Music, everywhere.

Reading Dorianne Laux’s short, one-stanza poem “Enough Music” this morning, and thinking about the swinging of “this rhythm of silence” between the speaker and the subject—-and how Laux refuses the easy image of the pendulum, choosing instead the playful possibility of the rope over a lake.

This poem is made, somehow, from its refusing the pendulum—-and the notion of time that it invokes.

Because I am thinking about music, time, motion, and memory—-again—-the rope swaying over the surface of the lake gathers itself in reflections and intonations of light.

The mystery of music— how vibrations in the spectrum of sound lead to complex reactions in humans. No theorist has yet resolved it. No neuroscientist has found a singular, cohesive explanation.

One of my favorite performances of Mahler’s Ninth was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas—-who is also a notable composer.

At at one point in this brief video, Tilson Thomas traces the music in the sounds of kids on the street:

One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants. And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected. And he watched the ball fly for a second, and then he went, "Dah dadaratatatah. Brah dada dadadadah." And he ran around the bases. And I thought, go figure. How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid? How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?

Well when it comes to classical music, there's an awful lot to pass on, much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky. Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years. And every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

As a conductor, Tilson Thomas’ interpretations have changed the way pieces are experienced. I’m thinking of Mahler’s Ninth, and TT’s statement “the main melody of the piece that is only heard in at the climax of the first movement” becomes “klezmer-like in the second and third movements.” And how Mark Swed interprets TT’s Mahler’s as using the kletzmer to tell us “what people thought of him,” before moving in the extraordinary cavalcades of the final movement.

Rombo.

This week, I had an interesting (albeit abrupt) exchange with an American female who insisted she had lived in “a village”—- and it was this allusion to personal experience in an American village which she used to dismiss (immediately, unquestionably, and absolutely) my interest in the village-like images of a poem titled “Peasant” from a book titled The Lice.

As I muted myself, the teen walked into the room with wide eyes and asked: “Eeee, who is the person screeching at you from the computer, Mom? She needs to chill out.” He had heard her yelling from the kitchen. I tried not to laugh.

Leaving aside the aspirations of global-villageism wielded by neoliberalism’s finest, turning my attention to a world outside the almighty dollar’s branding of planned communities, Esther Kinsky’s Rombo, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt (NYRB, March 2023), is a formidable novel about an Italian village destroyed by an earthquake.

Background: Il rombo is an Italian term for the subterranean rumble before an earthquake. In May and September 1976, two severe earthquakes ripped through the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, causing extensive damage. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes forever. Rombo is a record of this disaster and its aftermath, as told by seven men and women who were children at the time: Anselmo, Mara, Olga, Gigi, Silvia, Lina, and Toni. They speak of portents that preceded the earthquakes and of the complete disorder that followed, the obliteration of all that was familiar and known by heart. Their memories, like the earth, are subject to rifts and abysses. Esther Kinsky splices these indelible, incomplete recollections with exacting descriptions of the alpine region, forgoing a linear narrative for a deftly layered collage that reaches back and forth in time.

The novel’s author is German. I was intrigued by the references to a Slavic language spoken by the villagers—and to the way certain words (like Babe) also map onto Carpathian mountains in Transylvania.

How can we find a way into a complex story where the landscape is much as much a speaker as the narrators? Many immigrant writers struggle with this relationship between the palpable, subconscious longing (dor) for a particular land and the way in which the land feels like part of the self. 

I think Esther Kinsky does this effectively and brilliantly. 

Alternating between small encapsulated sections titled after speakers, flora, fauna, geological features, and “found objects” (descriptions of photographs), Kinsky's novel also blurs the line between the geology and the processes which lead to photos that 'preserve' the past. For instance, the sections titled "Corrosion" and "Vapours" describe parts of photochemical development in order to analogize those processes to landscape features in Italy. 

The aftermath— first humans help each other, then they begin competing for resources, arguing over explanations, trying to find a way to understand (and control) the earthquake.

The world is divided. The arguments, themselves, occupy a choral form.

How are these village arguments different from the interpretations of poetry? In this novel, the villagers know each other; and the entanglement of their lives means that blame carries consequences, or increases the likelihood of curses.

Using metaphor, analogy, geology, and local lore, Kinsky links geographical changes in the disputed memories and layers of perspective. The landscape is shaped by the humans on its surface, and the humans, in turn, are formed from their relation to the damaged landscape—-these two processes are so deeply intertwined that consequentialist readings can only result in misreading.

Considering the question—What we do know for sure?—-the writer reckons with perspective and point-of-view.

How does the knowledge of the child narrator differ from that of the adult narrator?

How does the child narrator expand the scope of possibility?

The voice that doesn't already know what it wants to say—this is the vulnerable voice, the least defensive one, the space in which the human speaks to the human in all their brokenness. 

Back in the 1950’s, in a lesser-known book, Rachel Carson spoke of a “sense of wonder” in relation to childhood, or the possibility of the child’s placement in relation to the world. Granted, she was criticizing the nature of screens and media at a time when she believed television cut off the mind from relating to its environment. Sometimes I sense this hunger for wonder in W. S. Merwin’s poems, or in their efforts to re-enchant the world without the idolizing the powers that govern and destroy it.

