Fragments

Post-festival trauma, I wrote in the notebook: tendency to leap up out of a sound sleep babbling about “poetry and the ideal life.” Uncontrollable fits of autographing and the completely unfounded illusion that I'm suddenly understanding Chinese…. Fear of green pencils. There’s something about being or having been so present somewhere so far away I can’t adjust to, I can’t readjust out of. What was I doing there remains unanswered, turns to What am I doing here?

One poet had titled himself "The Dean of the School of Ghostly Rain," I was told, another invented "The School of the Rose."

"Betcha you're sorry to be back," sings a passing colleague in the hallway. Uh.... In the mostly loose fast encounters tilting toward Christmas there's nothing to say except that it was wonderful.... I don't have sound bites: I think I'm still in shock. In LAX I couldn’t understand why the posters advertising the Sherlock Holmes movie had that big picture of Prince (circa Purple Rain) on ‘em…it was Rachel MacAdams…but really....

Poets to look out for (calling all translators!!) include: Max Lo, Yuhong Chen, Ko-Hua Chen, and Yang Xiaobin as well as (luckily translated) the Chinese poet Yan Li.

Resetting the date and time I see I flew off the map. What I mean is that since it’s not a globe but a flattened picture (America stage right, Europe Africa Asia stage left) I flew, for the first time, in and out of the blue margins of the represented world.

"Now we're going to be French," one of the French poets said, before asking about my sexuality.

Post-festival trauma: a tendency to expect mutant zombies or damaged brides to appear at poetry readings. Mutant zombies saved the opening ceremonies from being too lovely, and damaged brides and gigantic faceless women all in black like pieces off the chessboard of some surrealist artist drifted in and out of the closing ceremonies.

Things I don’t want to forget include the photographer, singer and poet Yang Xiaobin getting up at the dinner in the French Brasserie in downtown Taipei to belt out a couple of a cappella songs—including “O Sole Mio.” Noticing that glasses held aloft in the light (one of the many toasts) were marked by lip imprints, men’s and women’s glasses—as though we all were wearing lip gloss. Dark wine in the raised glasses: the sweet-bitter tang of Beaujolais Nouveau.... A huge cake came in decorated with the festival poster image (green pencils growing into shade trees...) as if we were at a sort of birthday party for poetry.

The moderator of one panel, who showed up late, unprepared, and eager to talk about his own work (“Why didn’t you come to my performance?” He asked, rather grimly); perfectly chosen outfit, shirt open to show his graying chest hair. All the careful glossiness marred by a dark wad of spinach or seaweed caught in the front of his large gleaming smile.

I'm told that the phrase for poetry that doesn't matter, that does nothing, is "saliva poetry."

The tour of the intricate and gorgeous "Lin Garden," a text of layered spaces and structures. The realization that ambition demands one read the world, insists on symbols, turns everything into meaning. Ten minutes into the tour it was almost impossible to breathe under the guide's piled lists of significant, or "auspicious," arrangements, the necessity of trying to recall and describe the endless signage of that civilization.

LAX—the United terminal—on that Sunday with no end: shabby, cheap, dirty, badly designed space (like most people who are trying to refresh or keep a charge, I was sitting on the concrete floor to write); a dearth of native speakers. Parov’s Stellar pretty Coco (I picked up Austrian techno in the “Taiwanese Indie” section—how does that work?) easing the transition from being treated as a symbolic object to being treated like an almost meaningless and disposable one; America, on first re-encounter, seems remarkable for a kind of flat brutality something real seeps up around the edges of, through a lot of superficiality or even what seems like (clumsy) acting. I walked, or tried to walk, through security with a little bottle of Taiwanese water—I was that out of it. Everyone seemed to be talking movies or comparing technology. Overheard scraps of conversation: “Car goes off ledge day,” “my hand is not geometric,” “I’ve got the complete works of Shakespeare and some other stuff….”

From a notebook: the distant sound of someone's pleasure somewhere nearby in the "Beauty Hotel" and my trying to find the word for the sound, writing: "Whistling almost, sobbing, hooting."

In one lecture, the French poet’s “word” “world” problem: the word is far away, he kept saying (he wasn’t confused—just couldn’t get at the similar-but-different sounds in his otherwise wonderful English): he stopped and asked us to hear world there.

On one of the first days home standing stock still in the Rite Aid listening to what seemed to be a patriotic song (sung with a Texas twang) piped in over loudspeakers, a ditty insisting "America is the greatest land" with a chorus of Hallelujahs. I was thinking We have lost our minds....

The world is closer than the word, really.

"Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues rotating on earth." Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, "Permanent Home"; Taiwanese....

poets at the palace...

some time / images

Opening Ceremonies

pink cadillac

I’m remembering what a friend said after seeing Cat Power live for the first time, bemused and mildly shocked: “You wouldn’t guess it from her voice, but she’s a big glossy thing.” On the street in Taipei I have the unnerving experience of being immediately recognizable as a foreigner: there are quick glances, open stares, and a fraying comet like-trail of hellos & other efforts to practice English. I’m very nearly as much the glaringly anomalous part of the picture as Paul Miller was in Helsinki. Suddenly I’m a “woman” and—despite graying hair—almost as much of a “blond” as I was half my lifetime ago, on my first visit to Italy. Yesterday—on my first cab ride alone—I got the news that my cloak of (sexual) invisibility (almost perfect in the States) wasn’t working: the driver hit on me aggressively, almost contemptuously (perhaps in part because I was headed to a Hot Springs hotel? Peitou has a history…): “You pretty woman, me gentleman….” “I’m glad to hear you’re a gentleman,” I muttered. It went downhill from there and I’d stopped speaking to him long before the road turned (narrow, winding upward) into a landscape out of a Chinese painting…. Today, on the street, I think to myself (maybe the image is protective?) that I feel like a Cadillac from the 1950s: I have fins and endless chrome, I guzzle gas, I take up too much of the street….

"Interwoven"

Increasing sense of fracture and estrangement and then a more intense presence? Arrive, then—-today: fragments. Taipei is sunless so far (one weak watery glimpse of light this morning) and both ugly and lovely. The buildings are mostly more grey than the sky but the complicated textures and ever-present flutter of some flourishing greenery and the sense of constant discovery mean that the gaze is constantly refreshed. There’s always (shift scale, quickly) something else to add to the impressions. Added to mine, the whirl of the hectic schedule: our wonderful guide Ms. Liao Homin bustles us into astonishing restaurants, commands that the table be filled with exquisite and rare dishes, and after we taste everything (whoosh) off we go. Maybe I should say “sploosh”? There was a moment at the Shanghai-style family restaurant when the waitress dumped the leftover and still hot the Lion’s Head soup into a plastic bag on the table and knotted the top in one swift faultless gesture—and set it down at the edge of the table beginning to gleam with the pressure and heat. It’s like the taxi driving here: there’s an almost incomprehensible level of skill and risk, but once you realize that the former matches the latter you can open your eyes, fascinated by intensity or acrobatics of what looks like the textured and absolutely constant attention or awareness, as if you were moving in a school of fish or a flock of birds--controlled by traffic signals and men in raincoats frantically waving little lighted sticks (as if there were a constant series of accidents). As I (attempt to) practice my French (with the poets from Paris—-Caroline DuBois, Stephane Bouquet, and Ryoko Sekiguchi) it gets worse, I swear, or maybe I mean its total inadequacy becomes painfully obvious. Knowing more means knowing there is so much more you don’t know. Do more, inhabit the limits. While most of the Taiwanese poetry I am encountering is not translated, her intense reading and extraordinary presence led me to beg for the English version of Yuhong Chen's poem...and now to be haunted by its easy and deep connection of image and thought: "Interwoven." I have only impressions added (too swiftly) to impressions.

some notes on 11/22/09 (translation, the idea of the National)

The plonky, stylized, music loud in the breakfast room in the hotel (breakfast: pickles, eggs, tofu, rice, cake sticky buns….and on and on) is “When You Wish Upon a Star” cheerful but cloying and a bit skewed: in a David Lynch film this is what the psychotic’s music box (opened by the foolish investigator alone in the creepy house) would play? Loud, dense, somehow broodingly happy, clumsily, emphatically so. I could be projecting? I’m still trying to process yesterday’s panels and Opening Ceremonies. The major shock is of course the encounter with my own idiocy: as I speak no Chinese the experience of being in a conversation, on a public panel, in which I feel first deaf, then idiotic, and then absolutely dependent on the skills and savvy of the (amazing) translator Michelle Yeh, is completely stunning. Yeh has perfect timing, and an uncanny way of communicating a feeling of details in a quick summary, but I am having the linguistic experience of that grand and terrifying moment—in the fairy tales I loved as a child—in which the Genie grabs the hero and whisks him up over deserts and mountain ranges and drops him on the terrace of the palace for a quick glance into a window and then lifts him off again. Whoosh! At which point I’m trying, you understand, to formulate a response to what I’ve just been told was said…. To say it’s dizzying would be an understatement. And then the shock, as the evening goes on, of the realization that the idea of National literatures is very much part of the base of this conversation. I might have suspected as much when I got the invitation and realized I was the only American? It’s a wonderful reversal of the situation I have seen enacted again and again (without thinking about how weird it is) in America, when the only visiting Chinese or Caribbean writer becomes the authority on as well as best specimen of the writing of an entire country or region, but it’s a fresh-to-the-point of bizarre experience to feel what that’s like from the other side. (Here’s a question: if you felt you had to represent contemporary American literature abroad, in this kind of situation, how many writers would you feel you needed to invite? What would be the minimum?) (I'm not asking who you'd invite, although I suppose that's part of the answer.) I had been thinking about the idea of the representative (distrustfully), so the experience is a gift (and god knows I do contain multitudes, as we say), but I’m as appalled by my own situation as Michelle is by the large general claims being made by one of the speakers: he says, she whispers impatiently, Chinese poetry has no subject so it has no ego. We exchange a quick skeptical glance before she returns to listening and I return to the attempt to look as if I am listening while I wait to be given some (whoosh!) glimpse of what is being said. In imitation or enactment of the complicated political situation of the country, claims for Chinese poetry will overlap with and then suddenly become very distinct from claims for Taiwanese poetry as, within those areas, aesthetic and historical differences and factions begin to emerge, becoming visible / audible (thanks to Michelle!!!) even to the disoriented and foolish "American."

