Barrett Watten's poetry presents a dull surface. There is not much for the eye, the ear, the nose. Even a description of Barnaby Jones, contrasted with Dragnet, is done as dead-on earnest sociological analysis. There is obviously a brilliant mind behind all of this, but I don't quite get it as poetry.

Take a series of Silliman sentences from "Paradise." There is a poetic subject there: a guy who rides around the S.F. bay area on the bus, lifts weights, observes things, makes comments on the process of writing, etc... Observations are tightly focussed, visualized, witty. Watten, using a similar series of paratactic sentences, comes up with something like this:

"A car abandoned on a quiet street. Falling asleep continuously before they begin. The shooting widened to expire in the act. Index of fusion of large numbers of. Emerging workers occupy the gate. Repetition of yes and no."

There is none of that Pound/Williams concrete detail here. Nor does a poetic subject appear. There are syntactic breaks, but they don't lead to very interesting results. I read "Frame," a book of over 300 pages, several years ago. Picking it up again, nothing rings a bell; it is as if nothing registered with me. I've read enough of this kind of writing to understand what he is trying to do, but I have yet to be convinced.

Now, I'm sure that Watten avoids all of the things I'm looking for on purpose. I don't think he's trying to write like Silliman and simply failing. He doesn't want a poetic subject, for example: an "I" to which can be ascribed certain characteristics. And to be perfectly honest there are some quotable lines here and there. I just need more language in my language poetry.

It was interesting that I was reading Fanny Howe's Selected at the same time as Jordan Davis. The UC press poetry series seems to be steering a middle course. Good-- but not very radical poets-- like Fanny Howe. (Calvin Bedient, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman are the directors of this series.) These books can get reviewed in the New York Times (unlike, say, Sun & Moon Press). I love the poem "Veteran," which begins "I don't believe in ashes. Some of the others do." I keep wanting to rewrite it though, substituting my own terms of belief and non-belief. I don't know how to take so much unironic religiosity. Howe is how a language poet? Guilt by association?

My list of poets to read more of this year: Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, early Clark Coolidge.

Total absorption. When you read Ron Silliman’s blog, or Jordan Davis’s, you get the sense of someone totally absorbed in poetry, night and day. You might get the same feeling from mine as well, yet compared to these people I am quite isolated from others who share this obsession. I don’t know that many personally (I’m not counting copious email correspondence). My feelings about peoples’ work is not influenced by friendships, for the most part. Not really being part of this community, except “virtually,” I tend not to know the work of as many poets.

Take Language poetry. I am quite devoted to Coolidge. Aside from him, I several books by the following:

Silliman (5 or 6)
Bernstein (4 or 5, mostly essays)
Susan Howe (3 or 4)
Lyn Hejinian (4 or 5)
Leslie Scalapino (4 or 5)

I possess a single book by each of the following:

David Bromige
Fanny Howe
Steve McCaffery
Alan Davies
Barrett Watten
Rae Armantrout
Michael Palmer
Bob Perelman
Douglas Messerli

Plus a few anthologies and a few more poets I might be forgetting. It doesn’t seem like an awful lot, considering I might buy 40 or 50 books when I go to Spain.


***

I went to visit my daughter's 2nd grade class this morning. They were doing poetry. The teacher is wonderful, but she had never heard of "Wishes, Lies, and Dreams" or "Rose, Where did you get that red?" The poem they were working with was not horrible, but it wasn't wonderful either.

Right before I fall asleep every night, I play the “complete sentence game” in my head. The way you do it is to formulate every thought that you have as a complete grammatical sentence, silently speaking the thought, word by word. What is interesting is that the thought first appears “all of a sudden”—the process of thinking it out word by word is slow, at least compared to this initial flash of the thought. What is more, I articulate these thoughts so slowly, in relation to my rate of only half verbalized thinking, that I get several more ideas for other sentences before I finish the one I am consciously articulating at any given moment. By the time I finish I think of a new one instead of “saving” one I’ve thought up along the way. Some of the sentences concern the actual game, but I try to get off that metapoetic hobbyhorse fairly quickly. I might play this game for as long as 15 minutes or as short as 15 seconds before I drop off.