I say “destroy”—

Initially, a typo had the prior sentence reading: their efforts to re-enchant the world without the idolizing the powers that govern and destory it. The de-storying of the world is at the heart of the culture industry’s efforts to promote the mental healthy industry. Rather than choose a barricade in this category of the culture wars, I feel more comfortable listening, reading, studying and trying to observe the ways in which money and mental health rubrics mediate the human hunger for meaning in contexts where community is increasingly thin and related to the administration of capitalist markets.

And perhaps, also: to consider the ways language produces outcomes.

To cherish the conversation between Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes in which Homes says:

And to which Yiyun Li responds:

This writer— me— holds Yiyun Li’s words as talismans against the impulses and urges which lead me to believe I could know all villages from having lived in or summered in or visited one. For how could the world not be more complicated and incredible than the Disneyworld of neoliberalism’s global village? What would have to die within us in order to believe that the USA is the expert of the village?

Notes on Cedar Sigo, literary lineage, and John Keats in letters.

1

Cedar Sigo begins Guard the Mysteries, his 2021 addition to Wave Books' Bagley Wright Lecture Series, by challenging the lecture itself.

In "Reality is No Obstacle: A Poetics of Participation," he wonders if the lecture form is appropriate, or if what he aims towards is closer to the speech act. Lectures are exclusionary from the outset: the lecture form is characterized by a captive audience, the presumption of shared academic background, the positionality of the podium, the hierarchy of power which reduces the understanding of language as an event between people. 

What Sigo values is a "poetics of participation" where the speech act embodies a form of cosmic intimacy which includes the living, the dead, the writers who touched us, the invisible lineages of ancestry. He makes this clear by structuring the lectures around his own literary influences, beginning with the title itself, which comes from a quote by beat poet Lew Welch: "Guard the mysteries! Constantly reveal them!" Though the second part of this quote isn't titular, revelation is central to Sigo's poetics, which probs the tension between reverence and revelation, between epiphany and exposure. The corporateality of it assumes a spirit, or haunting, a way in which ancestors (and ancestry) persists at a non-material level.

2

Against boxes and labels, Sigo maintains the poet's life as part of the poem where creation maintains a relationship between poet and cosmos, living and absent, imagined and unimaginable. "We believe in the creator," he writes, of his Suquamish family, without capitalizing the divine, without narrowing immanence into dogma or theory. Because one learns to write poetry by reading, relating, remembering, and collaborating with the words of others, relational pedagogy is a thread throughout the book, where Sigo shares resonances and biographical information about the poets in his lineage.

3

In Lorenzo Thomas' "How to See Through Poetry: Myth, Perception, and History," Sigo found an animating question: "When does the word itself become action?" Like Alice Notley, Sigo mourns the "images of dehumanization"  we access through screens. The politics of heartlessness. The hunger for others’ pain. The rehashed shock-rage, a blur between shock and outrage, the sense that something should be done, grafted by an absence of vision for how to do it. 

Recent political events render his former relation to language is insufficient; Sigo ponders his own efforts "to delay the meeting of edges and collage, until they fall to form the final image", or " the unlocking of collage through the inflection of voice." He quotes Amiri Baraka's assertion of freedom to do what he wants "in the poem": "There cannot be closet poetry. Unless the closet be wide as God's eye."

For Sigo, poetry is a gift that must be handed along, a source of liberation. He teaches American revolutionary poets without "stamping their work as political" anymore. To teach a poem as "political" creates a divide or what Sigo calls a "ceiling" of possibility that he wants to relinquish. He doesn't want to deconstruct but to reorient us towards one another, towards the natural world, towards music, towards the spiritual connections rather than the cadavers. For "political" may be a ceiling when the poet offers us "amulets," or things we "call upon to redefine what revolution means." These amulets, for Sigo, are words from poems, slogans, permissions, and various moments which become the touchstones in one's personal poetics. Each is liberating. Each is holier for the way it makes wholeness possible. 

4

"The pleasure of the poet" is "to redefine our engagement with the way language comes to guide our lives," Sigo writes. The poem creates its own poetics, as how Diane di Prima came to write Revolutionary Letters, poems which laid aside intellectual baggage in order to be "something you could hear in one hearing, something more like gorilla theater."  He queries the distance between "protest, performance, and actual battle." In di Prima's work, he finds a radical, inclusive, and deliberate cross-pollination of artistic mediums which refuses to separate the poem from the speech as action, performance, and protest. Rejecting the podium, di Prima put an amp on the truck bed and read her revolutionary letters aloud to protestors and crowds. Her audience was not academic--it was human--and this rupture created hope as an action. 

The use of pronouns - the We - is part of how we relate and see each other, how we define unity. Taking a cue from her anarchist grandfather, di Prima invokes this lineage when explaining her distribution of revolutionary letters for free, or creating her own press. The poems partake of anarchist printing ethics as well as the potlatch, a revisioning of class distinctions which assumes access for all. 