Taipei notes (rough & in progress)

11/21/09
Weeks of worrying about disengaging from a complicated and intense semester just before it ends, and fretting (when I have a spare moment) about the fact that I don’t have any idea what the schedule of the week-long International Poetry Festival involves (what have I actually agreed to do? I have NO idea!!!) and trying to get ready to go somewhere I’ve never been (stress headed into mild terror) ends as I check the bag in New Orleans: suddenly the whole thing is really out of my hands and I feel the perfect joy of actual travel. I’m on the way, wherever it is. In Los Angeles, where I find I not only have to walk out of security and go through it again, I also have to find my way to another terminal, pure joy is again compromised by peevishness, impatience with my own country: why is America so inefficient, why are our airports so badly signed, so vast and filthy, why the does the shuttle only stop in one place, why… and so on. No wonder we love franchises: places where you know not only what to expect but how to get what you expect (where things are located). Boredom is what passes for care—but mostly it’s the old bait and switch. “Restaurants,” “Shops” said the sign with the arrow—pointing past the one little “Marina Bar” towards kiosks selling (mostly) that San Francisco treat, See’s chocolates. I called Bhanu before we took off, to say “my airplane has a big flower on it.” So surprisingly girly, so other, that open blossom (cherry? Rose?) on the tail fin of the massive plane (China Air) at the gate in the stripped down terminal at Tom Bradley. Before take off there’s not any of the fuss about safety I’m used to, none of that please direct your attention to the stewardesses: if you don’t know how to buckle a seat belt you shouldn’t be here, and if the plane goes down (with hundreds and hundreds on board) then…then? Knowing that safety lights in the aisles should come on isn’t going to save your ass. The stewardesses look about 18 years old and are dressed in lovely pale mauve uniforms, sort of a military or marching band feel to them, very clean lines, but the color’s immensely soft or sort of faded. I’m trying to say something about how these gorgeous young women look both precise and vague at the same time—a state they inhabit through out the flight. If you are not paying attention, you’ll miss them. Once we are in the air I’m given (in response for a request for ginger ale) a tiny paper cup about half-full, barely enough to cover a single ice-cube…which is, in fact, really enough of that sugary drink. The flight was too long and strange to speak of (and the food was unspeakable) and it took me really a long time to figure out how to use the in-flight entertainment system: “Fantasy Sky.” There’s something about seeing the characters, the ideograms, that leaves me feeling incapable and foolish: here’s the trace of thousands of years of culture, like a wrought iron gate I circle, afraid even of touching. I am trying to make sounds (for “thank you” first of all) but the written words are simply so terrifyingly foreign that it takes hours for me to realize that the characters I’m seeing—at the bottom of my row mate’s glowing screen, mean these are (duh) American movies, with subtitles in Chinese. I watched 500 Days of Summer and The Time Traveler’s Wife. When we land I hear the announcement “Welcome to Taiwan” and realize that is a sentence I had no expectation of hearing in my life. When it’s repeated, by one of the conference organizers, on a cell phone handed to me by the limo driver who picks me up, the sentence became stranger: “Laura Mullen, Welcome to Taiwan.” I recalled the friend who took up banjo playing and—with it—a collection of jokes about banjo players, the one that stuck with me: “Sentences you will never hear: ‘Is that the banjo-player’s Porsche?’” Welcome to Taiwan seems like just such a sentence: so completely outside of all expectations as to sound surreal—incomprehensible grace.

hei: gratitude

On the last leg of the flight into Helsinki, last February, Finnair, I sat down next to my row mate & used up my entire stock of Finnish: "Hei," I said, or Hi. I'd been listening to how it was said & carried it off well enough so that he launched into a long response I couldn't make anything of, as we say. Of course I made or got so much, so much much more that I could write about in an hour, probably. My own ignorance, sure, but also his kindness, his responsiveness, the possibility of connection, the music of his language, his blue eyes, nice face...a dense and multilayered experience I cut off by admitting my ignorance, coming back to that zero place: "I'm sorry, I don't speak...." A friend I was talking to, admitting my fear of heading off to Asia with nothing of Chinese (okay, I can mangle "thank you"), reminded me of how lovely it is to be where you don't understand the language. That conversation, and C.D. Wright's Cooling Time, made me think it was worthwhile saying something I'd been thinking about poetry and languages. Let me digress by way of the acquaintance who declared "I hate poetry that makes me feel stupid." Do you speak German, I wanted to ask her, later (after I'd thought about it & got past the Californian, "Don't say 'makes me feel'...say I feel...," part): Do you hate German, because when you hear it you don't understand it? Do you hate Germans for speaking it? Or any other language, X language, you don't speak? I bet the question has a terrible seed of truth: I mean, I imagine that some of what happens in the moment to moment hardcore ugliness of our interaction with those whose countries we've entered unprepared has to do with the frustration of encountering what seems to our soldiers' untrained ears like gibberish. Let me put it this way: I learned to speak early & well so as to remove myself from the possibility of physical harm, and when boys--my brother, other boys--reached out to hit me (o a long long time ago) I could see their frustration, knew that the words they couldn't form informed their clenched hands and their urgent, angry, force. I can say mean things--it's still a pleasure--I can find out what I think and articulate it (finding out what I feel is more difficult). The boys knew what they felt...not what they thought? A long time later a lover said goodbye in a note in which he said goodbye was all he would say, because (we both cared about language) I was so much better at speaking of what I felt. Goodbye. "I hate poetry that makes me feel stupid." Where I was going with this? Slowly toward gratitude for the encounter with what you do not understand, for which--bless it--poetry can prepare us. Such a comparatively safe situation! To encounter a poem, in English, and think...I don't know how to read this! I don't know what to do with this! I don't even know if this is poetry! Hei! What an extraordinary gift that encounter is, meaning someone has ventured out of our normal walks and ways, someone has extended a hand, someone has truly taken a risk, ventured to trust us. I sat in a classroom of undergraduates disturbed and dismayed by a Barbara Guest poem...unready to read what resists translation, eager to be glib, to be smart...no, to feel smart. I like poetry, they might say, that makes me feel smart. (Don't say "makes me..."?) I do, I do, I do understand...--despite myself. I too! I also, oh yes, like to feel smart, right, in control and rich--but or and my fondness for these feelings are culturally situated and come at a cost: I mean meeting these desires has a price. Others pay, as well as myself. I really do, too much, like the encounter with what restores and sustains my best ideas about myself...but what requires a new approach or challenges old ideas "makes me feel" wiser, larger, stranger, more interesting, more capable, deeper, and...happier (what I know of happiness). I recall Bhanu Kapil saying she liked reading the difficult homi bhabha: of Location of Culture she said, "it makes me feel posh." When I started writing this entry I wanted to say something like when you see a poem you can't read / understand, then, before you say anything else, say thank you to the poet. Say thank you, I didn't know this experience was available and I am grateful to you to showing me that there are other ways, other modes, other stances. Then slow down and see if you can learn to say "hello" or "hi" to that new experience. Hi. No one is going to hit you: there is a space to connect, or not to connect. "If it's boring," someone said John Ashbery said about something they were planning to go to, "that will be interesting." There are so many many feelings and thoughts you might be able to have if you let yourself off the hook of needing to feel like you know it all already.... Oh, I think I'm writing this for someone (else), but of course "I'm talking to myself" (as the saying goes). Last night I woke from dreams I don't recall screaming, silently, "I don't understand, I don't understand, I don't understand...." Just because it doesn't unfold just as you expect it to and where and when and how you want it to...all that says as much about you as it does about poetry...or love....

aliento!!!

