The Mumpsimus

Ron Silliman on Bolaño's poetry:
The pose of Bolaño-the-poet may well be more important – and certainly more powerful – than the fact of the poems themselves, but what might be most useful here is to note the whole notion of Bolaño posing. The unifying – indeed distinguishing – element of these poems, written in a post-Beat free verse that might be closest in English to Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ray Bremser, is the consistency of the pose: the intellectual as tough guy but one who is, at all moments, hard as nails & deeply sentimental. Think of upper limit Jean-Paul Belmondo in the films of Godard, lower limit Charles Bukowski (not as Mickey Rourke so much as Johnny Depp or, had he lived, Heath Ledger). Imagine Kerouac mixed with Camus.

I've long been fond of HeatherMcHugh's poetry, and have even longer been fond of collage-type poems, so I was particularly delighted to read her collage-poem of cyberspeak, "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" in a recent issue of The New Yorker:A beige toaster is a maggotbox.
A bit bucket is a data sink.
Farkled is a synonym for hosed.
Flamage is a weenie problem.That's just the first stanza. I was hooked right from there, but once it continued to "In MUDs one acknowledges/ a bonk with an oif./ (There’s a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)" I was totally in thrall -- the sky turning to the color of a screaming live TV wouldn't have kept me from continuing to read. The ending achieves perfection: both hilarious and somehow, strangely, ineffably ... sad.

I probably especially enjoyed the poem because I actually understand some of the terminology -- for instance, the title makes perfect sense to me, and the last lines evoke emotion not only because their rhythm is par…

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted: "Phil and Jack", about the often-overlooked connections between Philip K. Dick and Jack Spicer. I wrote it a few months ago, but various factors out of just about anyone's control caused its publication to be delayed (it's surprisingly difficult to get long lines of poetry to wrap and indent in some types of HTML!).

The column's a little bit scattershot, but that felt appropriate. And let me just say again that if you like poetry and haven't taken a look at My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's one of my favorite books of recent years.

K. Silem Mohammed:
One thing you don't see much of in the magic business, I'm guessing, is magicians who fall for their own tricks. That wouldn't just be stupidity; it would be insanity. In poetry, however, it's fairly common. Draw your own conclusions.
(via Ron Silliman)

When I wrote about Issue 1 yesterday, I noted it with amusement, but didn't give it much thought, because even as a piece of conceptual art it didn't really seem to me to be doing much that was particularly new in an interesting way. Steve Shaviro thinks that may be one way to find meaning in it:
...given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgr…

So, as I do every few days, I was reading Ron Silliman's blog, and his latest post was about an intriguing online book of nearly 4,000 pages of poetry by nearly 4,000 poets. Wow, I thought, what a huge undertaking -- what a massive organizational nightmare! It must have been put together by somebody with a lot of connections!

And then in the list of names, I noticed various people I knew. But I hadn't heard anything about this project. Why do my friends hide things from me? I thought. Are they ashamed that they have started writing and publishing poetry?

And then I got to the bottom of Ron Silliman's post:
No, the quirkiest thing about Issue 1 is going to be that, if it includes your name – and, hey, it probably does – you have no memory of having written that text, nor of submitting it to Issue 1. Or, as Ed Baker put it so elegantly in the comments stream to For Godot,

I DIDN’T FUCKING WRITE THIS GARBAGE! And then I took another look. And lo, there was my name. Huh. …

Via various sources, I learned that Reginald Shepherd died last night.

I didn't know him, but have friends who did at one time or another. He was a writer I discovered first through his blog, then his poems and essays, and I reviewed his book Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry for the print edition of Rain Taxi. Shepherd, I said, calledfor poetic ecumenicalism, a search for a path between the various warring villages dotting the landscape of the last half-century of poetic schools, churches, and licensing bureaus. He disdains the insularity of poetry's mainstreams and avant-gardes, its false dichotomies and self-important taxonomies. The contemporary poetry he advocates for is a poetry open to possibility, a poetry written by poets who do not shun a technique simply because of which side of the garden it grew in: "While availing themselves of all the resources of the lyric tradition, such poets remain alert to the seductions o…

Via Pierre Joris's blog, I just learned that the great writer and politician Aimé Césaire has died.

I didn't pay much attention to Césaire until grad school, when one of my favorite teachers (and later one of my thesis readers) was Keith Walker, whose particular specialty is francophone literature and whose particular interest is Césaire. His passion transferred to me, though I can't read French, so I've been stuck with the few English translations of Césaire's many works. Last year, I used Césaire's play A Tempest and excerpts from his Discourse on Colonialism in my AP Lit class (to go along with Shakespeare's Tempest), and I would do so again in a heartbeat, because it blew the kids' minds (in a good way).

Keith Walker told me a story that I only remember vague details of, but I'll tell what I can of it here. He used it to explain to me when he had fallen in love with Césaire's work himself. He was at school in France, and his roommate had c…

I'm glad to see that the desire to come up with stable definitions and labels for difficult-to-define-and-label things exists not only within the science fiction community, where the desire for taxonomy seems sometimes pathologic, but also within the world at large. Exhibit A: The Queen's English Society is demanding that poems be defined as things with rhyme and meter (or, rather, metre).

Those of us who have survived interminable discussions of what, exactly, makes something science fiction or fantasy can probably help our friends at the Queen's English Society. In fact, we can let them know that the desire for definition does not end with one term. Oh no. One of the great laws of the universe is: Taxonomy breeds taxonomy. Once we have one label or category, we need many. And then the many need many of their own.

