Over at Exoskeleton, Johannes Goransson defines the lyric as "the monoglossic notion of poetry as elevated language," adding, "that is why I will always have a problem with using the lyric so unquestioningly." While I too am suspicious of a poetry that employs, as a defining feature, elevated language, it, as well as the "slippages" Goransson mentions, can't possibly reside solely in one camp or the other (lyric, langpo, etc.). As K. Silem Mohammad points out in his response to Goransson, "the work of Scalapino, Hejinian, and even Silliman is 'elevated' in the sense that it is instantly recognizable as language being used for 'poetic' purposes." Therefore, since it seems a lyric cannot be defined by the kinds of words it is made of, it can only be defined by the kinds of things it attempts to do. But is the poem's voice getting drowned out by the poet's voice outside the poem?
Goransson, via his take on Revell, seems to think the lyric mantra should be: "if we just pay 'attention' we won't let social conflict or ideology ruin our work." So the question arises, as it did in the recent discussion on what it means to be "post avant", is it a poet's politics or a poet's poetry that defines them? Are these two things separate? Should they be? "What makes Donald Revell an 'ultra-quietist'?" Mohammad asks. "Is it an actual quality of his work, or an attitude he displays 'outside' the work, in both criticism and casual comments?"
I love this question. I think I would add "or who he hangs out with." It seems to me, the more I ask What IS lyric or language poetry and who writes which?, What IS the School of Quietude or what IS Post Avant and which poets represent these camps?, the more I realize that the definitions for such things are so decentralized that the terms are only useful, if at all, on a personal level--as ways for individual readers to organize, for themselves, the poetic landscape. But as terms for use in a community, they, for me, have been rendered pretty impotent. What I've found, as Mohammad implies, is that these terms are being defined by what happens off the page as much as they are by what is in the frickin' poems. I've often gone to poets for the first time with preconceived ideas about them based on what label they had been given (by others, by themselves), and when I got to the actual page was like, "Seriously? THESE poems?"
The more I think about it, the more I blame us. If we took the time to read the poems and base our definitions and labels on the poetry instead of on the poets, and if our poems directly and clearly reflected what we think and how we speak (about poetry in this case...assuming we have taken the time to know what we think about such issues), I think the definitions would be less vague and more useful to us as a community (as Silliman points out, I'm just as guilty).
March 30, 2008
Stencilism
March 26, 2008
Bees Do It
More stuff on the uh... quantum nature of the written word. (Previously discussed on this blog here here and here). That grand grey majesty, Wallace Stegner, stands accused of plagiarizing Mary Hallock Foote, an early 20th century a magazine writer and illustrator. Stegner taught her stories while at Stanford and included her in anthologies, before deciding that page-long passages of her unpublished memoir were just too irresistible. So he jacked them for Angle of Repose.
It seems like we’ve reached a critical mass where there should be some micro-department of Plagiarism Studies. And there are noises in that directions, some serious, some less so. I mean, it’s got everything! Music, martial arts, you name it. Helen Keller was terrified of it. That’s why she wrote an autobiography. (Good news for those of us who are content producers, though: the courts have ruled that you cannot plagiarize yourself. Mostly.)
In grad school, I took a great course by Helen Sword on “Hauntology” (an expansive metaphor that encompasses literal haunting within texts, the author haunting linked texts of his/hers, and books haunted by other authors.) Check out her book, Ghostwriting Modernism, here. Of course with all of its ambiguities, plagiarism is a form of haunting (obscured intentions, chronological uncertainty, doubtful presences, etc.)
March 24, 2008
That's not what I meant.
Over at Harriet, which gets enough traffic, a fascinating, baffling debate between blogger Reginald Shepherd and commenter Michael Robbins (and a handful of others) about the intentional fallacy. What begins with civility quickly turns nasty as both sides assert faithful adherence to a theory – Shepherd to the New Critics and their separation of author and text, and Robbins to the Michaels & Knapp refutation of the intentional fallacy (“Against Theory”) from a philosophy of language perspective. Both Shepherd and Robbins make excellent points, and both vow vehement disagreement with the other and end the discussion with a throwing up of hands (hand vomit all around).