In our shared air, in the artist's active breathing, adventure. Aliento, 'breath' in Spanish, reminds us of the body's trafficked borders (alien air in, exhaled sound out) and calls us to recall ourselves as strangers, giving welcome to the wondrous strange. Over and over, the voyage out, a risking of everything, and a profoundly transformed return to an origin also changed. At once vulnerable and powerful, Claire Chase's debut doesn't feel like a solo album: the completely involved player, astonishing in her range, becomes exemplary, communing, communicating-- and a listener (taken with her to the edge of what is possible to utter and take in), involved and active, one more among a number of presences invoked. Chase's breathtaking physicality gives her the uncanny ability to sound, at points, like a crowd, and the mixture of the electronic and acoustic makes these works by international composers both urgent and echo-y, present and distant, equally physical and cerebral, wild and controlled; always in motion, emotional....

old

The truly beautiful thing about aging (or, "Do you want to know what's great about getting old?") is this: it WILL happen to EVERYONE. You can't say, hey, dickhead, yo bitch, just wait until you're...name your poison, as the phrase goes...[black? a woman? poor? whatever...]--but you can say ah well just wait until you're old. Every BODY will...find out. That's not saying it's gonna be the same for everyone (men won't hit it like women will: if you're a guy you can log in to facebook w/ out them trying to scare you into surgery or some really expensive moisturizer), but that it will happen--that's cool. There's some agism in your future. YOUR future! Woo-hoo! You will be treated as if you were crazy or negligible, you will be automatically registered as uncool, you will pass in to the realm of the sexually invisible. Embrace that experience: I am invisible! God knows you waited long enough to move out of that particular vision so that you could see what you feel. Achy? Cranky? Stiff? Swell! I move in a new zone. It's not at all the same, moment to moment: my 50 is not my grandma's 50 (a little gelatin in the bloody mary mix for stronger nails) nor my mom's (don't go there--I'm channeling her now), but...ah...it IS 50. "Just you wait Henry Higgins, just you..."--as the song goes. Sure, there's the good stuff too: you'll be taken seriously, finally, just about the time whatever it is you were so dead set on begins to seem a little funny (not ha ha) to you (okay, haha too). Everyone who went before trying to tell you: what a clamor of unattended warnings and...it's just beautiful. You have to, Beuys said, wear yourself out--and Stein was like, what, you have room for lots of dead people?! No. No, there's no room. Voices blur and vision wavers: you say goodbye to the demanding world one sensation at a time. Here we go: into that windy threshold, very medical. You will be shopping for yourself and be asked if the clothes you are buying are for your grandchild--YES! Beautiful! That will be me on the hospital bed with the breathing tube and then you--I'm gonna hand it over like a bong now. Deep hit: OLD. Excellent. exhale...hey dickhead, yo bitch: there's no one, I mean no body, I'd rather see this happen to.... How does it feel?

cut [bride] piece...

YOKO ONO CUT PIECE
by TECHNOLOGOS

rainy night in fort greene ("I fell into a dream")

The thing about blogging—if you’re me (and, I know, you aren’t, hell, mostly I aren’t)—is that it’s mostly about feeling remiss. That’s re-Ms. to you (and me). I keep meaning to make a note, at least a note, about Brooklyn, but it isn’t until a rainy night spent at home base listening to Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison (meaning I’m actually back in the Pacific Northwest circa mid-1970s) that I get anywhere near to pausing long enough in the living to do the writing. “It was a rainy night…”—maybe I just found the place where the writing is the living. The question is this: does someone have to notate the experience (bald guy—though it seems 4 outta 6 guys are bald this summer he stands out for extensive tats available for viewing ‘cause the look is white wife beater & khaki shorts, large & long, coulda been white socks, didn’t catch that, he’s on a cell saying something like “you can’t just go around blowing up mailboxes”) or is the experience already notated? Would the experience seem immediately worth notating if it were not at once recognizable as worth notating meaning it has been notated or something remarkably like it has been notated elsewhere? Beauty is a citation I said to a friend, I could add Love is: now I’m quoting myself. The couple out on the street (“Cumberland”—a citation of the Old World) late at night in what appears to be PJs talking to the police, or the guy is talking and he uses the verb “retaliate,” as in “And then they retaliated…”—not a good sign. Police lights off, no sirens, quiet for the explanation. I wanted to say something about how people seem extra awake and alive here: aware. I’m not going to recover soon from the experience of handing the jump drive over at a print place on Flatbush, needing a file printed, and having the guy come out from the little back room with the computers to hand the drive back and—though he says he just scanned the work to make sure it was coming out as text—discuss the project with me, simply, directly, and brilliantly. The comment he made (“It seems as if it’s a thought being passed from person to person…”) one I can use. What has to be seen in what has been seen or what differs from a previous understanding. Shall I record the visit with the friend who used to hate it when her mother knew which friends of hers were not really her friends and who—now—demonstrates that same exact and uncanny intuition for her daughters? The aerobics class that was like being in the opening scene of A Chorus Line or (another citation) All That Jazz, is that worth documenting, or the weird event where I sighted a friend on the street and (as it happened) saw his actual emotional situation clearly although the person I saw was NOT my friend, in fact far way? Record of books read, recommended (high up among many: Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends, Stacy Szymaszek’s Hyperglossia, and Zizek’s—to stay w/ “zek”s gadzooks—Violence)? Parties (Bomb’s summer issue launch at Galapagos Space)? The focus is shaped by others: the foci determined, a citation (Parties = see Proust on…). “Constant in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” Solas? Bonita? MomoFuku? ReBirth of a Nation for the second time (rerebirth?); Patty Chang’s Walter Benjamin / Anna may Wong piece, crucial; then an off off Broadway show that was a musical version of a book turned into a movie…—you tell me: necessary to write it down? To post it here (hall of mirrors)? Live versions of songs from various albums. Walking past a movie shoot on the Avenue of the Americas I found myself feeling sorry for the actors, only in a movie, as if the fact of my real life, I’m in, not making an image of, was some kind of fancy vehicle, stretch limo through the cramped garbage-strewn streets of the simulacra. Now (writing this) I’m not sure it’s not just a better (as in cheaper, more seamless) movie. Guitar tuning sounds and patter, “this song doesn’t sound good with just one lonely voice,” Mitchell asserts, but at the start no one joins her, then they come in for the chorus, as the chorus: stiff and tuneless community going round and round and round unto the scratch on the disc, “captive,” “time mime mime mime mime mime….”

It's Gross

I HATE NPR. Hate it from the hooky theme music announcing it's-Sesame-Street-for-adults-time to the smirk you can hear Risdall's voice, hate Mr. Miserable Puddle moping his way through another dead-in-the-water poem ("This is about how great the classic movies seemed, when you were poor, and..."), hate its assumptions about class ("'when you were poor"?! WHEN?!) and race (Obama was elected despite the commentators' pseudo-liberal hiccups), detest that the hardest hitting investigative journalism they've featured recently was done by a 10 year old...--are you feeling me? Okay, there's "Car Talk," but.... But this, the other night: James Patterson is being interviewed on fffffffreshhhhhh ERRORS (hello, are you kidding: do you know how many amazing living authors there are in America alone and...), okay. Whatever. The thing is is that he's honest: he's not an author, he's a business: he makes books the way Henry Ford made cars. But Terry Gross is still treating him as if he were a writer. Seriously. He tells her that "teams" of people write his books and she follows it up with a classic auteur query: "Where do you write." Anywhere, he answers. DUH. Maximum duh. Everywhere: I'm writing right now, he could have said. But the spectacle of the high art framework buckling to try to structure an experience of formula books, below B grade, could be somewhat edifying--I mean, if we hadn't invented Cultural Studies yet. But that's not the reason I'm on this blog, foaming at the virtual mouth. If you know the show you know the way Gross tip-toes out onto the permafrost of identity politics: did you have trouble getting into the mind of an African American character, because you're not...et cetera. Oh, no, Patterson answers: he spent a lot of time with a cook at his parents' restaurant and that experience...blah blah blah. And Gross does NOT ask how spending time with a female cook gives you insight into the mind of a male detective (his famous protagonist)--which would be the question to ask a WRITER--she just slurps that one down, no problem. Please, transpose the races for a minute? As in: How did I figure out how my white character thinks? Well I spent a lot of time with a white person once--really, did you? Did you? Did you!?! I hate NPR because it reminds me that if, as Fanon said, our "human worth and reality" depends on recognition by the other we. are. so. totally. fucked....

Berlin (pt. 2: I am also a jelly doughnut)

The hard "k" sounds: the brutal "d"s: though I've hardly begun to speak the Deutsch, the pitiful attempts I've made to mangle it during the day leave my mouth with the feeling of having moved around ungainly objects, all corners--don't go there. The wide bright day spent walking streets and crossing plazas that never seem really quite as full as they ought to be, as they were built to be? I have the sense of a few straggling figures (even in the Mitte), crossing spaces meant...literally(?) for armies. I'd forgotten (how does one forget these things?) (it's something about the hard blankness of America--but that's another story) how a day in a city, and spent mostly at a museum, could revive. Time spent letting "the murder of crows" (the Cardiff / Bures Miller soundscape) wash over around and eerily through me, a brush with Fluxus works I didn't know, artists I'd hardly heard of, hours spent choosing books (*The Walk Book,* *Uta Brandes--she, and she as a colective novel*) I'l probably have to mail home--but what it is to linger in a room with that kind of selection! Then there was the Beuys exhibit: his work ups the ante is an understatement: his work changes everything. The stacked chunks of cracking yellow fat and continuously looping movies (endless shots of him sweating and smoking in close-up, talking endlessly, or acting out, exploring every implication of, the his ideas) make the (sun) space hum with a lingering "social warmth," difficult and fascinating. "Every human being has to wear himself out," he said, in conversation in 1985, "It would be dreadful if we weren't worn out and then just died that way--it'd be dreadful...that means you really have to turn yourself to ashes, otherwise it's just not worthwhile." In the German the noun got a capital letter, Dickinson-like: Aschen.

