Thoughts on the Possibilities and Attractions and Revulsions of a Life Writing

Brent works @ SPD, and has for several years. He confirmed to me exactly how small the poetry scene is – at least the call-it-what you like crowd I run w/. Investigative, notational, experimental, difficult, troubling, yes yes, in part. Let’s face it, and revel in it, we’re an underground, made w/ sweat, we get to know each other’s faces. Harper, Bantam, Penguin, they can wait, you’ll make more, yes, but the whole thing will be a smaller, student-indie version of Brittany and J-lo anyway. Might as well do a student-indie version of a world that isn’t – can’t be – Brittany and J-Lo, nor even Susan Sontag and Margaret Atwood and the New York Review of Books. We went to the wrong schools, anyway.

Brent and I’ve been hanging out, and i think the best single thing we stumbled upon was this – Brent’s job pay him several times a year (I think) to go to book publishing trade shows, in every respect like the one’s my wife Sarah goes to for children’s clothes. The literary world – SPD, Coffee House, New Directions, sit in one row in a far corner of a room “you can barely see across on your tip-toes” (and Brent is a tall man). In fact, the whole shindig is so large, there are only a handful of indoor venues capable of accommodating it. That’s in the whole USofA, maties.

What is America buying (and just maybe reading?) Cook-books, bedtime stories, mysteries, Danielle Steel, pro- and anti- Bush books, how to learn Unix, how to build a deck, the Holy Bible, poems by a kid w/ a rare blood disorder who is 8, books on wine and postcards and Lonely Planet Baghdad (special section on beaches and underground clubs).

in other words – if you don’t – if we – sit down and set down an alternative version – our version – of this reality, it will not exist. NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT. Our voice – of difference, at times rendered as – rightly – dissent, is – if we are committed, if we care about this – important, vital, a treasure to develop – a work-practice, the activity (on-going) of wisdom and compassion. If we think the late capital narrative waist is too tight, or the American Male gendered hem too high, taint nothing else to do about it than to write and publish that writing as exactly and attentively as you can. Not even for someone else – poetry doesn’t sell – but to pass round to friends. And to make new friends. To build the community Anne Waldman is always building, that Allen was/is building, that a handful of teachers and writers and thinkers and lovers are working out, a community not built on commodities (not even built on that ur-fetish the book) but on… what? you tell me.

And even this small pool of poetry is – on Brent’s end – “all bizness”. Small Presses are desperate for the dead presidents, all these aging hippy gangsters writing threatening letters to distributors and book stores for $14.92, $123.86, shipping included. And the successful ones get successful by hopping ship, reprinting the classics or going soft on grants w/ too many strings attached. And, equally likely, dropping dead of exhaustion.

Yet, this very real liberation from an audience, which we all experience w/ the attendant rejection letters and Emily Dickensonia, is exactly what frees one to write w/o the concerns, cares and fetters of an audience, that constant power of communicability, the demand to make it accessible, make it a fucking Ikea or Lego block of words. This freedom is exactly what allows one to write up close and personal – not private, personal – like Emily D. Sara Larsen is studying her in Diane’s class and perhaps will be kicking us some gospel vis a vis Amherst’s finest some time soon.

So the curse is a blessing, is our chance to bring in vast joys and incomprehensible sorrows, minute and ephemeral notations, puzzling and obtuse ideas that distract yet compel, all the charged magnetic musings our cyborged hands can transmit. In other words, we can put the writing and the writer first – an intimacy. We can write at a high level, and allow others to meet us or no. We can all vow a poverty of writing, no attachments, and make our money somewhere else. I desperately want a teaching post, but I also desperately want to be a worthy teacher for my students time, not some middle-aged white guy w/ a steady income, a sort of genteel and non-descript (i.e. sanctioned) poetry cop (of one of several persuasions (flavors) now available) “nothing to see here, move along move along…like this”. I would like my classes to be an experience in what it means to come alive in words. My classes that don’t exist, my wandering from topic to topic,
excited and destroyed. Utter. ly. ish.

The poetry cop: its occurred to me that a large part of what is called “official verse culture” is really the investment of the large cultural institutions (w/ their tight links to the large economic and political ones) in demonstrating, publicly, for those few who come to see, the magic trick of non-threatening art. that there is really nothing to see here, that the manufactured reality persists here, is fed back, nothing to see, you already know this but, here, its pretty and its moving, its already known – see – like we said, so it is. here, here’s this big nothing, here it is like it is, like we want it to be, just like we want. the work is not chosen much for value, but because it continues the general cultural distraction of the subject from themselves. its not valued so much as art as it is as a spell to keep its audience asleep, dreaming the designated dream. Once an avant-garde dies, then they can be brought in, once the revolution is canned, it can be distributed. But first let the fish flop out its last gasps. Then gut it, textbook, syllabus, core curriculum. As all the taught writers were once revolutionaries (maybe not sir Philip Spencer but who knows? God I hated the Faerie Queen) but, having fallen silent, support the ‘natural’ edifice of the state.

The evident anguish and obvious irony of the way Stephen Malkmus cries “Ca-reer! Ca-reer!" in "Cut Yr Hair", going on to have – what else – just that. So how best to use our dirty hands? (“I realized that trouble was inevitable and the question was the best way to be in it” – Judith Butler, memory misquote (?), Gender Trouble, pg.1)

The rant does get in the way of making a subtle comment. Energy is horse-like – I have trouble riding it. This is a passionate release of frustration – a magic, but the spell does not transform compleat (a universe is made of such leftover ash).

To the extent I have a point above, one question might be, to what extent is techno-capitalism having trouble riding its horse? That trouble, around velocity and control (directionality), may be the best revolutionary aspect of our culture – its very systemic madness is what undermines and limns those exponents who would maintain and buttress its dominance. Maybe force the beast faster, push it to slobbery wide-eyed abandon, and then watch it drop. In the confusion, a good moment to slice off the rider’s (hello) head.

Hello. So a shout out to Brent Cunningham and to taking poetry wholeheartheadly: writing, publishing, editing, reading, recording, broadsiding, theorizing, conversing, listening. That list just might read better in reverse. Onto, into, across, of, thru.