Some later commenters, notably Boyd Nielson, do a nice job of elucidating the fine, in fact, line between the two arguments and shortcomings in both team’s argumentative styles. I also appreciate Henry Gould’s and John’s (no last name given) attempts to carve out a middle ground: “Poetry is not so transparently interpretable […] the ‘intention’ of the work is not easy to define […] There is no direct path from the art-work to its ‘meaning.’ Just as the poem’s origin is rather unaccountable, its meanings are elusive, open.” So intention counts, but intention doesn’t equal meaning. The middle way isn’t always the right away, but this debate does remind me of the nature vs. nurture question. I.e., it’s both, stupid.
p.s. Since I last checked in, the string of comments has gotten even longer and there’s yet more exasperation and offense. Yowza.
March 20, 2008
Iowa City Scuffle
There’s been a big dust-up recently at the Iowa Writers Workshop regarding University of Iowa’s open access policy and MFA theses—meaning MFA theses would be made easily available on the web, potentially rendering the work ineligible for publication, either in part or as a whole, as this form of electronic “publication” could constitute previous publication in the eyes of many editors, publishers, and agents, not to mention the troubling way in which the university seemed to be appropriating creative work. As I understand the situation, there was always a mechanism in place for MFA students to protest the open access—they could file an embargo letter along with a supporting letter from their thesis advisor—but the university then reserves the right to find the support insufficient. And really, is this something students and faculty should be having to fight in the first place? Is the open access policy fair to creative writers?
Last I heard, the administration backed down at Iowa, but some people are worried this will be the way of the future at other schools. What do you think? Is this really a big deal, or were people just overreacting?
March 17, 2008
I heart loose cannons (Samantha Power, you’ll be missed)
Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell about the United States’ repeated failure to intervene internationally to prevent genocide. Samantha Power is currently promoting her new book Chasing the Flame about the life (and death in the terrorist bombing of the Canal Hotel in Iraq in 2003) of UN High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello. Samantha Power was, until quite recently, an unpaid foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Then, in an interview with The Scottsman, she said—off the record—that Hillary Clinton was a “monster:”
“We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything... You just look at her and think, 'Ergh.' But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
Shortly thereafter, she was forced to apologize and resign. In an appreciative piece about Power in the July 2007 issue of Men’s Vogue, Richard Holbrooke stated presciently that “She will always face the risk that more bureaucratically minded players—I'm picking my way through this very carefully—will exploit her passions, which make her vulnerable to the charge that she's not 'careful enough.' But I admire these qualities in her. We need voices like Samantha Power. Whether she does this inside the government or as an outside writer is a story that's still unfolding.”
Looks like it’s unfolded and it’s gonna have to be from the outside.
March 14, 2008
What ELSE would I judge it by?
Go check out Gary Sullivan's two-part post, "What is your book cover trying to tell us?" Most poets I know are kind of obsessed with book design and fetishize the "beautiful object" of the book. I'm sick of reviews that begin by noting how a given book is a lovely thing unto itself, but I agree that the cover makes a big difference in whether I or anyone feels compelled to pick the book up (or order it online as the case may be).
Sullivan's second post focuses on designer Jeff Clark, AKA Quemadura, who has recently done a lot of covers for Ahsahta Press. I have oohed and aahed over Clark's covers before, especially Chris Nealon's fantastic The Joyous Age. Sullivan thinks the cover really works for Nealon's book but wonders if Clark's designs on the whole aren't too marketing-department slick, which makes me feel like a sucker falling for another Apple campaign.
Some recent covers I've liked: Felonies of Illusion by Mark Wallace, designed by K. Lorraine Graham, Sandra Beasley's Theories of Falling (slick alert?), and from the small press/chapbook front, Victor in the New World by Chad Reynolds from Rope-a-Dope Press right here in Boston.
UPDATE: More cover analysis madness at LIME TREE.