Berlin: loose notes 1

The the, right? The dawning sense of a doubled city, and the fact that it's been twenty years since the wall came down. The jet lag, of course. The I-kid-you-not moment when I open the fridge in the loft I'm renting and turn it on, and the ice tray, glowing white on white and dry, is empty except for the perfect curly pubic hair in one corner section. I didn't complain: I brought it to the manager as an art installation I was the appreciative but so far lonely audience for: they told me Berlin would be like this. The "they": the modernist mythologists (Isherwood, Benjamin, Fassbinder) behind this trip. Berlin is perfect in April: the foliage is bright but drooping, there's a sense of the season as tender and exhausted. The skateboard punk who, spray-painted board in hand, was coming home from work on a Friday evening with it in his hands was 45 years old at least, probably more like 55. Don't tell me he was carrying it for his kid: the black on black business casual attire and the battered leather messenger bag were only part of the elaborate system of "other signs" that made it clear he'd just stepped off to belly up to the hot-dog stand. The VISOLUX logo and susnset-reddened rooftops this loft gives on.... The weird unsettling sense that I have spent a little time in a town that reminded me a lot of this one: Los Angeles....

Museum / Regrets (after Anu Tuominen)

Make a collection of regrets.
Catalogue your regrets.
Offer your collection to a museum or build a museum of regrets or suggest that an existing museum consider a show of regrets—suggest they hurry (some regrets fade).; suggest they wait (the only regrets worth showing are those that don’t fade, regrets that remain sharp, keen regrets).
Miner’s headlamps for visitors for viewing very dark regrets; hip flasks.
Some regrets remain dangerous: cages for the regrets or protective suits for visitors or both? (Legal issues.)
Place to leave regrets at the end of the visit? “Add to this collection”?

Catalogue copy, curator’s notes: “Regrets are something like the invisible brake pedal the nervous passenger unconsciously, frantically, uselessly pumps in bad traffic: a gesture toward wished-for control and a good outcome as well as a sign of distrust if not hopelessness. The idea of a good outcome casts a shadow or many shadows (as it is lit by many lights): regrets. What did happen was also what might have happened, once, and what might have happened haunts the site, sad, weak yet ferocious, ghosts, faint chalk marks under the message on the board, palimpsests, wistful and furious. To be human is to be able to hurt ourselves in specific ways, with our creative as well as our destructive capacities, with our expectations—and regrets. The collection you are viewing reflects one person’s desire to halt the flow of time or at least break it down into analyzable instants in order to (or so she told herself), perhaps, respond differently in some imagined next time in some imagined possible ‘similar instance’. On the one hand there is no such thing as a similar instance and on the other life is remarkably repetitive and tedious, tending to present one with something very like the same problem over and over until (exasperated, schooled, or both) one finds a more authentic or desperate response (the response there’s no return from, the revealing if not naked response) or perhaps just “perspective,” that distance from which another way of responding becomes available—which is perhaps the same thing. At some point the collector realized that many of the regrets, despite their lingering gleam, were secondary: complex ways of telling herself about her own sadness. “If I had only…” is, she saw, an indirect way of speaking to herself about a specific grief. “If I had just…” replaced the inarticulate moan of pain or the clichés that fester and infect that space: “my heart is…”—and so forth. “If” was the source of a language located between cliché and the animal noises of real hurt. The tracing of lost opportunities halted and opened time, or so she thought, ‘and then,’ she says, ‘I found myself among the ornate and cold images, a lonely curator, sole caretaker of these delusions of power—my regrets’. Whatever. The gift of these exact and almost agonizingly detailed reproductions of what she felt to constitute evidence of her failures as a person and an (at least partial) explanation of a long sorrow puts the idea of explanation in question in ways we hope will prove fruitful for another generation of writers and artists. The exhibit is organized by the timeline it sought to disrupt: we begin with early regrets, juvenilia, really, but foundational works, nevertheless. These early regrets are those which have lasted the longest, and some critics have asserted that they are, in fact, the most successful, the most accomplished. It is true that their influence on if not echoed existence within many if not most of the later regrets (from the most extended ‘Oh I wish…’ to the smallest ‘drat’) is too obvious to require commentary—but you should feel free to add it if you wish (you will notice that there are blank pages at the end of the catalogue, this is not a mistake: we would be sorry if you did not have a space to remark that most common and yet extraordinary experience of regret, I speak of the place where ‘What I should have said…’ comes to you, silk cape glowing in the spotlight, gloved hands raised triumphantly overhead...in an empty, a cavernous and echoing, space). Visitors are encouraged to respond with regrets of their own, including but not limited to the purchase of today’s admission ticket. Gratitude is due to the estate of the long-gone singer whose recorded voice you heard at your entrance and exit, asserting that she regrets, in what is a fair translation, nothing. Our corporate sponsors also regret nothing, or nothing their lawyers will allow them to admit. You are urged to attend less to the words of the song than the singer’s breath.”

Notes from a Sno-Ball in HEL

I’m in Finland! Wall of tall dark trees at the edge of the airport, as if seen through scratched glass, lots of white stuff in the air and on the ground. (“Losky” or “loomy” were the shapes I made of the sounds I heard in the words used by the wonderful guy who picked me up at the airport—if he wasn’t teaching me to say ‘Hit me I am a fool’ then I am trying to say that the snow is icy & slushy in Finnish, a language which is, I was told by a friend who’d been here, impossible….) And it is not deathly cold, it is only cold cold. And there’s (immediately & probably falsely) a kind of cheery 80s feeling about it all, as if I’d wandered into a Wim Wenders movie, or maybe early Gus Van Sant when he wanted to be Wenders? There’s a sort of thin Eastern European desperation in the décor of my room at the Sokos Hotel Presidentti (cigarette burned fake marble broken fake marble) and the mall, on a Friday night, was packed with gorgeous young people just hanging out, many of whom—so my guide told me, are now named things like “Slushy” (“Loomy”) or “Rain,” in a sudden mad passion for new names. It’s my first time in a Nordic country and I know nothing, I understand nothing—but there’s a feeling that’s familiar: maybe it’s just jet lag. Around the hotel (in the Spanish-themed hotel restaurant or the British-themed hotel 'pub'), (the hotel for the festival), there’s a cadre of lean black clad figures: the New Yorkers, the music people, here for the “New York is Now” “Musica Nova” festival.

There’s a place in jet lag where identity frays out: or “Where you come from’s gone…”—it’s not just the person in the mirror I don’t know, it’s the idea of such a person. In that place, vodka is a flavor and not an effect (or so you think). On the first night I arrived (Friday evening. Having been on planes since mid-day Thursday) I sat in my room, practicing as if I were a flautist: he-uuuu-vvaaaa, heehyew…. There’s not a sound in English like it; heeyooouvaah: good. You say it instead of welcome: good. Hyva.

Then there’s the part of jet lag where you sleep half the day and emerge bewildered: who am I, what do I eat, why am I here, where am I? And in which direction is the frozen sea, because you can—I have heard—walk out on it, to one of the islands. But first (this is Saturday morning) the art museum, the institute for contemporary art, which boasts some figurative (memorial?) statue that looks like an overgrown Frederic Remington, lit at night to throw a giant and strangely mocking silhouette across the chill smooth glass façade. There is no real limit, no absolute limit, no imposed limit, to the length of a Finnish word—that is what I have read (and seen the guidebook’s version of the longest known…). There is something about the possibility of walking out across a frozen sea and a word whose horizon retreats as you move across it (where would you breathe) that seems to be somehow in synch, or just slightly off. Dialogue, but the questioning one-sided? A double exposure: I am a foreigner, not quite a tourist…I do not speak your lovely…. The works inside the museum (the exhibition was about the image, the idea of the image, now) were cool and smart and occasionally moving. Anu Tuominen’s instruction book thinkables will come home with me: “Make your own alphabet / Gather items that bring letters to mind, objects that resemble letters…” a beginning. Back in the hotel lobby I meet members of the International Contemporary Ensemble for the first time, speaking to Randy Ziegler about Pynchon, delighted to find myself sitting beside someone (it doesn’t happen half often enough) who has a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow in his pocket.

First night of the festival: lingering in a long tense rehearsal (or rather fleeing what seems to me like a tense rehearsal—because poets don’t rehearse and I don’t really get what’s going on intellectually but take note of body signals and voice tones, frantically) means I arrive (walking through the gritty slush) late at the Opera house, where a guard leads me down winding backstage corridors past racked costumes (a swift glimpse of beads, faux fur, floating chiffons, faintly gleaming leather) to a shut black door on a landing where we wait for the piece being played to end so that I can sneak in—but the piece he expects to end at any moment doesn’t end for what feels like a half hour but is probably ten minutes. We listen through the door—while the work (Fausto Romitelli’s “Professor Bad Trip 2”) is full of crescendos and silences it seems not to have any actual stopping place, or that’s the sense of a woman who waits with a kind Finnish guard on a landing where the light is timed and keeps going out, and the guard (whose English is excellent, as everyone’s seems to be) keeps hitting it back on and then I (it’s the least I can do) start hitting it back on also, and then we murmur—also at timed intervals—to each other about his expectation that I will be able to walk in soon and my gratitude for his willingness not only to lead me into this underworld but to wait. The piece (I like as much as I can from behind a shut door) ends at last & I slip discreetly (or so I hope) into the one empty seat in the front row. At which point a lovely and beautifully dressed woman next to me slyly whispers: “You are very naughty!” I turn, wondering what punishments I’m in for. “We others up here,” she continues, “were also late: but you are later than any of us!” So, I say, I am the worst of the worst?! She agrees as the lights go down to a flicker on the foil-wrapped interior of the hall. The problem with the piece that follows (Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape 5”) is that the sections of pop songs appearing as the radio is tuned and retuned are so dull, so expected, so canned, as to nullify the radical gesture. Though I’d intended to sit through the intermission that follows in sorrowful penance, my new friend (an Aussie named “Aida”) says, “C’mon woman, there’s drinking to be done!” After the intermission, there’s Reich’s hypnotic “Come Out…” and a section of Juhani Nuorvala’s Warhol Opera (Flash Flash) called “Intermission.” Jazzy magic, a frothy, seductive homage, gorgeously simplified: as if a life might turn out to be a few facts and quotes, poignant and thin and glossy and shrieked by singers dressed as “Factory” characters. Then there’s a fancy and lengthy reception at a chic venue by the Opera House and after that what I will come to know as the core gang ends up at pub Urho (where the musicians hang out because there is no music), sampling beers and (some of us) eating reindeer pizza until it’s late not only where we are but in the places we left.