Amiri Baraka called it "the scalding scenario"— the "ultimate tidal wave" of humanity reclaiming each other as participants in the end of the capitalist pageant, in the leveling and self-determining. Baraka was di Prima's "early collaborator, ally, lover, the father of her second child, Dominique. She wrote letters as poem-missives to speak to him. "Revolutionary Letter #110"  is an elegy for Baraka written after his 2014 death. For Sigo, the poem is a letter, a mode which inscribed the intimacy he values in the bond a poem creates with the reader. 

In an essay on Audre Lorde, Sigo describes how she and Diane di Prima first met when reading poems in the home-room of Hunter High School. In 1967, Lorde who delivered di Prima's fourth child, Tara Marlowe, at the Albert Hotel. Less than a year later, as di Prima began writing the Revolutionary Letters, she also published Lorde's first poetry book in 1968, the seeds of life shaped like a poem between them.

When demonstrating how a poem gives rise to its own poetics, Sigo points to Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters, which laid intellectual baggage aside so that the poems became "something you could hear on one hearing, something more like gorilla theater." Sigo queries the distance between "protest, performance, and actual battle,” turning towards silences, quoting Audre Lorde's reasons for writing The Cancer Journals: "to break one silence, one aspect of the kind of silences we partake in as women." For Lorde, the "responsibility" was inseparable from the calling, and the defiance of labels. "I am a poet," Lorde insisted, when her editor attempted to describe her words as "theory." To be a poet included all the ways poetry laid claim to language, or narrowed it by labeling.

The inventory—this listing of all the things one—is may be a revolution in poetics, as well as a widening form for Sigo, who values the lens which stays open, blurry, unsettled. In his attention to particular forms, Sigo seems to value the luminous vessels, those which also serve religious or spiritual purpose. The litany is a list of praise. The psalms are anchored in repetition and invocation of proximity to god. There is an undercurrent of reverence that insists on vision rather than nihilism. 

Lorde's poem, "A Litany for Survival", is a sort of list which relies on shifts, motion, and refrain - "We were never meant to survive." The pronoun, this We, is a site of poetics for Sigo, a permission to open the personal and historical silences of his Suquamish ancestry. He notes that Lorde did not give herself this permission at first. Instead, she spent a year writing rage, fury, fear into her notebooks only to return, later, and discover many of the poems which would become The Black Unicorn in her notes. Only when she was able to assimilate the journal entries into her lived experience could the poet begin to inhabit the poems – "only then can I deal with what I have written down," Lorde said. 

Both the list and the chant are poetic modes that rely on repetition. "Incantation and chant call something into being," Joy Harjo wrote, "they make a ceremonial field of meaning." Harjo locates much of global poetry in the incantations and chants, the song forms, the local dirges, and Sigo believes the poet "becomes what they are singing," being filled with recurrent rhythms and breaths. Repetition refines and sharpens and renders more luminous. 

5

Arguing for a poetics of participation, Sigo takes Diane di Prima's "Revolutionary Letter Number 62" as a model for how poetry is closer to a speech act than a lecture. The word, itself, becomes action when it insists on intimate address and vision. Sigo pries apart di Prima's use of pronouns to implicate herself, or to reconsider complicity, to note how the interstices of we and they are spoked.

But the poem’s speech also elects its interlocutor. For example, Amiri Baraka was Diane di Prima's early collaborator, ally, lover, the father of her second child, Dominique. di Prima communicated with Baraka through poems, including the elegy "Revolutionary Letter #110," written after his 2014 death.

6

In "Becoming Visible," Sigo describes intimacy as "scaling the gaps aloud." The spoken word is part of the poem's form, and every lecture he's ever given returns to form, defined as "how to convey the passage of the language through and body and down onto paper, and then to attempt to replicate that in the reading of the poems aloud." 

Both of Sigo's parents are artists whose practice focuses more on process and daily commitment than "mastery." Sigo's father, a photographer, served as curator and archivist for the Suquamish Museum. His mother is a singer. Although his parents honored their Suquamish roots (his father kept his hair waist-length), neither aspired to a purist affiliation. Neither valued tradition as a form of static orthodoxy, and Sigo expresses this by saying his father preferred to "leave it open-ended." But Sigo was imprinted by the connection between native prayers and poetry early on. He felt "haunted by the responsibility of making poems and drawings as a child", and the belief that art is a form of medicine.

In 8th grade, Sigo told his parents school was "too slow," one way of saying queerness didn't thrive in the box. Homeschooled since then, Sigo's poetics isn't unschooled so much as deschooled--which is interesting given his educational background. In this, his allegiance to the New York School of poets and the Naropa Institute occupies a foreground, and his words continue a dialogue with this lineage, influence, and approach to authority. "The pleasure of the poet is to redefine our engagement with the way language comes to guide our lives," and this, for Sigo, is a luminous task— "taking on reality in luminous particulars."

