jane dark's sugarhigh!

the company of poets: thesis 22

The critique of jargon (and for that matter the critique of intellectualism itself) does not serve the excluded nearly as much as it serves those who wish to have their own orthodoxies taken as natural facts. It forges a popular front from populists and the power elite.

elsewhere in the sugarhigh! universe

[Darkness at Noon: photo taken moments before 9/11 reading was called on account of weather; shirt made by East Bay graphics guru Jack Morgan]

A spin-off of sugarhigh! film reviews, the quarterly column "Marx & Coca-Cola" debuts at Film Quarterly (free download; click on "Content: Sample Article").

the company of poets: thesis 6

Thesis 6: Whenever somebody cites Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound, "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not," this person will be suggesting that he or she, their poetic community, and you if you are part of it, are Steins not Pounds. This despite the fact that they have just explained something to you. This despite the fact that the vast majority of poets who cite Stein or Pound are windy rationalists of the first water. In general this curious state of affairs is on par with the manner by which it will eventually turn out that everyone was bullied in junior high school, as if the bullies themselves had all risen up in a rapture at graduation so as to make war in heaven with the equally absent village explainers.

psycho-alpha-disco-geo

[above: ceiling domes of the Passage Colbert and the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu]

Speaking about his grand project, Walter Benjamin wrote:

This piece, which is about the Paris arcades, was begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue, which formed a dome above the foliage but was made dusty by the millions of pages with which the fresh breeze of industriousness, the heavy breath of research, the storm of youthful eagerness and the lazy gust of curiosity had been covered. The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, has cast its dreamy lightless blanket ceiling over the first-born of its sources of understanding.

The language is Benjamin in high form, mobile and punning (the page/leaf device works far better in French — and is that a pastry joke in there?), a shifting self-reference which at once displays and disguises the connection between one figure and the next, real and painted skies, domes over the reading room or the arcades, a final uncertainty about the final subject of the sentence...here the elusive experience of tracking thought in spiraling flight, the presence of Benjamin's thinking which makes of him a poet.

The painted dome of sky in the library is actually nine domes, designed by Henri Labrouste, hovering at an implausible height above the reading room, which therefore has a sense both of massive volume and extraordinary gravity. Stilted and quiet, it's a bit hard to match up with the commodity-bustle of the arcades. For linguistic source, one searches through time, alights upon this from Berlin Childhood Around 1900: "later in the year, a dusty canopy of leaves brushed up against the wall of the house a thousand times a day, the rustling of the branches initiated me into a knowledge to which I was not yet equal" (from the section titled "Loggias"). The dusty canopy returns decades later as the blanket ceiling, dusty from the million de feuilles, associated still with a knowledge and understanding upon which it weighs.

One must in fact know the territory to see that his reference ("The painted summer sky which looks down from the arcades into the reading room") is not a forced metaphor to link one space to another, succeeding on some figural aptness. Rather it's a metonymy, or even literal: the reading room where he did his work, and the arcades where the flanêurs set about their own projects, are no more linked by concept than by geography. The reading room, one discovers on a visit to the old library, opens directly onto the Galerie Colbert across the narrow Rue Vivienne. A true adjacency; they do indeed peer into each other's faces. The Passages Vivienne and Choiseul are a leaf's blow away.

(Note: space's way of remembering what time forgets.)

lines du jour

quotha Annie Le Brun,

....Oh you dissatisfied of every kind, don't warm up to the idea of a new mode of violence that you could wear, without danger, in town as in the country, and throw away, after using it, at the bottom of the coffin-beds of some up-to-date individualism, like a Great Inquisitor of desire set free.

personism: the early years

Poetry is at its very roots tendentious.

In my opinion, the line: 'I walk alone into the road' constitutes agitation: the poet agitates for girls to walk with him. It's boring, you see, on your own! Ah, if only there were poetry as powerful as calling people together into co-operatives!"

— Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (1926)

still standing/where you stand?

Everybody likes to quote Stein on Pound:

Met Ezra Pound. Didn't like him. Found him to be the village explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.

Most everyone, when offering said quotation, seems to believe they thusly (or already) stand with Stein against village explainers.