Gloomy Sunday: rain and reflected breakfasters at the vast buffet in the window that looks out on the tram lines and the castle or church-like natural history museum across the wide street. Crows so large I mistake the first one for a falcon: “This castle has a pleasant seat…” The steady flare of interior lights projected onto the image of a slowly brightening day; rhythms of what remains a mysterious language (vowels flashing) around me will bleed into the incredibly difficult and exquisitely achieved music by Jason Eckardt, played by the International Contemporary Ensemble (or ICE): The. Best. Musicians. Ever. (And—but this is revealed over days, and nights made long by the failure to find this time zone and the full moon—serious and indefatigable partiers.) But we get to the performance gradually, through the length of the day’s hard rehearsals (music on this level is like ballet: physical, demanding, intensive), slowly moving into the space of the Academy, so the hearing of the music is the hearing (as well) of the hall (which is “really live”). I can’t recall now which rehearsal session turned me into a fevered adorer of the conductor’s hands, but watching Eric Dudley’s fluid, precise, expressive, and controlled gestures is completely addicting. When I get to the Academy on Sunday they’re practicing the Carter / Bishop collaboration, Tony Arnold breathing “into that world inverted….” Behind the echo of footsteps as the musicians start again the tricky section, there’s an indrawn huh of starting laughter offstage. Preparation for this first concert sets the tone of the whole visit, in which—it turns out—food and sleep matter almost not at all: music and drink being pretty much what the machine runs on. (And it was a grand and joyful machine: Johan Tallgren and his amazing assistants made stacked events flow seamlessly and put conflicting aesthetics into productive and revealing conversations.) But for me, used to the page as performance space (its set or frozen perfection) there’s a kind of unbearable excitement around the increasing understanding of the fragility of this: a cough, a banging chair, the crackling wrapper of a cough drop, I worry, could rupture a performance. Or, but this comes to me slowly, could rupture an idea about the performance, because it fact the fact of the fragility announces another kind of resillence, “an open determinism,” as Ashbery said of Cage’s music? A place where what did happen is, if not what was meant to happen, part of it, and the force of the real displaces the structure of expectation brought to every encounter and somehow always there it its corpse-like rigidity, despite the repeated proof that it’s inadequate. “If I wanted it to be ‘perfect’,” the composer will say to a musician worried about the performance, “I’d have a computer play it.” Against what does happen when Eckardt’s immensely difficult music is played, the grid melts or tears, and floats, in shreds, wide: off. Despite the fact that the cycle couldn’t be done in its entirety here (so far substitutions “curse” each performance, as if the theme of displacement in the text infected the event), the concert is extraordinary—and so much no longer anything of mine (as syllable stretched to sound) that I can say that. After the concert, however, it was back to the pub Urho, and though the conversations (with Jennifer Curtis—about her work in South America with the Tres Americas Project—and, with Eric Dudly, about composers I’d never heard of [Witold Lutoslawski!]) were divine, the pub fare and exquisitely bad-tempered bar tenders were, for the second evening in a row, not.

Monday I wandered a little, around the grand train station with its huge stone men cupping globe-like lamps, finding my way to a maker of marvelous hats (I tried on a pill-box which was a cunning ashtray, crushed “butts” sewn of wool askew in the dip of black felt, “because,” the artist told me, “I just quit”), strolling down to the sea in the North Harbour—too (as I’d been warned) much just “loska” (slush) to walk on: sort of an uneasy puzzle of white on white. I wound my way back, going into a gallery full of strange “jewelry” more interested in the possibility of unusual materials than any idea of adornment, and looking into restaurants without being (though it had been days since I’d had anything but booze and a snack) tempted to sit down, and arriving back at the hotel in time to hear the panel discussion with Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Johan Tallgren, Riikka Talvitie, Marilyn Nonken, Maija Hynninen, Juho Laitinen, and Jason Eckardt. The discussion was unguided but in fact remarkably coherent, starting from the question of the political (“Art is purposely useless, it must refuse to serve”: Eckardt quoting Richard Serra) and moving into issues of the body and technology (Miller bringing up Plato’s Phaedrus and the question of memory). New York itself as a constant collage (let alone an idea about that city injected into the Finnish capital) informed a lively inquiry into kinds of time and various rhythmic structurings of space. Under the conversation, often near but only rarely on the surface, were the wild differences informing the different kinds of lives in dialogue at this site: the state support for the arts (& artists) in Finland, for instance, colored the discussion in ways those of us from America could only begin to guess at—what would it mean to be able to choose to be an artist without the acute fear of being refused healthcare in a crisis? To walk the tight-rope of finding out where thinking and feeling can lead, as it were, with a visible (available, real) net? In the context of a celebration of “New York” it was a little difficult to find out; I mean that speaking was speaking past the cultural imbalances that set me, for instance, down in Helsinki with little more than Anselm Hollo and “Moomins” to go on in terms of Finnish literature? It’s like Chomsky’s joke (I heard told by Robert Hass) about the difference between a language and a dialect, except that Miller’s “hyper nomadic” (as he put it) fluency in sampled cultures and Tallgren’s decision to entangle cities (as well as the on-going spectacle of our imperial failures?) makes each language potentially a dialect and vice versa? A dialectics. Something like the back and forth between kinds of live performances and kinds of work with recordings: either can be a breath-taking demonstration of vulnerability and power, or (as a Finnish composer complained about the too well-trained interpretation) “exact, bland, guided.” Between the panel and the performance a walk deeper into the city to the “artist’s” restaurant whose décor and music have stayed intact since the 1940s (pink predominates in both): it’s a perfect space (food casually exquisite, wait-staff just short of invisible but ever-present) and the joy of a real meal mixed with the deep pleasure of an actual (wide-ranging) conversation that elided all getting-to-know-you small talk almost, so that it felt, to more than one of us, like a dinner with old friends. Monday night brings the International Contemporary Ensemble back to the Sibelius Academy for works by Magnus Lindberg, Mario Davidovsky, Nathan Davis, Ignacio Baca Lobera, Du Yun, and the Carter / Bishop piece (my least favorite, despite Arnold’s gorgeous voice: the poems feel, too often, strained against, not part of, the music, and Bishop’s tendency to coy self-consolation peeps out). Nathan Davis and Du Yun were present, and there is a ferocious delight that comes with falling in love with the work of a living composer—and being able to (begin to) try to express an admiration for music so compelling and exploratory you can barely breathe while listening, afraid you’ll miss a turn in what seems like a real argument (as Yeats put it, “with ourselves,” but also, in this case, with eastern, rather than western, traditions). Afterwards there’s a talk with the composers and musicians, and a formal reception: over the sweet wine we begin to work on the question of what bar we can go to next (among the burning intellectual issues at the festival, this question is a constant). Festival geniuses Ana Sophia and Lawrie lead us (all, gradually) to filmmaker Aki Kauresmaki’s “Moscow” bar (see his The Man Without a Past): tiny, and almost empty except for a couple drinking champagne at the one covered table and a few lonely guys, one of whom will turn out to be a documentary filmmaker who comes here “every Monday, to drink alone with the bar-tender,” and another of whom will—deeply drunk—reveal himself as (shaking his tie at us as a badge of shame) working in the ministry of finance. The bar fills with giddy New York musicians, plates of reindeer pirogue arrive and the vodka has already been flowing for some while when the (I think I have the order right here, but it gets blurry at this point) glasses of champagne begin to appear (the couple in the corner has decided they can’t drink the many bottles they ordered) and then this guy (I asked for his name, later, but he wouldn’t give it) stands up on a stool and announces he’s buying shots for the whole bar. “I am Finnish!” he yells, “You are American! My dick” (he’s holding up his hand, fingers measuring a scant inch in the air) “is theees big!” Later he buys the bottle and wanders from table to table, pouring. The rest of that night deserves its own blog: a space for dense sampling including a montage of images: I leave it to others (ask Rebekah Heller—she took astounding pictures). Out of the blur a few stills: Claire Chase writing down and beginning to practice the longest Finnish word, Jay Eckardt locked in a lengthy and apparently inescapable tete a tete with the maudlin finance ministry worker, and the brilliant improviser Peter Evens, flushed and intense, saying “This is how I WANT to live when I travel!” When the Moscow closes we find another bar: there’s mysteriously more champagne, there’s (less mysteriously) more vodka, there are sexy if indecisive Italian tourists and smoky-eyed hungry looking architecture students, and it’s 3 or 4 am in Helsinki when what coherence is left dissolves and I stagger back to the hotel and it’s 7 or so when I try (passing the fabulous Eric Lamb on his way out) the hotel’s sauna in my effort to transition to Tuesday….