March 12, 2008
Draw, ya varmint!
I was reading Science and Steepleflower by Forrest Gander yesterday (who, by the way, has a podcast), and was enjoying the extravagance of the diction immensely. In fact, I can’t remember the last book of poetry I’ve read that gave me such pleasure in confoundatory language. This led me to an unprovable thought about the avant-garde: the more specific the language becomes, the more radical the poem becomes. To whit:
agaric
agnostoid
anguilliform
arborescing
aseptic
breccia
canthi
cartouche
cereus
chert
clades
consubstantial
dehiscing
enharmonic
ferruginous
fillip
flexural
galena
glabella
grum
isomorphic
lapilli
lithofacies
lour
matutinal
Merthiolate
Ordovician
orthogonal
penetralia
phreatomagnetic
plagioclase
polyhedrons
pygidium
quintral
raptus
rutilant
scoriaceous
selvage
Silurian
spiracles
spirea
sthenic
stoup
synoptic
tephra
topos
ungulate
volant
I am sure this particular strain of performativity was etched in carbonite in my medulla oblongata when I watched that scene from Say Anything where Lloyd flips through Diane’s dictionary and notices that she had highlighted multiple words on every page), but it actually started much much earlier, when I read a series that gave me these to chew on:
adjure
affrays
ambit
anadem
anele
apothegm
arete
aumbrie
auto-da-fe
badinage
bayamo
bedizened
caducity
chancrous
charlock
chatoyant
chlamys
chrism
clinquant
condign
contumely
coquelicot
corybantic
deflagration
demnify
destrier
desuetude
devoir
donjon
eidolon
epitonic
etiolate
febrifuge
febrile
feoffment
formication
fuligin
fulvous
gelid
hebetude
imbricated
impercipient
inanition
ineleuctable
innominate
irenic
jacinth
jannissary
jerrid
lacustrine
littoral
lorn
macerate
malison
mephitic
oriflamme
orisons
paresis
parethesia
percipience
plinth
propiquinity
quirt
refulgent
relict
roborant
sackbut
sapid
sark
scend
sedulously
sequacious
spandrels
spavined
spilth
steerhorn
stertorius
stillatory
suasion
surquedry
tabidly
tarn
telic
tenebrous
thetic
theurgy
thurible
travertine
treacher
unassoiled
vambrace
virga
viscid
vitiated
vizards
vlei
Crazy, right? I honestly can’t think of another author who has so thoroughly slapped around my sense of linguistic self-possession. It’s an author whom some people think that J.K. Rowling has stolen from, yet also one who views Faulkner, James, and Conrad as major influences (and let me tell you how unlikely I thought those four would ever end up in a sentence together). Why, Stephen R. Donaldson, of course. The author of the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, starring the titular leper anti-hero in a fantastical land. I’ve read other fantasy series, but not one that so systematically assaulted common diction. (Reading the series is arduous for other reasons, mostly because the protagonists suffer so intensely for hundreds of pages at a time with relentlessly insistent descriptions of their anguish. Yet this results in plots that deliver an immense amount of catharsis, which seems to take the reader by surprise somehow.)
I don’t know what this says about genre and literariness exactly, though really it does make me intensely curious as to what his process is--how many of you have actually heard someone say any of the preceding words out loud?--and, to a lesser extent, just what sort of editor they gave him. (My undergrad fiction professor used to say that every word you choose over another loses you a reader, and Donaldson clearly has nerves of steel in that regard.) So I’ve been wondering if there are other authors out there working in the margins or in marginalized genres (in the eyes of the literary world) who seem to have an obscure but unmistakable linguistic agenda.
March 9, 2008
Irony is "dead"
I'm interested in Seth Abramson's take on an essay in the recent issue of Jacket -- "The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a 'New Sincerity'" by Jason Morris -- partly because Morris attempts to describe a group of artists that has some overlap with those Ana and I brazenly lumped into the "New Childishness" "school" (Joanna Newsom and Tao Lin), and partly because, as it does Seth, the essay strikes me as wrong.