Sigo's sense of time is not linear or fixed. He credits Joanne Kryger with inspiring a loose temporality in the poem, a time where "the body itself threatens to become an afterthought," and the poem travels along "anointed pathways," growing in spaces which reconfigure time and recreate it. In opening time, in reaching through the material shapes we worship, across the particular embodiments and labels, Sigo imagines poetry as a site of communion, as a restorative place which uses traditions not to displace or replace but to reimagine entirely. To create a Suquamish poem located in Suquamish time, one which includes the invisible. Perhaps this is a form of queering for consumerist cultures like ours. 

He mentions his father's waist-length hair  which was not including a claim to be the "most traditional", and struggle was not something which belongs completely to the Past. "Misfortune often arises whenever we stop struggling," Sigo writes - and so the struggle is part of time, part of presence.

"Things to do" poems, a form popularized by Gary Snyder and quickly expanded by Ted Berrigan, offer insights into how he frames a poem. Sigo mentions "Things to Do in Providence" by Berrigan as one of favorites: the poem becomes a list as it goes on, and the asides become more necessary, illuminating. By allowing time and candor to slip into the asides, Sigo says the distinction between form and formula disappears. The formulaic is integral to this form, and so the fun comes with ruining the vehicle.

7

"There is no death, only a change of worlds," Chief Seattle said in 1854, closing a speech to his people, as quoted by Sigo..

Im a culture built on planned obsolence and perpetual novelty, it is revolutionary to say "the dead are not powerless" — and, comforting…to me, this invocation of ancestors in contemporary American poetics is comforting. Ancestors unsettle the living with eternity. In our attention to them, we are forced to listen, to be supplicant, to imagine alternative modalities of respect. This looking-beyond is dangerous to worldviews based on immediate gratification. The dead are not here for the commercial culture, and respect for elders and ancestors may be one of the most radical challenges to consumerism. 

Charles Olson helped Sigo expand his field of vision to include the available energies in a place. The energy of academic poetry is vaguely mentioned as a relief that Sigo was lucky to have avoided, "the  construct of Academia hanging over my syntax in anyway."  This, I think, is part of the commitment to sitting, to being in the body, to taking that relationship as authoritative.

Sigo learned by exploring his fascinations—The Black Panthers, political slogans,The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg's Snapshot Poetics with photos. He still keeps Ginsberg's proclamation close: "Candor disarms paranoia!" Proclamations, speeches, slogans and posters are formative to Sigo's poetics. Eventually he wound up at Naropa, which Ginsberg co-founded with Anne Waldman. 

Writing autobiography as poetry allows us to leave the gaps intact, which offers a more "complete" portrait. He is dissatisfied and restless with his books by the time they get published - he has already moved on to the "untyped poetry" in his notebooks, and the intensity of the time they occupy. Ending this lecture with a poem, "Smoke Flowers," enables Sigo to show us the poem as autobiography in practice. 

I soon left school for dreams of the lyric (of building)
I lied and said the lessons moved too slowly

.....

I became a warrior surprised at what I still didn't know, how to get started,
Move along, stay moving, how to fill the page all over.

8

Barbara Guest taught him that collage doesn't have to be constructed from or after, but can be created during the poem, as part of its existence, time signature, and scoring.

Joanne Kryger inspired Sigo's interest in a temporality where "the body itself threatens to become an afterthought," and the poem travels along "anointed pathways," growing in spaces which reconfigure time and recreate it. 

"Sometimes the life of a poet is itself a kind of poem that must be orchestrated and arranged for impact (preferably by someone else)," Sigo explains. It is immersive, demanding, a sort of absolute imaginative commitment, this writing of biography, especially when dealing with mythology, or with Joanne Kryger's complicated place in the Beat tradition. He dedicates an essay to her memory, tracing the relationship which leads to the collaborative 2015 project of collaging old interviews and "illustrating this chronology with ephemera from her personal archive."  Ephemera offers new trajectories into personal history – and we see this in the selection of images, photos, posters, portraits—a practice Sigo repeats in this lecture text. 

As the poet's pleasure is "to redefine our engagement with the way language comes to guide our lives," Sigo credits Kryger with inspiring a loose, nonlinear temporality in the poem, a time where "the body itself threatens to become an afterthought," and the poem travels along "anointed pathways," growing in spaces which reconfigure time and recreate it. 

9

As poetry expands time across particular embodiments, Sigo describes it as a site of communion, a restorative place which uses traditions not to displace or replace, but to reimagine entirely. To create a Suquamish poem located in Suquamish time, one which includes the invisible, to queer our appetite for terminal consumption. 

For Sigo, each poem we read and remember, each "resonance," becomes part of our inherited lineage. Unforgettable lines are "drifting medallions" which enable the poet to survive when he least expects it. US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo invited him into Native poetry by asking him to co-edit When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. In his introduction to the anthology, Sigo speaks of reconnecting with memory through stories: "I remember stories of Suquamish women leaving for several days on summer journeys over the Cascade Mountains into Eastern Washington to gather luminous bear grass, those pieces that would sometimes tell stories along the outer surface of our baskets." This image and action -- to gather the luminous bear grass -- combines Sigo's spiritual commitments with his understanding of poetry as a space of communion, a gathering of spirits and stories, a home for all ephemera and impossible visionary forms.