Tuesday involves lunch (at the “volunteer fire brigade” restaurant!) with ceramic artist Elina Sorainen and poet Kai Nieminen, and then a visit to the downtown art museum, hosting an exhibit of works around the idea of femininity in Japan. (There’s a strong cross-over, aesthetically, between Finland & Japan, something about baths and ways of honoring the natural, just for starters—a tenuous but real relationship the exhibit served to underline or make overt.) Elina and Kai are vividly delicious enough to raise the dead or, in this case, spark the deeply hungover back to urgent life, and the time spent with them (too brief) glows with a flashback’s intensity (While Kai sensed my trouble immediately and gave me a shot of Kirsch when I got in the car, Elina’s laughter was an equally heady restorative). Then a walk out onto an island (a concrete walkway connects an island (Tervasaari) to downtown Helsinki, so that it’s possible to walk or skitter (over layers of ice strewn with gravel) out into the harbor itself. The sea is off-white, crazed, and stilled without being solid, gilded by the setting sun; the sky is clear and the air is gelid and the small and city feels, at this edge at least, almost like a village or a little town—but a few minutes’ walk leads back to a bustling square and a marvelous Nepalese restaurant. Despite air and food, however, by the time the final concerts happen, I’m pretty much on the ropes: staying vertical is work—and this is the night where we move from the Academy (where Marilyn Nonken has a recital at 7:30) to the last ICE performance which takes place in the Korjaamo Culture Factory, in a club-like tall dark space with a bar or two. The high point of Nonken’s fast-paced virtuoso performance was Drew Baker’s “Stress Position.” Elegant in its conception (a response to the torture practices allowed if not avowed by the previous administration), seductively minimalist in its exploration, the piece forces the pianist to maintain an extreme tension (arms outstretched to the ends of the keyboard) for the full ten minutes, the last of which take place with the house and stage in complete darkness as the volume climbs and the pace increases. One of the most effective pieces of overtly political art I’ve experienced, the piece is also just drop dead gorgeous (a la Eckardt’s “16”). The ICE concert was less easy to sort or more evenly extraordinary (and it may be that some nights of listening to incredible ensemble work left me less patient with solo performance, where who displaces what and the emphasis is on a singular interpretation). On the way in Dan Lippel hooks me up with the “friend” discount on the ICE cd on his label: Abandoned Time is a must have. In the Factory, superb works by Nathan Davis (“Pneapnea”—written for Claire Chase) & Du Yun, (“By…of Lethean”), Peter Evans’ homage to Chet Baker, and works by David Lang, Mario Diaz de Leon, and Steve Reich were performed with the sort of vivid, urgent yet completely relaxed, presence you see in videos of Coltrane in the 1960s, say: there’s no way I’m going to do justice to it in words. After the concert, chaos: the problem of moving collectively to (where else?) The Next Bar seeming insurmountable for long moments as instruments were arranged and the distance back to the hotel measured. Violist Wendy Richman brought up the analogy of “herding cats” and I heard the verb as “hurting”: spontaneous (Eckardt and Richman in duet) mini-yowl and screech fest in response. We end the evening in the Fellows bar, where the lone quiet drinker we displaced or inadvertently chased out was rumored to be one of Helsinki’s important music critics.

Wednesday starts with a visit to the museum of Natural History with pianist Jacob Greenberg: Evolution or Finnish Nature are our theme choices, and I vote for Finnish Nature—it’s everything I hoped. Full of classic dioramas, the space above the glass cases full of migrating “Whooper Swans” and other birds (there is a Raven—it’s about a foot and a half tall), the museum is also the kind of place where there are drawers full of bugs to pull out and examine, pelts to pet, and endless schoolchildren rapt in the descriptions of life feeding into life, or maybe just startled by their own vivid existence amid so much stilled violence. Our reflections pass over plausible sea and landscapes and astonishing plumage in halted flight as we thread our way slowly out (by way of Evolution) and we’re talking about New York: the (increasingly expensive and frenetic) habitat we know, as we wander through versions we don’t—we won’t. Anything done on the last day of being somewhere you’ve been happy in and are not sure you’ll ever return to becomes elegy? The day swerves early into the “utterly perfect” zone and stays there: there’s lunch with Aida, who then takes me to the Yrjonkatu Swimming Hall, described in the guidebooks as a “Roman-style bath” but actually looking more like something out of a Leni Riefenstahl film. Wednesdays are for women, meaning everyone’s nude, and the massive and completely wonderful spa features three kinds of sauna, a cold pool, and dressing rooms with beds to rest on while sipping drinks and recovering—or whatever (the guidebooks also say the place is featured “on the gay cruising scene”). After the spa it’s up to the top of the Hotel Torni for coffee served with a “Geisha” (!) chocolate and a side of the local brandy (“paint thinner,” Aida calls it, but we toast and drink up) and (most of all) the view of the city and surrounding frozen sea. Then we visit one of the “Uff” thrift stores, which is having some wacky sale that means I leave with a bag of goodies (OMG) (Thifting. In. Eastern. Europe. Is. Beyond. Great) for under fifteen bucks. Back at the hotel I pull on a couple of finds (skin tight plaid pants!) before hooking up with Eric Dudley and Joshua Rubin to head over to the “Culture Factory” for DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation: the live cut of D.W. Griffith’s film with an original (sampled) score (done—in one version—by the Kronos Quartet). Coming, as I have, from Louisiana, there’s something immensely important and weird about watching what is a portrait of ‘The South’ (or an idea about…) unfold in choppy, danceable, sections, sappy and horrible, at once haunting and hilarious. The remix brings forward the relationship between racism and sexism, foregrounding the connection between sentimentality and violence, and it’s really the kind of major event that actually requires a discussion after the performance—but instead there was a cello concert. I think the Michael Gordon piece was well-received? Ask someone else: in body I stayed, in spirit I left—and shortly afterwards, I said goodbyes and went back to the hotel to pack.

On the final flight of the many flights back (Dallas to Baton Rouge) I overheard the husky-voiced young woman behind me (coming from Portland to work as a dancer, because you can make “about ten grand in two weeks”) saying she’d been kicked off her previous flight. Me: why? Her: “Wahl, I didn’t really know that you could actually be removed from an airplane for being visibly inebriated….” I’m home—or close enough.

“Very Superstitious”

The announcement of John McCain’s “Town Hall Meeting” last June in Baton Rouge included a RSVP request. The question this gesture raises (is this a Democracy we can all participate in, or an exclusive party?) is probably the question of the moment in this country. Some tough battles for voting rights behind us, inventive ways to limit the exercise of those rights are, evidently, the order of the day, and asking for an RSVP (along with scheduling the meeting for a workday, weekday, morning) sends a message about who is invited to participate. “I want to hear from you!” the candidate will claim: but who is that “you,” exactly? On Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., the crowd at the River Center is 98% white, 70% overfed, and generally gussied up: glossy with money and good health. No one seems worried about missing work or reluctant to go through the equivalent of airport security for a little face time. “I guess he’s got a pretty busy schedule,” snaps the woman I’m standing near in the line to get in, when I point out that many people are not able to leave their jobs for this event. The last time I was in this building it was full of refugees, ah, I’m supposed to say “evacuees.” The last time I was in this building it was packed with displaced citizens in shock, and crawling with responders (the white-coated Red Cross, the bright yellow shirts of the Scientologists…). There was a table massed with telephones: somebody on each one, usually just on hold, eyes glazed. The air was foul: despair was part of the mix. In his introductory remarks McCain—looking away from the teleprompter for a moment and approaching something like sincerity—will attempt to connect with the disaster, telling us how much the football crowd was moved, in Arizona, by the appearance of the LSU team, in 2005. His connection to Louisiana is deeper these days: he’s giving the idea of Jindal as a running mate some play, and he’s extremely interested in our…(duh) oil and gas. (If the French hadn’t been smart enough to sell the state, we’d be talking about the Louisiana “conflict” now.)

As if a very distant SUV with one hell of a bass circled us, there’s low pre-event music (smooth jazz or soft rock), something vaguely peppy…not anything you’d notice until it goes off—and comes back on again. The place is buzzing with conversation, but there’s a remarkable avoidance of any reference to politics in general or the purpose of this gathering. The conversation I’m overhearing is about phone signals. Maybe this noisy silence isn’t remarkable: there’s an unspoken but strictly observed (American?) rule that you do not show attention to or interest in the event you have gathered for (be it a class, a church service or, it seems, a political event). The conversations are about lunch, tires, and (briefly) Iraq: “It’s like Korea,” “We’ll just be there as long as we need to, then….” Later in the meeting a man asking a question will admit he was “uncomfortable going into the war,” and signal the end of that discomfort with three words: “we’re there now.” When I talk about silence I mean both the stoic acceptance of the status quo (no matter how deadly and destructive) and the damping down of all emotional response. Later in the meeting a woman whose question will reveal a deep rage against immigrants will have her stance characterized, by the candidate, as reflecting “annoyance” and “irritation.” Even when saber-rattling, McCain seems passionless: Iran’s supposed involvement in Iraq (no information is given, but the claim is made), is declared “unsatisfactory.” Except when he tells us, “no one hates war like a veteran,” McCain’s deliberately restricted and colorless vocabulary will suggest that large sections of our own capacity for response are more off limits than the oil reserves of many middle eastern countries. Meanwhile, still waiting, the conversation is about cell phones, and again about food, and then about “what it takes to put this kind of event together” and then about commitment “levels,” not political, emotional: “level 3 is when you’re with the person you think you’re probably going to be with, like, forever.” “Probably.” “Probably.”

