - School of Quietude

2009-11-21T14:22:00.006+01:00

Google Images Definitions #112 - SCHOOL OF QUIETUDE

Literary Terms Defined - Post-Avant

2009-11-21T14:06:00.009+01:00

Google Images Definition # 93 - Post-Avant

Literary Terms Defined - Sincerity

2009-11-21T13:59:00.006+01:00

Google Images Definition #62 - SINCERITY

Literary Terms Defined - Lyricism

2009-11-21T13:45:00.007+01:00

Google Images Definition #43 - LYRICISM

Reckoning

2009-07-31T03:11:00.004+02:00

For those waiting on correspondence etc., just bear with me. I have precisely three weeks to finish the PhD. Everything is behind. Time itself is altered. Peace to all while I set sail into the hurricane.

NEW! Ryan MacDonald In The Continental Review

2009-07-20T19:44:00.004+02:00

Delighted to be featuring these two stunningly beautiful pieces from Ryan MacDonald, commissioned by The Continental Review editor Jordan Stempleman.

Come into the eye of the storm . . .

Journey Towards The North

2009-07-19T13:47:00.002+02:00

Extraordinary times. I've just this week been appointed on a one-year contract to the comparative literature department at the University of Lille 3. I'm going to live in Lille. I will be leaving Paris. More on all of it when this work is over, and when I start to realize what it all means.

Will I Be Sued?

2009-07-11T15:38:00.003+02:00

Why does everyone threaten to sue people in the poetics community today? We'll see if I get sued for my piece beneath. I thought the satirical nature of the thing was utterly obvious.

Anyway of course Billy Collins didn't say that his own poetry is awful. Considering that I link to the original article, where you can read what Billy actually said in full, I thought it was clear.

Ah, I too remember free speech.

Feel free to comment though if you feel I should be sued.

Former laureate says country needs some better poets than him

2009-07-10T22:43:00.004+02:00

(Below is an entirely satirical I mean duh unedited transcript of a recent Billy Collins interview, which recently arrived at The Newer Metaphysicals' Paris bureau. We are unsure what happened during the copy-editing phase of the final version, which for interest may be viewed here, replete with its many typos).

LONE WOLF, Okla. — Billy Collins unwound the tangled wool from his half-knit Christmas stocking, unhitching it from the rusty gramophone in his library. He placed the gramophone next to a spiral notebook, then slowly wrapped the stocking around his head.

“I only have about 1 song on this thing,” he said, gesticulating towards the gramophone. "And I have to change the, what do you call it, memory-plate.” The lack of music isn’t that big of an issue though, Collins noted. "I just use it to tune out the noise", he said. Noise created by humans, that is, and what Collins simply refers to as "The Voices."

Billy Collins doesn't like "The Voices". For the next 30 minutes or so, the former laureate rocked back and forth, speaking of "Them", and droning on and on about the stark beauty of Oklahoma.

Yes, Billy Collins speaks poorly.

But he writes even worse.

“I was listening to Lady Gaga coming out here,” he said. “I’ve even learned a couple of her songs, but I would never play them in front of anyone. I hate people. They make noise. Also, nobody can really play Lady Gaga. She is too unique. I think trying to play that is a form of trespassing. BANG.”

And while trying to play Lady Gaga might seem like a violation, for Collins, writing poetry which evokes pantless one-pieces, rain, snow and household items, is his life’s work.

Chosen as a member of the faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, Collins has spent the past week boring to tears a select group of high school students with what the latter called his "old man stories". Last Friday, Collins spoke to the entire petrified group during a poetry reading at the Kerr Performing Arts Center, where his hour-long performance was greeted with continuous booing. Over three quarters of the crowd walked out, leaving only the comatose and the dead to be later awoken by the remaining security personnel.

“Coming here has been fascinating,” he said. “It’s sort of an ‘end-of-the-line’ experience for me. In that, I think this is the ‘end-of-the-line’ for my poetry."

Still, while Billy Collins found Quartz Mountain particularly suited to his often hilariously bad one-dimensional sentimental linear narrative poems, he’s less excited by the poetry the rest of the country has produced.

“One of the reasons people don’t read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault, except that they're usually much too noisy (I like taking naps). What I'm saying though is that there’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading, and mine is certainly at the forefront among them.”

It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he would love one day to be a part of. “I suppose my poetry is so dreadful because I think poetry needs to be transparent. Of course I have no idea what 'transparent' in this context means, or in fact could ever mean. It just makes no sense. It's a meaningless term. Sometimes I just feel so inadequate. I'm sorry is it mealtime yet?”

Collins then speculated that perhaps his poems were so awful because he believes that poems should always say something about the state of the poet and his environment.

For Collins, that philosophy bubbled to the surface when he was asked, as poet laureate, to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“I’ve only been asked to write two poems in my life,” he said. “At first I didn’t want to. But, later, as I thought about it, it disturbed me that I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge. And I was right: I wasn't. I suppose I just panicked. Did you see that crap I turned out? I feel ashamed."