10

"There is no death, only a change of worlds," Chief Seattle said in 1854, closing a speech to his people, which Sigo quotes. To create a Suquamish poem located in Suquamish time, one which includes the invisible, queers the present focus on materialist consumerism.  In a culture built on forgetting and erasing, it is revolutionary to say "the dead are not powerless." Invoking the absent into contemporaneity allows ancestors to unsettle the living with eternity. In our attention to them, we are forced to listen, to be supplicant, to imagine alternative modalities of time and respect. This looking-beyond is dangerous to worldviews based on immediate gratification. The dead are not here for a  commercial instant's hot-take or hashtag effluvium. 

11

Form is how we "convey the passage of language through the body" and onto the page. Sigo isn't a poet of the finished product (acknowledging that, by the time a book gets published, he is no longer fascinated by it), nor is he a poet of the production (which is related to branding). He has little to say about how to write a poem correctly, and much to celebrate in the forms and modes which inspired him, paying particular attention to the list form, the chant mode, "things to do" poems (as popularized by Gary Snyder and Ted Berrigan), political slogans and posters (The Black Panthers, The Fugs), Allen Ginsberg's Snapshot Poetics with photos, proclamations, journal forms, notebooks, Billie Holiday, improvisational jazz techniques, the "devotional quality" of writing by visual artists (including Agnes Martin, Philip Guston, and Joe Brainard).

Although Sigo doesn't name Rainer Maria Rilke, there's a sympathetic resonance in Rilke's description of music as "a breath of statues" that draws us into intimacy with the beyond. And in Rilke's embodiment of Rimbaud's poet-as-Seer, allowing the outside to accumulate within the flesh until it emerges in a poem, which is to say, revolution. 

12

Sigo's poetics returned again this week when reading Jason Allen-Paisant's "Silence, Sound, Ceremony: The Poetry of m nourbeSe philip," noting how philip's multi-medium, polyvocal ceremonial poetics shares a visionary stream. In Allen-Paisant's words: 

"Language is always an insecure place. The language of the poet performs this insecurity, the recursion of past and present, of the past in the present. To be displaced from language is to be physically displaced. Yet the answer to this alienation must be poetry itself. So the poem is reconceived as corporeal habitation. Corporeal because it embodies its subject matter;  Corporeal also in that it places the body in action. The poem is no longer an object;  it is a space of gathering (s)."

The space of gathering is one where the dead are permitted to speak by the poet who lets language lead, who opens to body to mystery and enchantment, who engages the ceremonial to invoke silences, breath, and ritual in which gathering is both created and embodied. "The pleasure of the poet is to redefine our engagement with the way language comes to guide our lives," and this, for Sigo, involves"taking on reality in luminous particulars." There is a physical and spiritual wholeness to this living poetics which relies on an ontology conceived from time and community, an invocation that is also a libation, a sharing of gifts with the dead,  a listing of names, evoking the missing—not just as elegy but as epistolary, as dialogue, as evolving incarnation. 

13

"Is our idealized voice in fact a ruin? . . . Wherein the notion of knowing of the instrument eventually transcends its spiritual strength?" Sigo’s questions shape the lectures as well as his poems.

Poetry is driven by the need to express the inarticulable, or what it means to exist, to be alive, to live given the knowledge of death. Sigo responds to this paradox by removing the endpoint: what drives the poet to speak is never finished, never settled, and continuously present in new forms and variations, as what being is relates to what being has been. The poem lives in collaboration with the ineffable, and this act of collaborating continues. 

Rather than reading Sigo into a poetics of transcendence, I found the numinous. It is not a box, a school, or a label: it is a space of inhabited illumination where the corporeal and the material meet the luminous as vision and revelation. 

And numinosity, perhaps, relates to Sigo’s foregrounding of the epistolary, recalling a time when "the most transformative and liberating texts on poetics were alive in actual correspondence," particularly those of John Keats and Arthur Rimbaud. The letter is the "most human form of direct address": it assumes the duration of a relationship and the space to watch it change up close. Keats' belief that "Poetry should Surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity" corresponds with Sigo's interest in gathering as both a noun and a verb, an expansive epistemology of what can be seen when open to all mediums. 

Like Keats, Sigo references letters and relationships among poets as if they are talismans, evoking the cross-pollination of mediums, the poetics of potlatch, revolutionary loci . . . things he gathers from relationships between his literary influences.

The poem is a letter, a mode which inscribes the ontological intimacy created between the writer and the reader.

A similar view of resonance in correspondence can be found in letters exchanged between Lou Andreas-Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke, where this ontological intimacy located equality within the encounter itself, the page on which one mind and spirit beholds another. And then, a few notes on Keats in the same section of my notebook devoted to Sigo—Keats writing to Fanny Brawne to rage, half-jokingly, lovingly, against the distraction of romance posed to the poet:

Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—

- John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 3 July 1819

To be inspired enough to write—and yet not so inspired as to be consumed, unable to write—this is the poet’s problem, and the problem is more real, more actual, more embodied for those living with chronic illness, or those writers who know next year might not exist. And so Keats writes to Fanny five days later, on July 8, 1819:

I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel. I have seen your Comet . . .

