The Question of Political Poetry

Part of the problem confronting poets aspiring to write something politically relevant is that the scale of obvious corruption and criminality defy attempts to write something powerful in a way that does not devolve into sarcasm, ranting or the sort of one-dimensional advocacy or propaganda that would be better off as an op-ed column. What angle would one take to write about the Bush administration? Every day brings a new parody of the day before, and I need not look further than the headlines in the New York Times. A perpetual astonishment accompanies the brazenness with which the public trust -- the very idea of a public trust -- is publicly disdained. On television. At nearly any hour of the day. If writers and intellectuals have been accused of being back on their heels (and of course they have for the last eight years and longer) part of the reason is that the degree of incredible outrage rises faster than any individual can process it, and I am left spinning in place with a dizzy fury while the powers that be continue to commit crimes with impunity. What is the appropriate literary response to that? It's hard to even know where to start.

Poetry, Ecology and "Ecopoetry," Whatever That Is

I began writing poetry out of a sense that language as it is typically deployed in the United States has become deformed, words have become bent by misuse in advertising, politics and cultural hyperbole, the economy of our verbal and written interactions has become impoverished and hollowed. Much of this I think is due to the mediated quality of most of the language we consume. To find out what is happening in Afghanistan we watch TV or listen to the radio. We read articles about books, music and politics. So much of what we ingest is indirect and secondhand, the veracity of which is not easily evaluated. Most of our knowledge of the world comes not from the thing itself, we are not there, but from someone whose integrity, good faith, intelligence and beliefs in most cases we cannot know and in nearly all others we will not bother to check because who has the time for that. So much is taken on faith. And yet this creates a disconnect that is most of the time ignored. We carry on with political debates about war and cultural debates about literature, necessarily, but without regard for the fact that most of our "facts" are perhaps not so factual. This conversation possesses a life of its own, creates its own terms and mostly refers only to itself and the facts it has accepted by invisible consensus. It becomes difficult to change or introduce new facts because of its very nature as a fact-producing system. Hence the creation of "conventional wisdom" in politics and culture and the weird box that separates the so-called acceptable or responsible interventions from everything else. It goes without saying that the institutions that decide what is acceptable and not are those with the most power and money.

This is a long way of saying that one of the ways out of this trap that I've discovered in my relatively short time on Earth, one of the areas of experience yet to be entirely swallowed by the machine is the wilderness, and I've become interested in how I could connect the lived experience of being outside (in the multiple senses of out of doors or in the mountains/deserts/plains and in a place where the mental categories we grow up into are shown so obviously to be as petty as they are) to connect this experience to a critique of language along the lines of the one in the previous paragraph. And to do this in poetry. Gary Snyder is the trailblazer on this route, at least among late-20th c. Americans (of course there are others, back to Thoreau and beyond the time and shores of N. America), but there has apparently been a recent generalized interest in conceiving an "eco-poetics" that incorporates an environmental critique into an aesthetic vision. Here and here are two short posts that attempt to stake out ground for such a project. I've yet to write my own manifesto, though I do believe any ecologically-based poetry must be rooted in specific locations rather than be floating in an atmosphere of vague statements of environmental ethics.

In Case You Didn't Know

It's We Still Like Each Other Day. Cook dinner for your sweetheart. Just because. This means you.

Here is a Place Where Poets Share Their Dreams

Or more accurately, here.

Charles Bernstein and the Self-Righteousness of Not Making Sense

I'm unsure what critics, either real or imagined, continually hassle Charles Bernstein in his cosseted perch at Penn such that he feels it necessary to repetitively produce self-justifying monologues in smug and sneering tones like the one just published in Harper's Magazine (print only) but mostly I think he just needs to get over himself. He's not that funny. And poetry that doesn't make sense is not revolutionary; it's boring.

This is Not a Blog Post

This is a poem (or something like a poem).

jornada del muerto

i.

level land of lava.
one hundred miles long.
dead sea, black rock,
white sand, sunlight, dust.

hollow echo of silence snows
on plains where nothing lives.
windlessness blows in. clouds
rip over the Sierra Oscura. dark

mountains erode in the heat
into dust, sky. the elements
of fallout melt in the ground.
sand fuses to shiny green glass,

dust becomes something new
in the instant of shadowless clarity.
brighter than noon, false dawn
pours from a sun chained to Earth,

years later still yet to set in the dust.

ii.