For instance, the Queen's English Society will need to determine whether everything defined as "poetry" is (for instance) immersive poetry or …

One of the best new essay collections I have read in a long time is Reginald Shepherd's Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry. I first encountered Shepherd some years back in an issue of Poets & Writers with an essay he wrote on Samuel Delany, though I didn't realize he had written it until I discovered it reprinted in Orpheus in the Bronx. I first noted Shepherd's name when I discovered his blog, which is consistently rich with thoughtful posts on poetry, writing, teaching, and living. (Shepherd has done some additional blogging the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, which has become a diverse and fascinating site of discussion about all sorts of different views of poetry. Some of Shepherd's recentpostshave stirred up passionate, valuable discussion in their comments threads and elsewhere.)

I've just written and submitted a review of Orpheus in the Bronx, and will offer more details on that once I know its fate. …

Christian Bök offers his poetry students a somewhat different view than they are likely to get from many other teachers:
I often remind my students that, despite their belief that they have important knowledge to communicate to the world at large through their poetry, their status as poets already suggests that they have failed to make any momentous discovery that might have otherwise contributed to the history of knowledge; otherwise, the students might have exploited this insight in far more lucrative vocations, like the sciences or even business. I remind my students that they are probably taking my class in poetry because "math is hard"--and since they have no other worthy skills, they have chosen to accept their demotion to a lowly caste of literate nobodies. I get a few nervous giggles from the students after these waggish tirades--but then I underline my argument by saying that, if students really do believe that they are communicating, heretofore undiscovered, revelat…

Since leaving my home state, I've become something of a New Hampshire chauvinist. So it gives me great pleasure to see that the new U.S. poet laureate is Charles Simic, who has taught for many years at my own undergraduate alma mater, the University of New Hampshire (yes, I was at NYU longer, but UNH is the place that gave me a diploma, so I've got some loyalty to them). Last year, New Hampshire's Donald Hall was the poet laureate, and now it's Simic (who is, I must admit, a poet far closer to my tastes than Hall, but I have tremendous respect for Hall's work as an editor and promoter of poetry, and he's absolutely wonderful as a reader of his, or anybody's, work).

Selections of Simic's work are available online at the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation websites. I highly recommend his Selected Early Poems, the prose poems in The World Doesn't End, all of his essays and memoirs, and his book about our beloved Joseph Cornell, Dime-…

Michael Hamburger (1924-2007),
poet and translator
Wikipedia entry
The Poetry Archive (short bio; text and audio of poems)InterviewDaily Telegraph obituaryIndependent obituaryPosts by Reginald Shepherd on Hamburger

Richard Rorty (1931-2007),
philosopher and critic
Waggish on "the three Rorties"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entryRorty's homepage at StanfordInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
Articles by Rorty in DissentWikipedia entryWashington Post obituary
Todd Gitlin on RortyJo-Ann Mort's addendum to GitlinA collection of Rorty linksA critique of Rorty by Michael AlbertRorty on Pragmatism
Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007)
writer and filmmaker
Wikipedia entry
IMDB entryNY Times obituary"Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary Artist" by Samba Gadjigo2005 interview in The GuardianGuardian obituaryLiterary Encyclopedia entryWoman Is the Future of Man: Ousmane Sembène on Moolaadé2005 Socialist Worker interview
Emory University page with overview and analysis of…

Reginald Shepherd:
The poem performs a double transformation: translating feelings (in the sense of physical sensations) into feelings (in the sense of interior phenomena), and also vice versa (thought-feelings become sense-feelings, including the words themselves as sensory experiences). It turns conceptions and emotions into analogues of sensuous experience (by turning thoughts into images) and simultaneously turns both thoughts and images into, if not the intangible, then the not-quite-tangible: that is, into words, which can function as a shared medium precisely because they are not specific to individual sensations, while at the same time they are sources of sensation.

Alan DeNiro:And so it comes back to emotion, and in a weird way I feel a bit like I've come full circle since when I was 15 and writing poems and stories as a tonic to alleviate my misery. The emotional responses that I write about are part of the world, and part of my engagement with it. This isn't a move toward easy therapeutic confessionalism, but rather to be unafraid to use my self as material, halfway between the public ambulatory life and the private sphere of my own thoughts. To see my imperfections and faults as, perhaps, codes themselves that can at one point be reinterpreted on the page as hope.

This weekend, Meghan McCarron and I went to the Juniper Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts to see Alan DeNiro read, and to hang out with him, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press, and Holly and Theo Black. Alan read from "Home of The" from Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, and the audience was amused and enthusiastic, as was only proper.

There was even cotton candy. More readings need cotton candy.

The Juniper Festival is not something I was aware of before we visited, but it's a great event, and next year if I'm in the area, I hope to attend more of the readings and panel discussions, because Amherst is fun town and the mix of writers and readers is eclectic. (And Amherst Books is a marvelous bookstore!)

Lucy Corin particularly grabbed my attention with her reading from Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, a novel I now hope to read very soon. (Yes, I know I say that about a lot of books. And I mean it. I'm full of hope. Especially a…

From "The Sea and the Mirror" by W.H. Auden, 100 years old today:O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion's mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

There's some discussion going around the blogosphere of apocalypse and related issues. A post by Joseph Kugelmass at The Valve offers all sorts of interesting ideas, and promises to be the first part of a consideration of the role of poetry and apocalypse, particularly as it derives from the question of what Frank O'Hara has to do with global warming -- or, more accurately, isn't "personal" poetry trivial in a world faced with various threats of destruction?

[Update 1/29:The second post, with reference to the movie Children of Men and to O'Hara's concept of "personism" is now available.]

(Speaking of global warming and apocalypse, as somebody points out in the comments to Kugelmass's post, Bruce Sterling has declared that the Viridian Design movement is winning.)

I fear the discussion of poetry in a world of apocalyptic climate change will devolve into the old arguments about whether writers have to be "engaged" or not, and it's…