I am fascinated by Bernadette Mayer’s work: the idea of capturing that richness and density of ideas that might occur in a single hour or day. Even a minute would be quite an accomplishment. The essential problem is the same, except that writing is much slower even than the Complete Sentence Game. Thought can be rapid, but at the same time it feels unhurried, whereas the effort to get it all out on paper gives the false impression of excessive haste. Bernadette is able to do it in a work like “Mid-Winter’s Day.” Being really fast means you don’t have to hurry. A good quarterback experiences the play in slow motion, since the action on the field is, in fact, considerably slower than his decision-making process.

How much space can there be in a fast bebop tempo? Say, 280 bpm? Quite a bit, it turns out, even when a full measure of 4/4 goes by in under a second. The drummer might feel it in half time (140 bpm). (Not me, I have no hand speed.) On the other hand, an extremely slow tempo is all the more likely to be subdivided into smaller units.

***

How much more effective is Steve McQueen’s opened-eyed, steely blue-eyed gaze than the Clint Eastwood squint.


The ideas I have for writing in this blog are only limited by the amount of time I spend writing, not the number of thoughts that actually occur to me. I could try to blog for 24 hours straight, as an experiment, to see whether I ran out of things to say. On the other hand, I am inexperienced at this mode of writing, compared to Bernadette Mayer. I am thrilled that my poetry experiments are still up at the Poetry Project, along with hers.

A google search for "Adorno atonal aesthetics," "commentary on visions of gerard, Kerouac," or "solving polyrhythms" will bring you to this blog. I have a bit more time today to blog because my daughter is back in school, and I haven't started classes yet myself.

***

On "Lime tree" (Kasey Mohammed's blog) last Friday, some commentary on Olson that leads me to reflect. There is a technical obsessiveness in American poetry that has always rubbed me the wrong way. I approve of an obsession with poetic technique, but not when it is couched in pseudo-technical terms. That is, when the technical discussion is all metaphorical, never about the actual syllables. That's why I like Coolidge's essays. His grounding in music. When drummers talk about rhythm they talk are talking in very specific, precise terms. Zukovsky? He also knew what he was talking about, obviously. Creeley? His theoretical pronouncements are couched in a weirdly inarticulate ("semi-articulate flakes") dialect. I love Creeley's poetry, but dislike that Black Mountain rhetoric he felt he needed to explain what he was doing. O'Hara has a comment somewhere: it's amazing Creeley puts in as many syllables as Levertov. I know this is heresy to many who will be reading this! That very aspect of Creeley about which I feel ambivalent leads directly to Grenier, of whom I need to read much more.

***

An essay by M. Perloff about Adrienne Rich. Pointing out that her style is basically derivative of Robert Lowell. I kept waiting for it to appear in one of Perloff's collections of essays, and it never did. Too brutal, perhaps? The point that the idea of a specifically gendered language (Rich's claim for herself) was based on the most prominent mainstream male poet of mid-century America. I remember in Graduate school (early 80s for me) there were people who read Rich and only Rich. People not otherwise readers of poetry. They would not have recognized this stylistic kinship because they had not read Lowell.

Reading Harryette Mullen’s poem “O ‘tis William,” I did not at first notice the guiding principle:

--Is it Otis?
--I’m . . .
--Otis, so it is.
--Am I?
--‘Tis Otis.
--I am . . .
--So, it’s Otis.
--I am William.
--O, Otis, sit.
--O, I am Will.
--Sit, Otis.

etc....

Only reflecting back on my reading about half an hour later, without the book in front of me, did it hit me. The obviously “oulipean” tone, I concluded, came from the fact that the text is a lipogram: it is forbidden to use the letter “e” in this poem. (As in Georges Perec’s novel “La disparition.”) I came back downstairs to confirm this intuition, and noticed that “u” is also absent, presumably verboten along with “e.” Thus the obvious question “Are you Otis?” must be rephrased.