Good comedy.

a specter is haunting national poetry month

Words always obscure the face behind them, but the Academy of American Poets has apparently determined that the ghost within American poetry is Karl Marx. A little late to the party, but — welcome!

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

no love is not dead

"Ideological purity" is indeed an impossible fantasy. But not a fantasy of some radical leftist position; rather, it's a fantasy that aligns the liberal-progressive with the corporate-conservative — appearing not as a demand, but as a twin foreclosure of thinking. One the one hand, it's longhand for "Stalinism," generalized such that the insult can be used to smear anyone who doesn't accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order. On the other, it's the shorthand of the whisper campaign concerning the lack of this supposed ideological purity, a negative seduction which always runs something like, you're complicit too, we saw working to pay your rent, we saw you buying a Coke, you're not so pure are you, nobody likes a hypocrite so why don't you just accept it and accept the supposed choices on offer from the current order? The fact that some turn this accusation against themselves as a justification of their activities proves nothing other than the proposition that Althusser really had a point when he wrote of the "Ideological State Apparatus."

In its very form, it proposes a Manichaean worldview of the pure/impure — stacked against the former, who are inevitably elites, tyrants, messianic crackpots, and/or hypocrites. However, even if it leaves these suggestions at the level of the implicit, it negotiates the binary via a second binary of impractical/pragmatic, with its rhetoric about striving for possible gains, actual alleviation of suffering, along with the usual apologetic promises to change things from the inside. It's the boilerplate, that is to say, that valorizes the idea of "the lesser of two evils," and proposes its apparent content.

Ironically, such Manichaean thought is at great hazard of finding itself quite contentless. If one first accepts the terms of the decision as being between "two evils" (having foreclosed the only remaining possibility, that of "ideological purity"); and if one will always choose "the lesser" regardless of the content of that position (regardless, that is to say, of its avowed stance on, e.g., military spending, universal health care, or capitalism); then the decision turns out to be purely formal. It finds itself on a slippery slope without any method of slowing its descent; there's no mechanism for knowing when one should stop preferring the lesser of two evils, and think about the entire system of choice in some different way.

An unceasing preference for the lesser of two evils, and for the worldview in which that seems like an accurate description of the choices, would mean that, for example, one would support the Vichy government, insofar as they would be likely to treat the population better than the National Socialists would, even if many concessions would have to be made. Indeed, this was how the case was presented, and it was persuasive to many.

History, alas, has judged these persons harshly: "collaborator" is the term that springs to mind. This is not by way of hurling further invective at the current avatars of "the lesser of two evils," but rather of noting that history is rather clear in showing more than two choices on offer. There were at least three: Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, or resistance. History suggests that, as a general principle, there are at least three choices; there is no crypto-ethical binary. History teaches as well that it requires no ideological purity, nor claim of same, to make the third (or any other) choice; that such choices are humanly (if not ideologically) open to everyone; and that such choices might be seen as supremely pragmatic. They require no test of purity at all, but the merely posing of the question, What would refusal look like, what would negation look like in this intolerable situation?

No matter how gracefully one might distinguish that political constellation from our current conjuncture, this final question presents itself with no less force.

It is perhaps also to-the-occasion to point out that every member of the resistance died (or will die all too soon), just like every Vichy sympathizer, and every Nazi. This includes the poets. Some are buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, or Montparnasse; some are not. Some are remembered; some are not. These are some poets who did not choose the lesser of two evils: Philippe Soupault was imprisoned and Breton fled; Rene Char, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Robert Desnos fought and wrote in the resistance.

No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouth

hereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.

Listen, I've had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.

Love's what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.

Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

Everything's transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouth

But still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.

And if some day you happen to think of it

Oh you, exact form and name of my love,

Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,

When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,

or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,

One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,

Or on some rainy day

At dawn just before getting into bed,

Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than any

other man did, and that it's a shame that you didn't realize it.

But tell yourself, too, that there's nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard and

Baudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly dead

women who despised even the purest love.

But as for you, when you die,

You'll still remain both beautiful and desirable.

I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparable

image present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other hand

should I outlive you

Your voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,

The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,

will still go on living in me

Yes in me, a poet who's neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,

Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so well

Have become their equal.

Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn't want to be remembered for doing anything else

he's ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.

if one wanted confirmation that modernism was in fact threatening to the bourgeoisie...