And then again on July 27th:

You absorb me in spite of myself—you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is called being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares—yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it. I am indeed astonish'd to find myself so careless of all charms but yours—remembering as I do the time when even a bit of ribband was a matter of interest with me.

And what I want to suggest is that these epistolary relationships, these heart-pours on the page, are also part of literary creation, and the basis of what we call lineage. Charles Brown was one of Keats’s closest friends. They met in the summer of 1817 and went on a walking holiday of Scotland together. In a letter to Brown dated 30 Sept. 1820, Keats wrote:

The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond every thing horrible – the sense of darkness coming over me – I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases shr was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wen(t)worth place ring in my ears – Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

And then, a few months later, on November 30th, Keats wrote to Brown again, facing the dread of death, the end already present in his understanding of self:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young . . .

*

Sigo notes that performance also involves fakeness or predatorial intimacy, as in when COINTELPRO used a divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy the Black Panthers —they emulated them, went undercover, performed intimacy and revolutionary brotherhood. But he does not offer a solution to predatorial intimacy in poetics. This may be one of the silences that deserves unpacking at a time when so much of what is taken from humans is done so through screens and media.

Notes on the aesthetics of ruins.

The language of ruins — the presence of ruinscapes — is central to my current manuscripts. But so much of what compels my thinking will be left out of the poems, the essays, the novel . . .

So I leave these crumbs for myself, should I wish to retrace my journey in a space less chaotic than notebooks: the relationship between the icon and the monument, between love and eros, between seeing and beholding, between imagining and destroying.

In an essay, “Summer of the Statue Storm,” A E Stallings looked at Georgia’s famous Stone Mountain, a monument to the Confederacy, while reading ruin-guru Susan Stewart. In Stallings’ words, and quotations:

As Stewart concludes in her last chapter, “Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language,” “Monuments are among the most controversial of built forms, and their controversy always lies in their inadequacy and in the inevitability of their failure.” A monument is a future ruin.

Reading Stallings brings back the goosebumps of reading Stewart and discovering connections between conventions, language, and social valorizations:

The fragment is cousin to the ruin, as the unfinished building reflects the collapsed one. “Companion to the ruin, the unfinished is not the sign of a damaged form but the sign of damaged intention.” The Tower of Babel is the ur-unfinished building—or the unfinished building of Ur, perhaps. Its most famous depiction is the much-reproduced painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (or paintings, to be precise, as two versions are in existence, slightly varied, like an early spot-the-difference game), itself based on a ruin: he pictures the mythological ziggurat after the breakdown in human communication as a lurching wedding-cake pile-up of layers of colonnades based on the Roman Coliseum.

Modernism thus is a kind of culmination of the ruins lesson, with its fetishizing of fragment, its palimpsests, its Babel of language and voices, its concern with the “age value” of ancient quotation, and its fascination with physical ruin.

“A quotation is also a way of engaging a ruin, or fragmenting the monument known as a text,” I think to myself, while reading Stallings’ beautiful essay.

“Perhaps saliency, itself, is a form of intertextual relationship,” I wonder, while recognizing words and phrases that I kept in my notebook when immersed in Stewart.

Surely Stewart must have mentioned damnatio memoriae? What other coincidence could cause it to pop up in both Stallings’ thinking and mine?

To quote Stallings:

Scholars have been busy telling us that iconoclasm is nothing new, reminding us of the Roman practice—cancel culture, if you will—of “damnatio memoriae,” or condemning the memory, when the Senate would try to erase every image and inscription relating to an individual, and even their families. Caligula and Nero are among Roman emperors treated thus; they have hardly been erased from history.

Also on my turntable as I finish quibbling with the poetry manuscript, the ruins of angelology, the hagiographies of motherhood, “In Labyrinths” by Martin Pops (also known as Marty Pops), “Resisting Left Melancholy” by Wendy Brown, and, of course, the echoes inside Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement”.

Music: “Into the Light” by J. Views ft. Wild Club

*

Is there something like a ruin in disappearing? Or does the ruin rely completely on a physical chipping-away in order?

I don’t know.

"I am indifferent about being missed," writes Hanif Abdurraqib, thus opening his essay, "The Art of Disappearance." Being rooted in his own contingency is perilous:

“To drill down on the definition of “being alive,” I have always come to a core definition that I can understand and make peace with: being someone who participates in the ever-shifting world. But I have no control over the world, and I don’t mean only the world in the sense of a blue rock twirling along endless dark. I also mean the smaller worlds.”

The smaller worlds include the immediate challenges of relationships, the persistence of his depression, the self's relation to self. Relationships expect things–they presume presence and bloom from anticipation. The more presence asks us to perform a certain openness, or emotional lability, the more it costs.

There are kinds of leaving, disappearing, and changing one's mind in a way that removes you faster from the presence and awareness of others. 

Sometimes, on the playground, I lied when the other mothers asked what my husband did for a living.