But this was obviously wrong! There are many other letters missing aside from these two vowels. I started to make a list of the missing letters, but then I realized that the only permissible letters were those included in the names “William” and Otis.” It is not a lipogram, then, but a series of anagrammatic variations on these two proper names. It gets better: the speaker who mistakes William for Otis begins by only using the four letters of Otis. “William” begins by only using the letters of his own name. Only gradually does the first speaker beging to use the w, the a, etc... and vice-versa. By the end of the poem both speakers use all the allowable letters. It is quite late before the letters of the two names merge in the word “still.” Is this the only word in the poem that combines the two set of letters? The “I” of identity is the only letter shared by the two names. I could go on and on with this analysis...

How I could be so slow to realize all this is quite puzzling to me. I should have had it in an instant. I thought the text was a quite enjoyable and hilarious meditation on personal identity before I even thought to look for the guiding constraint in a systematic way. Perhaps I assumed I would just go back later and figure it out, which is in fact what happened.

“Denigration” is a poem that refuses to use the infamous n******* word. The word is definitely present in the text, though: denigration, niggling, nigrescence, niggardly, enigma. Also, words with “neg”: neglect, negligible, negotiate, negate, renegades, renege. The entire poem plays on two unrelated Latin roots, nigr- and neg-.

A poem dedicated to Jayne Cortez makes me think of Ornette Coletrane’s “Jayne,” one of his most tuneful tunes. (It is the same Jayne.)

I once had an idea for a crossword puzzle with two mutually incompatible solutions. That is, the same set of clues would yield two puzzles fitting on the same grid, but with no coinciding letters. I don't know if this is possible or not.

Georges Perec designed crossword puzzles for a French newspaper. Marcel Duchamp wrote a chess column under a different name.

I am an INTP on the Meyers-Briggs personality scale. Introverted: I need a certain number of hours of solitude. N is for iNtuitive, as opposed to Sensory. I love abstract systems of thought, even though I am often attracted to poets who are very concrete. Thinking rather than Feeling, I favor Perception over Judgment. Why do I put any store in this sort of classification? It actually explains quite a bit, especially my failure as a teacher.

***

Preparing class. Cartesian doubt in modernism. Jorge Guillén's cogito begins with the existence of the outside world. It is this world that convinces the poet of his own existence. "La realidad me inventa." But of course he is there from the beginning as the thinking subject. Everything must be reordered in an artistic structure for it truly to exist. The principle of order. You couldn't have just the sentences of Hejinian's "My Life." You also need to ordering principle: a certain number of sentences in each section. What is surprising is the sheer simplicity of this organizing device.

***

Reading Harryette Mullen's "Sleeping with the Alphabet." Is it too facile in places? That would be my only critique. I don't always like catching on that fast! I like to feel stupid for a while before I "get it." On the other hand, it is pleasurable reading for a crossword puzzle aficionado like myself. The conjunction of Oulipean techniques and Afro American attitude is bound to find many admirers. I'm sure Harry Mathews would like it.

***

You can practice a jazz ride-cymbal pattern against a hip-hop beat. Just pretend those 8th notes are quarter notes and everything falls into place, since the swung 16ths become jazz eights. But then those backbeats end up being on "3" instead of 2 and 4. It sounds very odd.

All the talk about the poetic ear in various blogs leads me to reflect: We lack a vocabulary in which to talk about prosody. Much about the way we "hear" is determined by the meaning of the words. We cannot really "hear" poetry in language we cannot understand. All Russian sounds the same to me, though I'm sure in Russian, to Russian ears, there is an infinite variety. We hear non-sense verse as non-sense, that is, as poetry playing along the edges of sense. The way I hear Clark Coolidge's line "and allow back the whelm tamp of stacks" is affected by the unusualness of the word "whelm" used as an adjective, or at least in adjectival position: it has a heavier stress, read as a noun. Coolidge does this all the time. My feeling here is that the word "tamp" is used because of its sound: therefore sound is placed in the foreground. This would not be the case for reader ignorant of English. Even to function as an onomatopeia we have to already know what it means! I don't really hear the "Spanishness" of poetry written in Spanish anymore. I only hear the individual "voice." In French, I am about half-way. I can hear distinctions, yet the "Frenchness" of the language is still there for me as an independent quality, whelming my reading.