...or if one simply wanted to hear what anti-intellectual panic sounded like, or how it might lead a managerial class volkspoet to insult poetry at the same time he insulted all Japanese people, one could have attended the reading by Ted Kooser at the University of California, Davis, last Thursday, when he said, claiming to be quoting Karl Schapiro (as if that shored up the position, or made it not his own):

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that fell on American poetry were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

"at this stage of his life"

From the annals of Anglophilia, this fantasia from the estimable Enid Starkie. Gathering momentum as it goes, it consigns Baudelaire's talent to the paternalistic mercies so redolent of Empire, with an easy confidence that, had he only been heir to such management strategies, he could really have had a chance to straighten up and fly right, never doubting the desirability of this imagined outcome, a kind of starched quasi-achievement which is invested with more and more libidinal force with each clause before collapsing back down to the fleshpots of Paris.

In England Baudelaire, at this stage of his life, would have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge, as an undergraduate, where, under proctorial and tutorial supervision, he would have done himself no permanent harm. He would probably have made a name for himself in undergraduate circles, in artistic and literary clubs, and this might have satisfied his need for eccentric self-expression. In this simple and adolescent manner he would have grown out of his 'green-sickness', and, under tutorial pressure, might even have learned to work at set hours, in order to pass his examinations. It is, however, probable that he would have been a serious student, for, with his facility and felicity in Greek and Latin, he might have been a Balliol Scholar, and have read with distinction for Honour Moderations, while his taste for metaphysical and philosophical argument might have led him finally to Greats. But, in whatever manner he chose to spend his time, he would have been kept under kindly supervision during these critical years. Unfortunately the university system in France does not fulfil the same function as it does in England, and the life into which artistic and literary young men and plunged, on leaving school, is the Bohemian life of the Latin Quarter, the life of cafés, literary circles and student balls.

— Baudelaire, Enid Starkie

political undertakings

Note that black suit and coat have not only political beauty — as an expression of universal equality — but also poetic beauty: an expression of public spirit, an immense parade of political undertakers, love-stricken undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We're all celebrating some kind of burial or other.

Charles Baudelaire

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

de gustibus

From a letter of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara, dated Rome, Italy, 11/7/54:

I've become a moviegoer again, if not a bug or fan; it's like being an opium addict without getting any lift. Let's see, I've seen: Witness to Murder, Mogambo, Ulisee (I saw it in Italian, so that's what I call it), de Sica's dud, Stazione Termini, On the Waterfront, From Here to...and a couple of Italian ones I won't go into. Not to put a fine point on it, I thought them all hell; though many featured nice-lookers caught looking their best.

from "monological poem #1"

There are hot forms and
cold forms and poems

no matter how you break them and
what you print them on

are always cold (no matter how
hot they were at the manufacturing stage).

And yet hot and cold
sometimes aren't even all that

far apart and it has been known
for the one to turn into the other:

— Durs Grünbein

il faut se manifester

¶ Poems (like humans) do better when treated by poets as ends, not means — manifesting, not causing. The insistence that poems should be instruments toward some social end is limiting and damaging.

¶ However, critics might take poems as means — as part of social production; this is independent of the poet's making of the poem-as-end. These are fundamentally distinct conceptual matters.

¶ This fact and nothing else explains the diffident relations between poets and critics, though the fact often appears masked and in costume.

¶ The recognition of this categorical difference is shaped historically by the catastrophe of instrumental reason that defines Western modernity; said recognition and nothing else is what is meant by "the death of the author," though this fact too often appears masked for occasions.

¶ Though the categorical difference often appears adversarial, this conceals the actual adversarial relations.

¶ The poet's adversary (and we are not at all abashed to speak in such terms) is reification, spectacle — that is to say, dead manifestation.

¶ The critic's adversary is, in short, the advertiser (or politician): someone who, adopting the critic's position regarding social production, recuperates art-as-means toward the end of consolidating and advancing current conditions.

o'hara inedit

I don't like modern literature — anyway, no one does.

It's too precise at the outset; in the end too vague, and dancing before our eyes.

I wish it was more indefinite and more precise, that is, just what it isn't.

I wish its content were closer to what matters, to the stockpile of vital forces within its signs.