I pushed my son back-and-forth on the toddler swing and said: he is an engineer. Or a teacher.

Once I said my husband managed the gardens of the elderly and disabled, a sort of janitor for beautiful green spaces which felt like homes to their owners, but which their owners could no longer maintain.

My husband was out there, somewhere, in those moments when I was asked to imagine him.

But I was a single mother. There was no husband or partner. No ex or divorce.

It is easier to disappear in the expectations others have of you than to exist as a perturbation of the normal. Ruinscapes aren’t merely perturbations of the normal—-they are repudiations of time which articulate alternate temporalities. It is the precise nature of the ruining destruction which most intrigues me.

Tomaz Salamun's "The Field of Ptuj"

My Excuse

I want to the look at the place described in Tomaž Šalamun’s poem, “The Field of Ptuj,” before thinking through the poem, itself.

Since I’ve already read the poem, one might read this having-readness as a note of insincerity. But my sincerity is uninteresting—-and my reasoning is simple—- the place of the poem serves as background to the actual subject, which is the poet’s ancestor and family history.

But the way in which Ptuj, the place, is described on various websites carries the tone of heroism which Šalamun challenges.

“Ptuj”

Ptuj was located at a strategically important crossing of the Drava River, along a prehistoric trade route between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic. The area is part of the traditional region of Styria and it was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

The area was settled by settled by Celts during the Iron Age. People first settled at the lively crossroads of merchant roads, where it was safe to cross the Drava River, already at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Like many parts of Europe, recorded history began with Roman colonization.

In the middle of the 5th century the territory was plundered by the Huns, and later gradually occupied by the Slavs. At the end of the 8th century Ptuj became part of the Frankish Empire, and at the end of the 9th century the city came under the power of the Salzburg Archbishopric. The city saw a revival of its trade similar to the Roman era only in the 11th century, when lords of Ptuj took over the rule.

- Visit Ptuj website

“They were not only successful in the battlefield, but also proved themselves as erudite and critical supporters of art. They reinforced the town militarily, built a new castle on the remnants of the old, and long-distance trade was revived,”

- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi.

The city’s most prominent buildings were erected already in the first half of the 13th century – the fort on the castle hill, the Dominican monastery, the Minorite monastery, and the Church of St. George. Ptuj officially got its city rights in the middle of the 13th century, including the right to build a city wall, which enclosed all city buildings, both monasteries, and the castle.

- Visit Ptuj website

Tourism began in the second half of the 19th century.

“Citizens of Ptuj invited travelers to come and see the remnants of the city’s glorious past, they praised its mild climate and good wines, and recommended bathing the rapid and clean Drava.”

- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi

The city had a castle and vineyards! It was ripe for bourgeois recuperation visits, later known as vacations.

From the beginning of the 20th century until World War II, the city was famous for the bubbling social life that took place in its bars and cafés. The excellent choice of coffee, wine, and spirits attracted wealthy and more demanding guests to the city’s hotels and cafés.

Hotel Osterberger, now Hotel Mitra, was the most prestigious hotel in Ptuj. Cafés and hotels also hosted concerts and balls, which were an important symbol of the city’s soul and air of refinement.

- Visit Ptuj website

The Poem

Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun brought his neo-avant-garde brush to a piece of family history with "The Field of Ptuj," a poem first published in his 1980 collection, Masks.

Here is the poem as translated by the late and marvelous Charles Simic:

I am drawn to the poet’s subversion of monuments and stereotypes, a tactic Šalamun uses from the outset, in the gesture of his poetics of dedication. Šalamun dedicates the poem to its interlocutor: a great-grandfather who served as a General in the 19th century, and who would, in many poems, be treated heroically as the pinnacle of masculine accomplishment.

Alas:

You were tired at the very beginning.

The first line completes its declarative with a period. One imagines the poet looking at a portrait and scrutinizing the General’s facial expression as he moves into the next line:

When like a trained monkey you posed
with your saber.

Again, this sense in which Šalamun’s description suggests an iconic photograph: the General posed with his saber (and what a perfect word Simic chooses in his translation, sword comes more easily but saber retains antiquity).

He resembles a trained monkey. “At the ceremony”— the swerve of Šalamun’s line breaks— where he is officially “made a baron.” From a General to a baron after someone says the magic word and the ritual of transubstantiation is completed.

The poet’s mocking tone clings to the sharp images. And how cleverly he avoids the consequence of his gaze by distributing it among the plural pronoun:

We forgive you
for looking ridiculous.

After all, the interlocutor must have been thinking great thoughts, Šalamun tells us, invoking “duty” and “future generations”—two abstractions which satirize the depth of the General’s purview. Deploying a noble-sounding abstraction in order to ridicule a subject is a classic Šalamunian strategy—using the abstract against itself to render an aura of vapid pomposity.

The truth is that General got “bored” in Zadar. And his wife wanted him to return to Vienna.

Slowly, Šalamun begins dropping pins on a map, dots which relate to the title invoking this field of Ptuj. Borrowing the chivalric conventions of his ancestor’s time, the poet names names to gossipy effect:

Did you even notice when Mr. Toplak
carried off your daughter? Your investment
had gone to Ptuj.