Collins did change his mind though. He said he took advantage of two literary devices — the form of a eulogy and the alphabet — to build his work. “I needed the eulogy and the alphabet, I needed those as a frame for the poem. But, as I said, it was just . . . awful.”

Later, Collins read his work to a joint session of Congress. “I remember the tears running down Senator Patrick Moynihan’s face. It was that bad. I never knew poetry could be so dreadful it would make politicians weep. It was an interesting way to see the country’s politicians.”

It was in moments like those, Collins said, that he understood the absolute lack of any power in his poems.

But even with his bizarre descent, Collins continues to write. "I just can't help it. 87 percent of the country's poets suck, and I suck more than all of them. But for me, the future is basically the next poem. It’s always been that way. It’s always been one poem at a time", he observed, gazing out with melancholy at the Oklahoma landscape.

"And they just keep on getting worse.”

BORN

2009-07-01T20:16:00.004+02:00

Ypolita Press

25 poems, pink pages, bound with pink thread, $5USD

the volta
verses * at its pitch
like your nose needs its fatalistic
noose ! hanging
past
lovers by the leavings
they have * left . . . it is as if in
protrusions some potency hid its pur
-loined pouts stolen * by shadows
in a triangular artistry
where the breath
fogs life *
anew
by mere geo-
metric * mimetic terms . . .
and all this is past some shivering :
it lies in the point * of waiting
still and still destructive
above the thing
to kiss

The New Thing: Towards A Cryptopoetics

2009-06-17T22:49:00.006+02:00

Contemporary poetics is apparently in the throes of The New Thing. Thank fuck for that, because it's been like 4 hours since The Newer Pleonasm, a movement I so totally loved.

Luckily though, The Newer Metaphysicals has obtained some rare images for its readers of other recently discovered poetic group-anomalies :

The Newer Pleonasm

Post-Periphrastics

Neoteric Redundancy

Beautiful . . .

So beautiful . . .

Anyway, the next time you catch a new poetic movement from the depths of some imaginary historiographical Niflheim, could you please just do the decent thing :

Throw the fucker back.

How Many Poets Are There?

2009-06-17T20:30:00.006+02:00

Over the last 12 years, I've been mapping a number of inductive statistical models which chart the growth of the world Poet-Population across a variety of contrasting demographics. This brief summary of my analysis is dedicated to Seth Abramson and Ron Silliman . . .

Research Outline

The term "Poet-Population" (PP) commonly refers to the total number of living poets on Earth at a given time. As of May 31, 2009, the Earth's Poet-Population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6,792,467,727. The world Poet-Population has been growing continuously since the first circulation of Petrarch's Canzoniere in the 1330s. There were short-term falls however at other times due to lack of inspiration, for example in the mid 18th century. The fastest rates of world Poet-Population growth (above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s (see Projectivism) then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s. This can be seen on the following graph :

According to Poet-Population projections, the Poet-Population will continue to grow until around 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World Poet-Births have levelled off at about 137-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, Poet-Deaths are only around 56 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Since births outnumber deaths, the Poet-Population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.

Different regions have different rates of Poet-Population growth. According to our statistical mapping, the growth in the Poet-Population of different regions from 2000 to 2005 was:

237.771 million in Asia

92.293 million in Africa

38.052 million in Latin America

16.241 million in Northern America

1.955 million in Oceania

-3.264 million in Europe

383.047 million in the whole world

In the 20th century, the world saw the biggest increase in its Poet-Population in human history due to a range of factors including grants, word processors, and the formation of poets into tightly cohesive groups. In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's Poet-Population was growing at the rate of 1.14% (or about 75 million poets) per year, down from a peak of 88 million per year in 1989. In the last few centuries, the number of poets living on Earth has increased many times over. By the year 2000, there were 10 times as many poets on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to data from the CIA's 2005–2006 World Factbooks, the world Poet-Population increased by 203,800 every day. The CIA Factbook increased this to 211,090 poets every day in 2007, and again to 220,980 poets every day in 2009.

Statistical Models

Hoerner (1975) proposed the following formula for calculating the world Poet-Population :

where

N is current number of poets
T is the current year
C = 2·10¹¹
T₀ = 2025

The formula indicates hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population.

According to Kapitza (1997), the Poet-Population grew between 67000 b.c. and 1965, and the world Poet-Population growth formula is:

where

N is current Poet-Population
T is the current year
C = (1.86±0.01)·10¹¹
T₀ = 2007±1
$τ$ = 42±1

The transition from hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population to slower rates of growth is called demographic poetic transition.

Summary and Predictions

Globally, the Poet-Population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak of 2.19% in 1963, but growth remains high in Latin America, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In some countries there is negative Poet-Population growth (i.e. net decrease in the Poet-Population over time), especially in Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. Within the next decade, Japan and some countries in Western Europe are also expected to encounter negative Poet-Population growth.

The United Nations states that Poet-Population growth is rapidly declining, and is expected to peak at 9.2 billion in 2050.