Actually, it's not O'Hara, but Gabriel Pomerand, dreaming in 1949 of some set of signs that would be their own content: "metagraphics," which turned out to be all-too-Egyptian.

It was not the signs but the dream of the signs; this, one suspects, is what Warburg chased after, and Pound in his Fenellosan error.

And it was not the signs but the dream of the signs, of annealing the fissure between signifier and signified, that allowed Pomerand to hear, in the bedside klaxon that summons us to work, the sound's dialectical double:

Throughout my life, I've had no other goal than to be an extremist, at that battlefront which alarm clocks suggest even as they lure us into the traps of life.

did we say 'poetics'? we meant 'film criticism'

In a longish essay about a collection of American film crit, British Film Institute honcho Clive James clarifies the stakes of a variety of debates by tendering two promises. The first is that theoretical approaches are just plain worse:

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.

The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope, and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform — subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level — is to help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.

That The Times believes it gains by reviling intellectualism in the arts is scarcely news; said tendency has grounded certain discussions of the stakes of theory in poetry and poetics (many of which are linked to from within this post). In those debates, the opposite number of theory tends to be a vitalist array of everyday life, immediacy, to-itselfness. James' (ahem) theory, as it creeps up through his weedy prickishness, is that the opposite of theory is observation.

Already this is a useful binary (and please understand that the word "binary" always already means false binary; we can simply save typing time by agreeing on this). It becomes practicallly revelatory as it leads James and us to the second tender:

For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own. The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean War.

But in the movies they are.

The virtue, per the estimable James, of observational criticism — the reason it is finally and irrevocably superior to theoretical criticism — is that it will forever and only confirm for us what we already know, what we flawlessly decided for ourselves without any fancypants hovering over our shoulder. As in, say, physics, the conclusions are already known; now we just need a lifetime supply of observations to justify them.

Let's nevermind the continent-sized hole in the logic (what about observational critcism whose observations dispute our own? what of theoretical readings that confirm our own initial pleasures and displeasures?) We'll ignore this yawning gap because James does, the only way he can: he defines it out of existence. Quicker than you can say "tautology," James proceeds as if we had all already agreed on the definitions: if a thought confirms our initial suppositions, it's an observation; if a thought confounds them, it is theoretical.

Which is another way of saying something that's been said before: theory is what you think, while my aesthetic judgment is common sense.

Which is to say that Clive James and sugarhigh! finally agree: theory absolutely should be excluded from film criticism, music criticism, poetry, poetics, politics, and every other sphere — if one is satisfied with rendering the tastes of a certain population as objective truths, and if one is satisfied with being limited to endless variations of whatever set of observations can be seen to achieve this objective.

poetics note

Thought experiment: imagine hundreds of physicists, in lectures and physics journals, recounting endlessly varied episodes — car crashes, swaying bridges, one tells of a cranky refrigerator his family had when he was a child, which they eventually pushed off the roof — to demonstrate the same few formulae over and over, which they all share and agree upon. Force equals mass times acceleration, simple harmonic oscillation takes the form F = -kx, heat cools. In fact, everyone reading or listening also knows these formulae that are being demonstrated with exemplary narratives, from which they can learn nothing and experience only cosmetic difference. This happens year after year; decades pass. Surely the publications and talks would just stop?

And yet, isn't the most popular poetry like this?

how tall/how serious

The hot hot gossip is that trinational man of mystery George Stanley will be awarded the Shelley Prize (given with regard to "genius and need") at the annual ceremony of the Poetry Society of America (where he will most surely co-write an occasional pantoum with Maxine Kumin). Stanley being one of our most beloved poets, we congratulate him and wish him a lovely trip to New York for the event, and rather expect a travel poem to follow, perhaps a mixture of "A Trip in Ireland" and "How Was Calgary?" with a pinch of "My Trip to New York."

[after two days at harvard]

Patsy isn't quite the right word. An instructive case would be John McCain, whose long term political strategy involves periodically breaking with his party of quasi-substantive issues, providing a sense of independence and objectivity, which in turn allows him to store up what might be called rhetorical capital, which is inevitably expended at critical junctures — major votes, candidate endorsements — to bolster the party line from which he is reputedly so autonomous.