All my friends are scientists discovering things making drugs creating knowledge chasing snakes doing whatever scientists do to become esteemed and distinguished indispensable contributors and members in good standing of our progressive and rational Enlightenment culture and here I am pretending to watch a historical event from a crow’s nest sixty years in the future with a group of men who are not themselves but themselves as portrayed by various Hollywood actors most of whom are dead or crazy and I have decided to call this work. We get up before dawn and it is cold in July on the desert and still black. I am in a Jeep which is a new thing at this point and next to me in the back is a tall skinny Tony Perkins looking like he has been attending a wake for the entire cast of The Sound of Music for the last six months, having uncomfortably folded his long limbs into the not-quite-functional backseat of this vehicle, and he rocks back and forth muttering what could be prayers in a very ancient language and stares straight and hard into the blankness through which we are driving. I can’t see a thing. Nobody else in the truck knows Tony Perkins is gay. George C. Scott is behind the wheel singing La Marseillaise over and over in quite mellifluous French. The radio blurts some loud static then leaves a slippery vibration in the following silence. I hum the first verse of America the Beautiful but I have trouble picturing a spot right now where anything grows. Elizabeth Taylor wears warpaint and a feather in her hair in the passenger seat. She periodically shrieks and flutters her hand over her mouth, telling us she is Pueblo and hunting Spanish Conquistadores who have been observed in the area chasing around a German fugitive on the orders of the Inquisition. She has seen them circling each other on the plains and I ask who is the Road Runner and who Wile E. Coyote but it is like I have not said anything at all. I feel we have been driving for decades maybe more. The road, really more of a rutted track, runs on in a line measured by hand with a ruler directly through the Arc de Triomphe of the mathematical imagination into the wastelandscape home of the Roman god Mars. I ask myself what I am doing here. George C. Scott glances at me in the rear view and seems to be asking the same thing. We arrive, disembark at a low windowless structure and it occurs to me there’s no need for a roof since it last rained in this place a thousand years ago. I take the dark goggles I am offered and try them on. Their tint is absolute. I don’t notice for maybe ten minutes that no one is speaking. Nothing moves. We are given warning and a countdown that feels like drowning. It looks like nothing so much as the moon, blooming from a field of cauliflower, rising out of the desert with the gravity of an old farmer confronting the winter. It looks like nothing so much as a golf ball, submerged partly in sand of a fairway bunker, awaiting in the shushed importance of a major event the player’s swing to send it arced in parabolic grace through the invisible black beyond. It looks like nothing so much as a perfect sphere of marble, mined and shaped by Michelangelo, coated by Leonardo with a stain of his own invention that reflects the sum total of all light sent bouncing around space since time began. It looks like nothing so much as a pupilless eye, born in the colors contorting through phases of rainbow, violet blue green red and crystalline white streaming out in writhing and sexual rays from which it is now and forever impossible to hide. All my friends are scientists and they stand around doodling in notebooks, drawing their coworkers naked, and they contribute these findings to journals in a language that no longer exists. It occurs to me we are present at the conception of an abstract historical era in the middle of an actual desert, and I wonder which is the more real. I am not breathing. I kneel in the sand and drag my finger through the dirt but forget how to spell the word earth while an angry general who looks exactly like Paul Newman chomps his jaws around a corncob pipe and through perfect teeth and what look like painfully distended neck tendons shouts something inaudible at the top of his lungs into the onrushing alien wind.

iii.

lightburst.
scrubbrush feverburns.
shadowtree flashfreezes
outline onto zeroground.
sandgardenblooms.
budfruit stillbirth.
lavaflow. mountaintime.
wildbluesky. horizonbowl.
land. wind. ash.
glass. steel. heat.
Trinity.

Sufjan Stevens is a Crazy Freak Genius

That is all.

Reasons We Elected This Guy Include...

Poetry readings at the White House. But what's more interesting is one of the comments (by a poet) suggesting that poetry would be better off remaining "obscure." He has a point in that most of those who read at the WH would likely not be along the lines of Allen Ginsberg shouting about blowing Hell's Angels or anything similarly radical, but this attitude has the potential to fetishize poetry's very real obscurity in the context of American culture, a condition that does nothing to advance the form's political relevance -- something the commenter also seems to suggest is important.