Though the audience is seated in a circle around the podium, the podium’s direction is fixed: out toward the media, and the teleprompters. There are two huge screens ready: white lettering on a black background, the starting phrases up and waiting: “Good morning.” Why anyone would consider electing a man who can’t come up with “Good Morning” on his own is one of the mysteries. (But Jindal, working off notes he evidently used yesterday in New Orleans will announce that he’s pleased to welcome McCain “tonight,” “I mean this morning….”) “Thank you Governor,” the screen reads, and then you can see the top of the next part of the sentence, “Jindal for those kind….” The music gets suddenly a lot louder: they are playing “Superstition” (Stevie Wonder) to start the event. Really. As I’m connecting the lyrics to the administration’s tactics (“Keep me in a day dream / keep me going strong / you don’t want to save me…”), the song cuts off and Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden takes the podium to thank McCain for “his keen interest in the plight of the people of Louisiana.” McCain’s interest in our votes is clear (5 visits in 10 months): what our “plight” might be, in his mind (or the mayor’s), remains mysterious. Former Governor Buddy Roemer’s up next, to tell us that McCain “knows how to stand in the gap and protect our dollars.” Which gap, and how dollars will be protected…that’s left vague: promises to help “bidness” do lots of feel-good work and are liberally made. Finally Bobby Jindal takes the podium to make the “kind” remarks the prompter tells us he’ll be thanked for. Jindal’s face, like McCain’s, is visibly asymmetrical (most faces are, but not so you’d notice), and he presents himself (voice, energy, posture) so fervently and convincingly as a Southern white man that his race doesn’t so much vanish as retreat to the status of a sort of afterthought or not totally believable application. Charging energetically through a list of his administration’s accomplishments, the Governor arrives at a promise to cut Louisiana’s income tax (wild applause), before welcoming the candidate he calls the next “leader of the free world.” Having just visited Europe I realize I have no idea what those words mean: compared to countries whose taxes go to education, infrastructure, and healthcare (instead of war) America looks increasingly trapped, backward, and impoverished. “Good morning.” McCain reads, and gets past “Thank you,” before going off-road to introduce Jindal’s wife as “very much the brains of the outfit.” I can see why he wants help, and as he goes back to the script, I turn to the screen to read along with him.

The headline news coming out of this event will be (I watched it scrolling by) the aggressively promoted invitation to Obama to begin debating in June. How talking about talking becomes “news” is a situation hardly worth more words, but, actually, language formed the subject of a lot of the language we were hearing. Roemer ended his stint at the podium by implying his own articulateness disqualified him for running for president with the following couplet, “I don’t need a pretty speech, I need a commander in chief.” The opposition of words (read thought) and action is an ancient binary, and Bush has got a lot of mileage on it, but McCain (who graduated in the very bottom of his class) seems to want to play both sides. Reading off the prompter, he promised his rival a chance to “join in the higher level of discourse Americans would prefer.” I suppose his scriptwriters have some idea what that “higher level of discourse” is. Given the number of unsubstantiated claims the Senator’s making (America has “the best healthcare system in the world,” “We are winning in Iraq,” Iran “has developed nuclear weapons” and is “dedicated to making Israel extinct”)—it seems unlikely that the discussions he’s imagining will clarify the murky waters we’ve been in for the last eight years. But Bush, a noncombatant, believed in belief: the blind faith he asked of us was mirrored by the superstitions he certainly (if more willfully) holds. McCain isn’t as well armored against the painful sting of fact, and—as some of his earlier comments about the war revealed—he is capable of being critical. Nevertheless he’s running a campaign on, at this point, little more than the reiterated assertion that he believes he can “inspire” us.

The strain of, as Stevie Wonder’s lyrics put it, believing “in things that you don’t understand” becomes apparent when we finally get to the actual Q & A. While all the questions are framed as friendly, and most are as far as they can be from accusatory, there are a couple of real questions and an underlying feeling of something like uncertainty. The mother of the marine in Iraq, who stands to say her son told her to tell McCain he’s “our only hope,” urging him “not to allow Obama and Clinton in the White House,” clearly means to show her support for the candidate—but desperation and defensiveness comes through as well. Other questions about the war reveal McCain’s facility with evasiveness (the complaint that few elected representatives have children serving in Iraq elicited a repetition of his standard “I believe I can inspire” response) and tautology (our soldiers “are the best of the best”). His concrete plans center on “a larger army and marine corps” made of soldiers who serve longer, and his desire to make education benefits “transferable” would turn the GI bill into a way to staff a long-term mercenary army of soldiers paying off their loved-ones’ educations. Other questions touch on privacy, education, and obesity: the solutions are choosing the right Federal judges, working on parental involvement, and getting famous athletes to act as role models for obese children, respectively. While the obesity question gets some disrespect from the crowd (coming from a female PE instructor), it is the one issue McCain seems to have a considered, specific, and potentially effective solution for, It’s likely that a message about fitness would gain power coming from the famously fit. (But his suggested solution is already being put to work in a local advertising campaign known as “the Louisiana 2.”) Unfortunately, the message about how sweet it is, as the old saying goes, to die for one’s country leaves no one alive to endorse it.

“I’m going to look you in the eye,” the candidate said, blinking nervously somewhere above our heads and checking the dark teleprompters, “and tell you how important your vote is to me….” When the event was over we were held—bunched at the doors—by Security as the Senator worked “the rope line,” and the music came blaring back on. “Superstition” again, followed by “A Well Respected Man” (the Kinks) and finally a song I didn’t at first recognize or know I knew until, out on the street, I found myself humming the lyrics I’d been hearing: “Don’t Stop Believing” (Journey). It’s a revealing set list, maybe saying more (more directly) than the candidate did: what McCain is asking us for—belief—is something he distrusts, something he knows (from his own experience) is usually dangerously misplaced. As Stevie Wonder put it: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand / then you suffer….”

got my vote

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Works & Days & Days (a preface)

So far is goodness a mere memory
Or naming of recent scenes of badness
That even these lives, children,
You may pass through to be blessed,
So fair does each invent his virtue.
(John Ashbery: “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers”)

Published in The Threepenny Review #21 (Spring 1985), the essay below is the first book review I wrote—and the only purely negative review: the only case where all I intended was to explain why something was bad, bad, terrible and really bad. Days We Would Rather Know wasn’t a book I found on my own, nor was it recommended. I heard my teachers (in the Bay Area) laughing ruefully about it at a party. So I suppose it was recommended to me, in a reverse or perverse way, anyway I decided to sit down (over the summer after I graduated) to think about exactly what made the book so bad. What I came to was the issue of stance Charles Olson discusses in “Projective Verse,” but read (it was 1984, and Berkeley) through the lens of Michel Foucault: a concern with the imbalance of power owned by the “unacknowledged legislator.” It’s a concern that’s never left me, though my strategies to address the issue—as a poet and critic—have changed. Why never another negative review? Why no other overt attempt to readjust the market value of a work or reputation that seemed over-inflated? Perhaps more faith in time itself, less in the action of “telling the truth”? I’ll admit it surprised me that the teachers who apparently despised the book weren’t supportive of my analysis. Sure, I’d done a good job, one of them said, but went on to say (and I’ve never forgotten this) it disturbed him a little to see a younger poet …I’ve forgotten the exact verb here & it’s crucial…criticizing wasn’t it—it was stronger and more violent—an older poet. Did he mention the reverse of genders (younger female, older male)? I think so, but let’s leave it there. One spends so much time fuming at the blindness of others when one is young that when one revisits the site one finds it’s all smoke. And then one is older and “blindness” begins to look like something else. I get a little of what he meant now—a whiff of it. That younger poet—her first book on the way—who used the phrase, in her review of a recent book of mine (my fifth, which took about 15 years to write), “it would be easy to dismiss…” had me murderous for a dark moment. But she shall live—with luck—to find out how that feels. Maybe the fact that teaching’s my (intensely engaging) day job convinces me I need to write the next book, not give lessons in deportment. (In fact my own deportment was so awful we could say I am only getting my just desserts.) That job might be also the reason I don’t have much of a desire to explain again at length what’s wrong with someone’s work. The atmosphere of such explanations can get so thick in a workshop I’ll often stop, or start, the class with writing exercises. I find that if students recall how tricky and rich the creative process is they are kinder to each other, more apt to focus on what thrills them, less eager to find fault and applaud their own ability to locate obvious mistakes. (And what are “obvious” mistakes? Mostly signs of a limited aesthetic in limiting action.) It’s just easier to name shortcomings than to praise with intelligence. So when a dear friend said (apropos negative reviews) that there was so much great work out there that never got any attention it was a shame to waste the time and space, her words made sense. I took up the positive review as a practice: it was more difficult. Right now I’m reading (for another essay) a lot of immensely foolish and mean things critics have said about Sylvia Plath and thinking about how much self-betrayal there is in the negative review. All the more reason to write one? I think part of what all of us have been slowly readjusting to is the situation in which there are very very few (almost no) critics of poetry who are not themselves poets. (To turn Frost’s phrase about form around, if you have to serve the ball and get to the other side of the court in time to return it there had better not be a net.) In this situation there’s some important work we can do for ourselves as writers through intelligent disagreement, even disparagement. A strong dislike, like a powerful attraction, is a good place to start a thoughtful response: you will make and discover yourself. Coming back to this site of self-definition (or what Julia Kristeva calls “abjection”) after so very long (the newsprint yellowed and cracked), I took out the single positive adjective (“delightful”). Thrown in as—too obviously—a bone, it stuck in my throat: that one word of insincere praise seemed the most insulting part of the piece. So I smoothed some edges but left this intact: I don’t disagree with my-O-so-much-younger-self. What seems laughable to me now is the restriction of my final examples. I still love that Roethke, that Berryman, that Plath, but my critique—as we see—of Blumenthal is restricted to content, and now I would of course consider form, and I would have, because of that shift, a much wider range of examples (Erin Moure, Harryette Mullen, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge come to mind, along w/ others...): the list would go on and on. Once I turned my attention around it seemed there was so much more to love and try to learn from, and so much less to hate. And then (and almost finally) I’m less sure of myself, which is—as it turns out—a good thing. I was so incredibly wrong about Virginia Woolf’s wonderful The Waves, for instance, when I read and disliked it in the late 80s, and I raved about how awful it was to a friend—all too (almost) convincingly and to my eternal embarrassment. Mistakes like that are salutary. I don’t think I would have found what freedom I have found as a writer (and there are obviously far further reaches I haven’t got anywhere near) if I had gone on being absolutely sure I knew what bad writing was and how to avoid it.