But the McCain case is modulated by at least two factors: its extension over decades, and the fact that he hopes to be president. Both of these set horizons for exactly how far any given apostasy can go, and how much of his rhetorical capital he can sacrifice on the altar of his boss. This is why, finally, Colin Powell is a purer case, and far closer to being a patsy.

From the perspective of history, the entire narrative of Colin Powell, with its ambvalences and inconsistencies, can nonetheless be seen to have been directed toward a single moment. This can be phrased as a question: how does one go about accruing enough rhetorical capital in a single body that one can walk into a room, a room at the very center of the often decentered-seeming spectacle, and pass off as the truth the single utterly incredible lie you've been asked to tell? Despite the particularities and wonders of his career and the facts of his life, there is nothing about Colin Powell's life that is not the answer to this question.

Certainly Colin Powell was the author of his moment; surely he had intentions. That is as nothing. Or, rather, if one cannot grasp from this actual existing event what it means to say that the author is dead and intention is empty, one is likely to grasp little. "The world" (which here means, as so often, the balance of institutional and superinstitutional powers) needed one exact Colin Powell, and turned out to have taken the necessary steps to make sure one would be available.

Authors are Colin Powell writ small, patsies for what the social needs to get done. What's interesting is how the social — how history — has to go about the confabulations, what signs and wonders are needed to take care of business. Significations and form. In the contours of history's methods: the possibility for understanding social production that much better.

For Juliana: After two days at Harvard, we sing of the majestic need for credibility, and the majesty of the accrediting machines.

film professor flarfs!

Yes, thank you for your question, wonders will never cease.

"meanwhile, i'm stiiilllll thinking"

Isn't there a risk that this line of reasoning serves to suggest that poets lacking a dedicated knowledge of the empirical bases of their own critique therefore court the self-deluded fate of style without true criticality?

Hmm, where have we heard that before?

house for mr. is-was

We are sympathetic with what we take to be our fair colleague's basic desire found herein: that, if one is to be thinking about something, it's better to know extensive and intensive stuff about it. An informed critic...etc, whether it be regarding literature or political economy.

Nonetheless: hmm. We would no more gloss "bourgeois," e.g., as a term of "19th century sociology" than we would gloss "Oedipal" as a term of 20th century psychoanalysis. While these may be the moments in which the idea has been most revelatorily described, the human relations expressed by the terms have been with us quite a while longer — and still obtain. As of this moment, here in this world, "bourgeois" is no more a nostalgia or an archaicism than is, say, "poverty," or "empire." But we are sympathetic again with the desire to put the idea in the past.

What would it mean to suggest, in France in 1785, that a peasant ought have knowledge of statecraft to speak about the King, about the condition and experience of being his subject — an experience that permeated daily life? We should certainly imagine that any subject of the King would be both entitled (har har) and qualified to express her opinion on the matter, and even to take up arms to change conditions; surely a theorized knowledge of Machiavelli's texts wasn't required?

And finally, what of those who do the endless discursive work in service of capitalist chic — which is to say, almost everyone, almost every day? One suspects they too lack the appropriate technical knowledge — yet this ignorance goes unremarked and unregistered, as does most such ignorance in support of domination. Do they need less rhetorical policing?

lit-humument

We are taking simple pleasure in the object. In this case, Jen Bervin's book NETS, found at the Ugly Duckling Presse table in Texas. Less emergent poetry than Hollywood, it's what you'd call high concept: an idea that can be pitched in the time it takes an elevator to go from the lobby to the mezzanine at the Chateau Marmont, a pitch that moreover follows the time-honored scheme of "It's [popular form X] meets [popular form Y with somewhat different demographic appeal]!" (cheerfully accepting and suppressing the knowledge that X and Y were both produced by similar device).

It's Shakespeare's Sonnets meets Tom Phillips' A Humument! And it is: laid out inside spare 6.5" x 5" space, name on spine and simple design on tan cover, one encounters nothing more than all the sonnets, with most of the text grayed down to what looks like about 20 percent; in each, a few words here and there at 100 percent black form, more or less, a single contingent phrase, both a derivative and variable of the source poem. Not earth-shaking, but pleasing, strangely immediate and calm.