A Bailout for Me and My Unemployed Friends

My girlfriend works in the newspaper industry and goes to work everyday wondering whether she will be laid off. People are fired every week, and it is not a question of if so much as when it will happen to her. That's not necessarily a bad thing because she doesn't much like her job, and doing this seems way cooler anyway. The writer is thinking mainly about journalists as the recipients of these grants, but as he noted the original New Deal program was stuffed with bigtime novelists. Finally a jobs program for underemployed MFA graduate students! In fact, I'm working on a project--poetry about remythologizing the American landscape (more later)--that seems at least pitchable to this sort of program. And some of the money could be recouped by selling hard copies of the work (kind of like the 9/11 Commission Report except less morbid).

Miranda July

Miranda July is so fuckin' annoying.

Epics, Fake Epics and Charlton Heston

I've lived for a long time with the suspicion that something is lacking in our contemporary relation to words, that some dimension of our language is impoverished, that the meanings of words have been perverted or misapplied in a way that shrinks our experience of the world. The most obvious abusers are political speech and the language of advertising, both of which appropriate words like freedom and use them to sell cars and wars, but I think there is a deeper and more invisible process at work. It is not simply that so much language is polemical and wielded with the intention of convincing us of something, getting us to buy something or otherwise manipulating us. Our language as we typically use it lacks the dimension of metaphor or myth that properly connects us to a world larger than the hustle and scuttle of dailyness. Most of the time our words refer merely to some event or object elsewhere in the present tense of our culture of instantaneity—something occurring right now—while the historical or mythical freight that a word might carry remains unacknowledged. For some reason this occurred to me the other day as I was writing about something unrelated, and I began thinking about Charlton Heston. I have no idea why I began thinking about Charlton Heston, but it led me to the difference between the word epic as it might be applied to the Book of Exodus and epic as it applies to the film The Ten Commandments and, more commonly today, any historical drama with big stars and a bad script. The resonance of the original Biblical story—its quality of epicness— and its meaning for religious (or even not so religious) people is basically mocked by its reduction to Hollywood spectacle—far from being a metaphorical vehicle for ideas of exile and return, it becomes Wow look at the shit we can do with these moving pictures—and the idea of epic becomes even more hollow when it is used to describe Brad Pitt playing Achilles in a film that alters the story of Greek myths to fit a producer’s marketing needs. And strangely, everyone involved continues to take themselves very seriously. (In a weird coincidence, my roommate just came home from the beer store down the street (one of those high-end places where the guys who work there know what they’re talking about) and reported that when they didn’t have what he was looking for the counterguy recommended a pale ale from Avery Breweing Co. in CO and described it as “epic.” I’m not sure if this helps or hurts my argument.)

One way around this or further into the obscured baggage words carry is by their historical roots. I read an essay called “Words as Eggs” by a Jungian analyst, Russell Lockhart, who explored the etymology of the word consider, part of which is composed of the root word sider, which is the root word for star or heavenly body. Thus the act of thinking is connected to the night sky or the movement of the heavens, which makes sense when, well, considering that the ancients rigorously scrutinized (or does the word scrutinize imply rigor?) the sky for signs from the gods and believed the arrangement of heavenly objects portended earthly events and shaped destinies. Obviously these days we have sentenced astrology to a sideshow role in the contemporary circus, but nonetheless there is something in the act of thinking—in opening the mind and reaching through the universe of mental space to link thoughts together and draw conclusions—that feels a lot like laying beneath the ocean of night and watching the stars rise and turn around the Earth (though I recognize it is really the Earth that is turning, thanks). Both possess an element of spaciousness that, conveniently enough for the purposes of this blog post, corresponds to the spaciousness and resonance that every word, properly conceived, possesses in the invisible dimensions of its history and, further, in its connection to the limits of the visible universe around us.

This is my blog. Hello Sarah Matt and Ethan. Welcome. In the future this will be filled with brilliant and amazing observations about our lives and other interesting stuff. (But, really, what could possibly be more interesting than our lives, seriously?) But that's for another time...