Days We Would Rather Not Know
Laura Mullen

"The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them... In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth."
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish


Days We Would Rather Know
by Michael Blumenthal
Viking/Penguin, 1984,
$14.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

The problem with Michael Blumenthal's Days We Would Rather Know is intriguing because it is the problem with so much of the poetry currently being written. It is not a question of dullness (although much of the current writing is dull), or incompetence (Blumenthal, like so many writing now, is competent to a fault), or (depending on your school of criticism) a lack or excess of narrative; it is a problem of stance. This is to say that the location of the problem is in the encounter between the poet and the world and, currently, that world's lack of resistance to (or its seeming collaboration with) the attempt to reduce it into language, order, and meaning. As someone said about the proliferation of cults in the seventies, the problem is not that these people are looking for enlightenment, but that they are finding it, everywhere. Mr. Blumenthal's poems, like so much of the work one sees in current reviews, occur in a world anxious to whisper, cry, signal, drop innuendos about and explain the meaning with which it is so heavily replete. It is not merely a subject which desires to enter language, but one that has--it seems--no prior existence: as the world exists only in the service of the poem (Williams' Ideas = Things equation having achieved the static economy of allegory), it is already language, the vehicle of a communication the poet does not transform but simply records. In Blumenthal's world ferns are "secretive," gingko leaves fall "like letters," rain drops are "iambic," light has a "message," the Potomac is full of "the innuendoes / of ice," and, in short, "The air" is so constantly "surrendering its secret" that it no longer has one.
What this so thoroughly decoded nature loses in mystery, however, it more than makes up for in moral (or, to pun badly, morel) lessons. Occurring (as the author seems to admit in "Mushroom Hunting in Late August, Peterborough, N.H.") "when, looking for the lesson in nature / we are always looking for...," these poems rival the "notes" of Hugh Prather in the sheer quantity of attempts to find, define, and communicate the meaning of life:

and I realize again that our lives pass
like the phased signals of that old coach,
the moon,...
("Night Baseball")

I think of my life as that fruit, of what
a going in
there is in the face of bad odors,...
("Winter Light")

O love, this is our life: this rubbing
and rubbing
at the dim, artificial gloss the heart's
veneered with,
("Refinishing the Table")

...Our lives
are the extraordinary flowers
we carry, speechlessly,
into our ordinary rooms.
("Ordinary/Extraordinary")

Unfortunately, because of his insistence on its communicability, this kind of ecstatic understanding is also reduced: in Blumenthal's work enlightenment retains no poetic ambiguity but becomes merely an answer to the lesson nature so eloquently presents. Indeed, not merely an answer, but (and the use of the definite article in these poems is remarkable) the answer, even, in the context of nature-as-lesson, the right answer. The ramifications of this paradigm do not, of course, stay hidden very long: if there is a right answer, there must also be many more wrong ones and the student’s chances of failing increase significantly.
While Blumenthal's facility with good-sounding answers reveals his sense of himself as being subject to examination by a nature whose secrets he must discover and whose questions he must answer to pass (and, in a situation such as "Mushroom Hunting...," to live), his defense against this threat is to assume the role of scientist, of naturalist, of--in short--examiner. It is no surprise, therefore, that in his interactions with nature and with other human beings Blumenthal finds himself in a position of alienation qualified by the very stance it arises out of, a pseudo-objectivity (characterized by the use of a false "we," with its implication of community) demanded by the proclaimed work of classification, of separation, "because separating is, in the end, what this / is about..."
In "Mushroom Hunting in Late August, Peterborough, N.H." (the ars poetica of this relationship to one's subject), the need to divide the world, "delectable" from "deadly," is given a certain believable urgency by its setting--there is, after all, a very real danger. Yet whether this actual danger survives its use as metaphor is open to question. Against a nature so weakened by personification and intelligibility the poet, which his obvious intelligence and symbolic weapons--knife, book, magnifying glass--seems all too certain to come out on top. Indeed, the audience to this battle, aware at once of the mismatching of forces, finds itself cheated by an empty and decadent Romanticism: it is a fixed contest. Unfortunately, if it is clear to the audience that the danger the poet posits, and the resistance of his subject, is non-existent, this situation remains unclear to the writer, who, still threatened, continues boxing with shadows, and this split in understanding makes the work look self-indulgent. It is this resolution, finally, which forces the poet constantly to assert his weakness, his vulnerability, his sensitivity and wounded soul, in an attempt to make the contest seem more equal.
This assertion of sensitivity is worth considering, however, for its revealing double function: the way in which an avowed weakness becomes an unacknowledged but understood power. While, on the one hand, the poet is always being bruised (like the princess in the fairy tale) by his own terrible, unavoidable attention to detail (the adjective "small" recurs throughout the book), on the other hand this very eye for what might otherwise remain unnoticed is his qualification for the power he exerts over this world as examiner of it.
While the danger in mushroom hunting, no matter how attenuated, could serve as a justification of that desire to be the examiner--the one who classifies and reduces nature, that "large harvest," into "a small bundle of certainty and safety"--the divisions Blumenthal enforces on his human subjects are less apt to be excused. Indeed, as these attempts at classification (which is here substituted for understanding) proceed via the worn-out distinctions offered by bigotry and cliché, it is likely that many readers will not be able to excuse them.
Inside Mr. Blumenthal's attempt to claim "The Woman Inside" him (a creature he only understands in terms of other language structures, i.e. Jungian psychology and myth) is the same threatened and defensive reaction we see affecting his involvement with the world at large. Women are a potentially dangerous delicacy in "Mushroom Hunting...," a series of offered bodies in "Some Nights at Thirty," the keepers of what seems a false certainty in "The Last Supper," the audience he explains the world to most often, and never the person for whom the poem is meant as intimate address (in sharp contrast to those poems for his father or friend John McNally). Women appear to be, for the poet, another deliberately impoverished landscape, adversaries emptied of their real power to hurt and refilled with the sawdust of cliché.
This kind of gesture reaches its apex, however, not in the poems about women but in "Today I Am Envying the Glorious Mexicans," a poem whose wit, if it is that, cannot (in the context of the book's revealed project of reduction) redeem it:

Today I am envying the glorious Mexicans,
who are not afraid to sit by the highway
in the late afternoons, sipping tequila
and napping beneath their wide sombreros
beside the unambitious cactus.
…
...I just want to emulate
the beautiful purposelessness of the flowers
and Mexicans!...
I want to sit here babbling to myself about lust
and disobedience until it kills me, so I can join
the chorus of the singing dead and the sleeping
Mexicans beside the wild chrysanthemums--
Beside the rose, the sangria and the
happy earth.

While the poet does give evidence, elsewhere, of a gentle wit than can both amuse and edify (most notably in "Fish Fucking"), it is not given the room in this collection that it deserves, most examples of humor being, like the one above, grounded by lazy thinking and self-pity--problems not even the writer's sense of music and transcend. Indeed, the vapid musicality of a poem like "Today I Am Envying...," goes far in revealing the poverty of the meanings Blumenthal "discovers" in the world; put in by the poet for the sake of the poem, they can just as easily be taken out.
In the end the difficulties evinced in the poet's failed attempts to understand other human beings must be seen in the light of his stance toward nature. There is, for the poet, no "other" with an existence prior to or separate from the medium of explanation and classification. In these poems, people, like the writer's other subjects, exist only insofar as they already are language, and the real mysteries of human life have been reduced to functions of speech. Caught in the endlessly self-referential paradigm of a life that takes place between being "uttered...like a large syllable into this world" and going out of it when "the gods /...speak [our] name[s]," people can never be the subject of a poetry they are so subject to.
A solution to this problem--of the poet's stance in reference to his subject--is offered, not only by critical theory, but by a consideration of those works we read with excitement. The Roethke of "The Lost Son," the Berryman of 77 Dream Songs, and the Plath of Ariel give us examples of poets whose profound respect for the essential mystery, the resistance, of their subject does more to make us feel its danger than anything the poet could say. In these works the world, so sincerely other, keeps a depth language can never plunder. Indeed, as Keats understood, the sense of an inviolable depth to our lives is what we depend on poetry for. As to how today’s poet, so long after Keats, holds onto this sense of an inviolable depth? First one must acknowledge that it exists, then, as Conrad advises his failed Romantic, Lord Jim: "The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands an feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up."

"Scar of departure, which zigzags, like the crack on a Greek vase, across the painted bodies of the gods." Benjamin, Arcades p. 406