Even if one takes the term "The New Sincerity" at face value, i.e., interprets it as sincere, as Morris does, it seems overapplied or inappropriately applied. Seth notes: "Reading the essay became, in many respects, exactly the sort of experience I'd feared: a disappointing one. As a fan of Wes Anderson's films, I'd be the last to say, as Morris does, that they aim at 'an honest representation of reality.'" And: "if one has to re-define terms in order to crowbar them into an aesthetic, it seems to me as though the notion of 'sincerity' has already been sacrificed from the start." Exactly ... one must essentially redefine "sincerity" as "irony" to call Anderon's films "sincere" with a straight face. But the straight face in the first place is one of my problems with the essay. I mean, to quote from Joe Massey's manifesto thusly:
Don’t plasticize your shit with dildonic irony. Keep it real, ass.
The New Sincerity rejects Top Gun sunglasses and floppy bangs that scream “trying too hard!”
The New Sincerity rejects the inside egg-headed jokes of academic crackers!
FUCK YOU, and your THEORY GOGGLES!
and then follow the quote up with this: "On first reading this it seemed to me to fit a very basic, intuitive definition of messianism: Something’s Coming. Something that will do good, something that will heal, something that will reverse wrongs." That seems to me to fit a very basic, intuitive definition of missing the point.
March 6, 2008
Lit News Round-Up
In response to the recent fabricated memoir double-whammy, Meghan O'Rourke over at Slate explores why publishers remain so inept at spotting the fakes.
Nick Antosca tracks writers' political contributions.
Creepy celebrity exploitation alert! Esquire has published a fictionalized account of Heath Ledger’s last days. Ugh.
Robert Olen Butler, of Pulitzer Prize and Gawker fame, has a new story collection out that imagines the sex lives of famous political figures.
All the while, The Guardian discusses why literary sex sex so often goes terribly wrong on the page.
Jim Shepard has won The Story Prize for his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway. Check out his wonderful story, Pleasure Boating in
Allegra Goodman’s story, Closely Held, also from the Spring 2007 issue of Ploughshares, has been selected for Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie.
March 4, 2008
“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
As has been noted before in this space, there are many who would say that all poetry book contests are equal wastes of time and money. But it does seem that some contests might be more equal than others; contests that offer more in terms of prize money, maybe, instead of the customary $1000 and publication.
University of Arkansas Press, for instance, has been running an annual poetry book competition for years, but this year they've decided to add a monetary award of $5,000 to the previous award of publication-only. They’ve opted to do this both to honor the press’s co-founder and first director Miller Williams and to “increase the number of submissions for its competition as well as attract more established poets.”
Does it matter to you, Ploughshares blog readers, if you get paid for your poetry, or is publication alone enough? Are you more likely to submit to this, or any other, contest because they offer a particularly large monetary prize? William Slaughter says that “Poetry is a gift economy,” but it is nice to be able to say that you received a generous cash prize for your work even if it’s most likely in what might be called “the low four figures."
But is that money enough to motivate anyone? Will it lead to more and /or better submissions? Editors who run presses, do you offer prizes? If not why not and do you wish you could?
Do you want Freys with that?
More lying liars and the lies they tell have been exposed. The New York Times reports today that "Love and Consequences" by "Margaret B. Jones," a memoir of growing up a half-white, half-Native American foster kid running drugs in South Central, was a big old fake.
"Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family." Wow, that's really not true, isn't it? Also: "She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed." We have the author's sister to thank for revealing the truth.
This comes hot on the heels of "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" by Misha Defonseca (nee Monique De Wael) being revealed also to be a big fat flipping lie.
At least it seems like these people have written compelling fiction, such as it is. But now the inevitable question: For God's sake, why lie? Why not just write a novel about SCLA drug-dealing based on research? That'd be good, right? Reportage, journalism? Didn't it used to be that we would tell someone's story and not actually be that person? If you find Inuits fascinating, for example, can't you just go find some and live with them and tell their stories -- must you fabricate a whole sham life as an Inuit too?