Narrativity Is Part Of The Futility Of Language

2009-06-13T21:39:00.005+02:00

I just spent half an hour giggling at work by The Postmodern Text Generator. I read a good ten of its enlightening essays, ranging in topics from Spinoza to the future of Libertarianism. My favourite phrases for this session were the following, which I intend on using to other people this week and attributing them to their "authors" with unswerving confidence:

- “Sexual identity", Marx claimed, "is the rubicon of language."
- The characteristic theme of la Fournier’s analysis of predialectic rationalism is not deappropriation, but postdeappropriation.
- If one examines the textual paradigm of context, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcapitalist theory or conclude that context is a product of communication.

Then of course the most wonderful thing about The Postmodern Text Generator are those occasions it produces a sentence which you attempt for 5 minutes to try to "understand". You feel there is something there. This must be a semanteme. My favourite of this category during this session being :

“Narrativity is part of the futility of language,” says Lacan.

- Um, hey Robot-Academic.
- Greetings . . . MANNING.
- Listen RA, I'm just going down to the bar with Greg and co. for a few hours, do you think you could finish that section on Pessoa in the techne chapter and then just tidy up that stuff on Perelman and The New Rhetoric? That'd be great.
- Analytic or Continental.
- Err, let's go with Analytic today. But could you put in some equations, you know like Badiou.
- Confirmed.
- Sweet. Oh and could you go easy on the sollipsistic paradoxes this time: we're not playing Žižuku. BYE!

Why It Is Harder Being Young Today Than It Ever Used To Be

2009-06-11T21:56:00.004+02:00

You know it's true.

Following several conversation with close friends, was moved to write this after having read Matt Cozart's note of a few days ago:

I'm so fucking angry right now, or whenever I think about career stuff. Why are there never any articles that DON'T assume you've already had years of experience in a high level professional job? Why can't there be articles that tell people like me what to do? People with no skills or experience or even a slight sense of what the hell they want to do with their life??? I just don't know what to do anymore. It would be one thing if I knew what I wanted to do but simply couldn't find a job. That wouldn't be as bad. My problem is that I have never seriously considered any particular career in anything, and now I feel completely lost and defeated. How did I end up this way? I'm a college graduate, I've always done what I'm told, I don't get into trouble. I've done everything right!!!! And I still can't seem to figure out how to be an "adult", which seems to come completely naturally to everyone else. What is going on?????

What indeed, dear Matt, is going on . . . I'm sure I may get comments from people saying, more or less, "Man, you should have seen how we lived in Brooklyn in the 70s (slash 40s slash 80s)!" So I'll state in advance: I really don't care for this kind of comment. It's irrelevant to my general hypothesis, namely that the fetishistic "professionalization" of Western society means that we are forced to choose very early our "path", and the fact that this is then set in stone as a deterministic element of individuals' identities almost entirely precludes any free and considered choice of what one may indeed "want to do". I cannot tell you the number of times for instance that I've heard, over the last several years, this exchange:

- It's just too late for me now to be an architect/doctor/chef/artist. . .

- Oh, how old are you?

- 28.

- I see.

The whole "career mobility" line, specific to our contemporary Weltanschauung, is a sham. (Note, for instance, how the "Sauder Career Success Cycle" is hilariously just one big hermetically sealed self-perpetuating self-referential loop leading nowhere . . .)

See Matt, you should be able to walk into a plethora of fulfilling positions. Why is it so difficult?

This is why:

1. The ridiculous need in our society for an endlessly self-perpetuating number of degrees, certificates, diplomas, qualifications, CV references, to obtain the most junior position, anywhere, in any field. "Education" has turned pornographic. Not everyone needs to attend a university, and above all, not everyone should feel they have the obligation to do this in order to "get ahead". What happened to respect for people who had primarily technical knowledge, acquired over a short period of time, and then perfected over a practical duration? If this is respected, then individuals are also respected according not to what they "have done", but what they may do or are capable of doing. Respect for what individuals are inherently capable of doing, through their intrinsic capacities, has been buried under this infatuation for mythical epistemic accreditation. There is techne. Not all is episteme.

2. The massive extension in time now required to even enter into adult working life. 7 year med degrees, 7 year law degrees, 7 year grad programs. My undergraduate professors, who completed their studies in the sixties, used to talk of how they went into good-paying, full-time jobs after having obtained their Masters degrees.

Their Masters degrees.

Are we clear?

This means, in many cases, that today, young people under 30, if they're working at the same time, can spend upwards of 10 years in shitty, part-time poorly-paid scraping together enough shit to live on lives. (Oh and by the way, education used to free . . .) Of course, you're indeed a very lucky S.O.B (my case) if your parents are in a position to help you out financially and socially over this "formative" period. For many, or perhaps the majority, this is of course not possible.

I was reflecting on all this the other day, and was shocked to realize that, if I'm not mistaken, my parents were in the process of building their first house together when they were my age.

Currently, nothing seems further from the realms of the possible for me, and for the majority of other young people I know.

I am thus preparing myself, for the next two months, to put on minimal cologne and pack an extra pair of pantyhose (see below).

This is why it is harder being young today than it ever used to be. But feel free to berate. The Newer Metaphysicals is always up for a good inter-generational flame-war . . .