Today I must begin to prepare my graduate course. My mind is a complete blank. I have no idea of how to teach literature. It wasn't something I ever learned from having been taught by anyone else. I did learn from resisting the way it was taught. All the theorists agree that the definition of literature is what is taught as literature in the classroom. I don't care that the students have no advance preparation: it is the lack of commitment I cannot stand.

The most elementary and radical objection to translation is that it puts the poem in another language. I stipulate that the translation is more or less adequate, but refuse the legitimacy of reading “Lorca” in any language other than Spanish. Why would I be attracted to such an extreme position? I feel that this position must be correct, even though I cannot justify it.

Murat’s attack on Jabès gives me pause. I’ve read very little of Jabès, who owes a good deal of his fame and prestige to Derrida. I’ve always assumed that I ought to admire him, and Murat gives me permission, if not to ignore him, at least to recognize what he must look like to a different sort of Jewish poet. Valente admired him, of course: but is there an aspect that’s almost “too good to be true” in a figure like Jabès? The combination of Jewish-exile/ Mallarmean themes is obviously too much for someone like Derrida to resist, even though Derrida himself downplays his Jewishness. I wouldn’t presume to reach any conclusion. I don’t find Jabès’ language very interesting, but I feel the same way about a lot of French poetry. Nor am I thrilled with Derrida as prose stylist. What if Derrida were actually a great writer? Then, and only then, would I accept the argument about the rapprochement of poetry and philosophy in his work.

“Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard”
“Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard”

All those setting on a cheap Hamilton Beach blender as I puree my butternut squash soup. Or do I indeed puree it? I have a choice of frappe, liquefy, chop, grind, puree, mix, blend, etc... --a total of 14 separate settings. It reminds me of the "Esquimo snow hoax"! An anthropologist could conclude that the contemporary American has 14 separate words for putting something in a blender and pushing go. The poet as name-giver, the Platonic legislator of the Cratylus dialogue.

My seven-year old daughter Julia knows the difference between a name you give a horse and one you give a dog. Her stuffed dogs are Drumbo, Spot, John. Her horse is MacDanduff. Stanley is obviously a bear.

Cymbal sounds are hard to sample because of their rich enharmonics. Electronic music often has rather "poor" sounding cymbal sounds. Now acoustic drummers want to replicate electronic beats on real drums, emulate this "poor" sound, so cymbal companies put out acoustic cymbals designed to sound fake - electronic - like Zildjian's "re-mix" line.

For a poet to have a good "ear"? This implies, in the first instance, a capacity to hear poetry (rather than a productive capacity). Then to be able to hear what one is writing. I might have a good ear but not be able to produce anything that demonstrates this to the world.

The most prominent percussion soloist in the world today, the Scottish woman Evelyn Glennie, is profoundly deaf. She also has perfect pitch - or did before she lost her hearing in her youth. She plays barefoot better to "hear" the music through her body. I don't really understand how this works!

The way we hear language is influenced by the meaning of the words, even the part of speech.

Suppose I could imitate Clark Coolidge's style. Phonetically, a taste for dense sounds; onomatopeia. Morphologically: he like the suffix "-age" in words like roughage or overage, etc... Syntactic breaks, nouns used as adjectives, concentrations of monosyllabic accented words. I believe I could (conceivably) write in this style, and be completely original, since the emphasis, the quality of the insistence, would end up being different even if I reproduced all of these features. What is the difference between an imitation that is intolerable and one that is seen as a productive breakthrough? I sometimes think Koethe is way too close to Ashbery, even though I can read it with pleasure if I ignore this fact. The same with some of the Gamoneda clones in Spain.

Horrible self-doubt at the beginning of the new year. Is my career effectively stalled? (Ineffectively stalled?). Should I rejoin the MLA? The AATSP? I feel depression not as an emotion, but as a bodily sensation. Learning to recognize it is useful. Should I eat a peach? Like that character "Dark" in "Seeking Air."

***

The poetics blogging community is taking shape nicely with the recents additions of Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Kasey, etc... I am happy to have gotten into the swing of things fairly early. I spend the same amount of time browing the internet as before, but now there is actually worthwhile "content" to be found. Before I would fruitlessly flit between Salon and Slate.