One can probably imagine what it looks like. No need: the web arm of the Conjunctions empire has done a swell job of laying a few online, though the rollover effect — as equivalently obvious as it seems — perhaps takes a little from the soothing simplicity. Nonetheless, here it is; scroll down a ways, and click on "From Nets."

how the thing is made

Every poet a MacGyver: one can build the ad hoc device (always for escape) just by jolting electricity through the cables, grasping the pair called Love and Benjamin and crossing the wires...

oscar news from all over

Tonight, Ben reads at Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC.

This morning, Louis saw Sophia Loren in LAX.

At sugarhigh! world headquarters, we are studying the press release for this; we believe without hesitation that there should be a great book of poetry named The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears, but — given the blurbs from Mr. Collins, Mr. Daniels, and Mr. Suarez — we fear that this isn't it and, moreover, that it is not a sequel to this.

upright

1) regarding Steve Evans' formerly-serialized and soon-to-be-Baffled essay on Poetry Foundation and the apparitions of the fiscal imaginary in contemporary poetry, we note this passage from Ted Kooser's seemingly-unironically-titled The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets. Regarding unconventional grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, typographic devices, or "any unusual shape in the way the poem is laid out on the page," the Poet Laureate advises, Don't be afraid to use the following devices, but give them a cost-benefit analysis.

2) If that's is supposed to funny, we'd prefer a somewhat more knowing rube's take on the economics of advice, free melody included! File under "game recognize game."

3) We are particularly bemused by Kooser's concerns about funny-shaped poems; he recommends one squint at a draft so thoroughly that it becomes pure shape, and then measure it as geostructure; is it about to fall over? Or does it stand solid and dependable? This urge to spirit poetry away from the realm of idea, to make it verifiable from the perspective of the craftsman-laborer—to render language as having the same relation to physics as do joists and drywall, columns and roofs—is a powerful one, to be sure. How are poems even to be considered as things if they don't conform to the logic of the most commonly desirable things? And how will we experience ourselves appropriately as virtuous craftsmen and laborers, rather than layabouts and leeches?

4) As one loves the foursquare prairie home, the common thing par excellance, the populist/individualist iteration of the forum and the very ideal of both concrete and abstract stability—one must hate certain kinds of poems as one must hate ruins, for their failure to be things. A ruin is not a negative thing. First it is obviously not a thing.

5) In other notes, have we mentioned the excellence of new hyphy track "18 Dummy," by The Federation? And in general sung the wonders of Rick Rock?

6) If we could actually do anything beyond the abstract realm of the affect worker—if we could actually manufact things—we would make the world a better place, possibly by wildcrafting designer ringtones for our friends. Under current conditions, the economy at the edge of the economy is a place where sweetness pools.

7) Having a big comeback around sugarhigh! world headquarters: "Wichita Lineman," Glen Campbell.

8) The possibility explored in the aforementioned Evans essay is one that is everywhere sullenly disavowed: that turns in poetic style could be explicitly (which is to say, not causally) connected to the styles of political regimes, even if many of the poets involved fancy themselves apolitical or even voted against the incumbent. Moreover, the call from Dana Gioia, Ted Kooser, the doyens of Poetry and the Poetry Foundation, for a return to a well-wrought poetic is not a new cry; surely it resounded in the France of Mallarmé-Dreyfus, the America of Ginsberg-McCarthy. If this moment is haunted, it's not a new ghost. Nor is the naming of the ghost a new fact; here's one appellation, written half-a-centtury ago:

...anything hybrid provokes the strongest rejection. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure the roof rested on columns.

sounds of summer

failed rhyme from last summer: Maos / chaos

proposed rhyme for this summer: economics / monomaniacs

take two aspirin and call Thomas Pynchon

Trying to discover what we'd been up to after three weeks of fairly acute amnesia, we discovered this book: 100 AMERICAN POETS AGAINST THE WAR: A PROTEST ANTHOLOGY, edited, selected, and introducted by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine.

This puzzled us, as we had no recollection of submitting a poem to said project, nor of having heard of said Introductor, and moreover we make a general if unrigorous policy of not being a poet against the war in any official sense. But a little investigation is a fascinating thing. It turns out that the Metropolitan Arts Press publishes three other books in its "Literature" line, each of which is a collection of poems by Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine. Continuing on to the only other section of the online catalog, "Art/Architecture Books," one discovers volumes on "New American Architecture" and "New Chicago Architecture," on the writings of Louis Sullivan, and gathering artworks by "the children of Chernobyl."

Needless to say, all these titles are written or edited, selected, and introducted by the estimable and tireless Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine. For those interested in ordering, the email address given is lodged in the UK, though charges for shippping and handling suggest that items will be mailed from North America; meanwhile, the main office is in Athens. We are excited to see our work represented under the aegis of this energetic and relentless personage!

Barbara Guest (1920-2006)

                    Leaving MODERNITY





               as if the encircled doe






          Medievality and in her hand, also dusted



                                        apparition no less

valentine's day is over

Every day we can agree with Bachelardette is like the day after Valentine's Day (didn't Morrissey say that?) To wit: "how will poets' situations change if the world does not?" Yes, yes. We take this not as plaintive despair but a battle cry.

To radical purists who think poets should stop jockeying for jobs and money and cultural capital that can be converted later into jobs and money: fight for nationalized health care, so poets can afford to get sick while pursuing aesthetic purity! (Alas, at the most empirical level, with decades of data available, it's obvious that voting Democratic helps this not happen. The fight is elsewhere!)

And to anti-elitist populists who think that intractably opaque or "academic" poems have destroyed poetry's market share and that such poetry offers contempt for the struggling citizen without time or energy or educational privilege to engage such art: don't blame poetry! Stand with poetry—fight for a world where life isn't reduced to mere survival!

flarf 2

Despite the various protestations, Dan Hoy's essay must be offering a good deal of satisfaction; if flarf intended in part to provoke, one can only imagine the delight at provoking an 11,000 word essay in Jacket.

poetics metanote: flarf

Jasper* calls for more response to the Hoy essay on Flarf; here at sh!, we have only the briefest:

One must respect his impulse, which is to look for the regulatory forces on supposedly autonomous art in the material sphere. Hoy is, more or less, asking the right kind of question. That said, I'm not clear on the source of the villain that Hoy sets out to slay, which isn't Google but the phantasmic promise of flarf as free and unregulated, autonomously critical art. Did a flarfist ever make such a claim, or has Hoy propped up this straw man merely to run him through?

If, for example, one took as evident that flarf proceeded from the assumption that any cultural production, flarf included, bore the imprint of the daily and dominated world from which it was brought into being, Hoy's essay wouldn't be suddenly false, but immediately irrelevant in the most basic ways. His essay depends, for its very existence, not on the nature of flarf, but partial, imprecise and excessive phrases about flarf themselves wrought of the most conventional poetic meta-language.

That is to say: 11,000+ words to, in effect, review blurbs.

This is a rather old story: a rissentiment about the social whirl of poetry presented as a theoretico-aesthetic analysis. The "news" Hoy presents — material conditions reappear in the cultural product — surely can't be news to any flarfist, even the ones who forgot to go to college and ignored any political analysis of art written after about 1857.

If there's anything new-ish to the action, it's the presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such (thanks to Tom Orange for the conversations regarding this topic). For this, Hoy can't be held entirely responsible; the relative success and insight of recent poetics in making theoretical accounts of itself that are at once persuasive, and relevant to poetics in general, has perhaps produced a certain set of expectations. Certainly there is a rise in general in the sense that poetry is well-accompanied by the author's "poetics," as seen in, for example, the collection edited by Spahr and Rankine (and the follow-up, Sewell and Rankine), or the increasing footage given over to critical writing by the poets in the back of the Norton Anthologies.

This issue — of how responsible poets are, especially those who make some claim on unfamiliarity, for theorizing their own practices — seems worth pondering further. This is true in part for exactly how historicizable an issue it might indeed be; it does seem inseparable from the endless parallel debates about the increasing academicization of poetry and the increasing centrality of the writing workshop.

Last things we'd like to know: what does Craig Dworkin think? What does (sigh) Jackson Mac Low think?

* ps to Jasper: sure, Cixous, but for those of us who can't make it, it's Balibar you want at least as much!

WWMD

Jordan proposes a "new meme"; we're down, way retroactively.

serial carnage and the rise of Ron Slate

Steve Evans' five-part (or three, depending on how you measure) analysis of Poetry Magazine's huge bequest and the rise of the Poetry Foundation, to be printed in full in The Baffler, can be found online—in order—here, here, and here. Explicating the social logic that speaks through characters like Dana Gioia and John Barr with such clarity seems exactly what arts journalism could aspire to: historicized art criticism, or material aesthetics.

yes, yes

Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humor as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness....
— Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

Without ascending to the questions of happiness, laughter (and delight, pleasure, desire) that haunt especially Adorno's aesthetics via their negative apparitions, I wish to pause only to notice that Baudelaire and Hölderlin are the only poets mentioned in the length of the landmark essay. In this way, despite its claims on radicality, the essay stands at the median of modern aesthetic philosophy, Heidegger to Deleuze, Benjamin to de Man, for which those same two poets must always be exemplary.

This is not to say that the pair are not astounding, signifcant, and particularly generative for philosophers of language and experience — of course they are. And yet, Baudelaire and Hölderlin share with Sex Pistols and Eyes Wide Shut the quality of being more interesting to read about than to read (or listen to, or watch). There is a suggestion in this about what critical accounts are less able to engage (again Adorno is exemplary), but there is also a sense that the aperture on what lyric poetry might yield is disastrously narrowed for even the most acute of philosophers — narrowed and pointed obscurely into a certain historical depth. One thinks, in corollary, of Lukács — always the absolutist case — and his inability even to figure lyric poetry tout cour as historically substantial: a true moment of comedy which inevitaby returns upon its author, in this case when Lenin, meeting Lukács, dismisses his dallying with culture entirely.

But the very unreadibility of the modern lyric (which, per Poetry magazine, is its own fault, natch, though their periodization of when things went off the tracks can't account for this particular history) remains as a powerful horizon for the most far-seeing critics interested in aesthetics and literary historiography. Franco Moretti, in the extraordinarily lucid and insightful introduction to his newly-reissued signal volume Signs Taken for Wonders, nonetheless joins the queue (in which Frederic Jameson is a notable and generous absence). After writing of tragedy's role in the age of absolutism, of the value in "a study of sexual prohibitions and certain dream symbols deriving from them" for understanding a time's literature of terror, of the relevance of the second industrial revolution to science fiction, he proposes that not all historical knowledge is necessarily pertinent to literary analysis:

The Second World War — to take a strident example — does not seem to have much usefulness for literary periodization or interpretation: this does not, obviously, make it a secondary episode or one without enormous explanatory power in other areas.

He could just as easily have said, "I have not made a reading of my century's lyric poetry" — and perhaps he does say so, insofar as the only poet he mentions twice in this introduction about literature (as opposed to the novel alone) is also the only poet he mentions once: "Baudelaire"...

rabbit rabbit

A 1913 Literary Evening
Presented by The Lab
www.thelab.org

Wednesday, Feb. 1st, 7pm, 2948 16th Street San Francisco, $5-15 admission

Readers: Hillary Burrill, Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Stacy Doris, Scott Inguito, Susan Maxwell (guests are threatened).

Please join 1913, a journal of forms, in celebrating the publication of its second issue where Bay Area contributors will read from their interdisciplinary work. Dedicated to printing the finest in contemporary poetry, art, poetics, and their intersections, 1913 numéro deux includes a chapbook by Brazilian poet Josely Vianna Baptista with original artwork by collaborator Francisco Faria, as well as a section of contemporary French poetry. Other contributors include Fanny Howe, John Taggart, John Yau, Sally Keith, Chet Weiner, Jen Hofer, Cort Day, and Lisa Robertson. http://www.journal1913.org

Download a flyer

sitekeeping

Some updates: sugarhigh! has added a link to the new blog formed by Laura Moriarty, A Tonalist Notes; some other urls have been updated. A new section of links has been added, to non-poetry blogs that I read (and that are updated regularly). Almost all the poems linked in the "Read Poems By" section are new; there is also a new download, of the Juliana Spahr chapbook "Gentle Now Don't Add To Heartache." Hope you are dry where you are.

what if content is sedimented form?

Van Dyke Parks, describing compositional methods during the Smile sessions:

Brian sang: "da da da da da da da da dah." I wrote "Columnaded ruins domino." I've lived to regret it for the majority of my adult life. Now, I'd like to enjoy it justly.