Insinuating that the General’s war games meant little when he couldn’t even protect his own daughter from a weak suitor, Šalamun burrows into the language of masculine convention and social status to attack where it wounds the ancestor most.

And, if this is not enough, the poet adds onto the accusations, for it is the General’s disinheritance of his daughter which causes “Barberle” to “turn grey on the mountain road.” Here is the turn:

Dumbfounded she stared at her offspring.

One sentence occupying a single line.

There are three such single-line sentences in the poem: the first line, this turning line, and the final line. An invisible pattern is set by these lines which stand, complete in themselves. Like sign-posts on a road.

Here, Šalamun shifts into the juxtaposition, the secret tension, the division between the elite and the Slavic (one of his themes)—the mother whose children were “raised by barbaric Slavic maids” did not even understand her childrens’ “language.” It is the mother who failed to protect them from the linguistic Slavic taint. It is the mother who allowed their tongues to be polluted. And now she has lost a daughter to the Slavic suitor (see Toplak).

The gorgeous captioning of what follows, the frame which bespeaks rather than speaking, the ominous colon:

raised by barbaric Slavic maids. It’s written:
our mother lay down all white and kept
pressing the buzzer no one heard.

Šalamun swoops into a prophetic voice and stretches into the romantic, fairy-tale diction of “our mother lay down all white” only to leave the reader with a discombobulating buzzer sound, an sonic uncanniness that ruptures the flow and the seriousness of the folk-language.

O, and the perfect return to the image of the saber-bearing General, the Baron whose Baroness lies stupidly with a buzzer:

"That’s not the way you figured it, mon general.

Online, I find: “Archaeologists believe that some 30 thousand people lived in the greater area around Poetovio, which was one of the most important Roman army base camps, at the time.”

The Roman name of Ptuj was Poetovio. There is a poet inside it.

How does the italicization of mon general influence the ordering of the poem?

I'm thinking about how we begin a letter with the diminutive, the assertion of intimacy, the "my" inside "mon"...but Salamun ends the poem with this. Mon general—French, the bourgeois language of correspondence.

Asterisk

In poetry, one encounters the concern about an underdeveloped speaker. I’m not saying that it true of this poem, or in this case, but I see it pop up in craft essays and arguments about poetics.

(One could argue that Salamun’s speaker is quite underdeveloped; keeping his distance through plural pronouns and the razor-sharp focus on the subject of the portrait. The speaker isn’t changed by the poem—-he doesn’t mature, evolve, or discover anything small and precious about himself?)

“Development,” of course, is loaded by contemporary associations, and by the of the narrative arc, borrowed from fiction.

Concerns about 'underdeveloped speakers' are time-bound, which is to say, these concerns are only a problem for the poem which takes the narrow time of personal development as a metric.

Assuming our preference for redemptive narratives, it is still worth asking why we bring this expectation to the room of a poem? Why do we assume the speaker must be changed by it? Isn’t this concern one which ignores the relationship between the poem and the reader? What is the poem for?

Curb-Appeal: Notes on the author's headshot.

1.

The first time an editor asked me for “a headshot,” I had to google it. Accordingly, the term originated in the movie industry to describe a standard 8″ x 10″ professional photograph of an actor, taken with specific parameters, and submitted to a casting director or producer in the hopes of booking an audition based on the first impression of their looks. 

To book is to bill.

A booking (n.) is an engagement for a performance by an entertainer.

A book (n.) is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover.

A publication (n.) is a book or journal issued for public sale.

For writers, a headshot (n.) is the standard photo requested by publishers prior to a piece's publication in a journal or book.

As a visual component of marketing, the headshot serves as a possible point of sale.

2.

I change headshots more frequently than some mammals change their boxers—restlessly, constantly, driven by a mixture of intrigue, devout uncertainty, and dread. Like nail-biting, this compulsive shot-shifting is bad for my brand. It prevents consumers from relating to me as a recognizable product. 

What does it mean to recognize a produced self?

When someone refers to me as a blonde, I don't remember who they are referencing. In my mind, I'm still brunette. I am often unrecognizable to myself. Surely I’m not alone in this.

There are 117 photos in the folder marked HEADSHOTS on my laptop. Among these photos: seven camellias in varying shades of light, a glacier as captured by my dead mother, a small dish with ash from a manuscript, an assemblage of acorns, the back of my head on a metal slide, three MRI images of my brain with contrast, a green cardigan, a silhouette of me kicking seaweed, a passport photo, the Krakow nude, me in grass, me in meadows, me looking tired, happy, distracted, surrounded by notebooks . . . 

3.

Real estate agents emphasize curb appeal, or the attractiveness of a property for sale and its surroundings when viewed from the street. Landscaping, the front entrance, and the condition of the paint or siding are the biggest factors in curb appeal. It's the outside of the house that makes the buyer decide whether to enter. 

In "People Judge Your Book By Its Headshot," author Scott McCormick insists that “the goal of your author headshot is to cement your brand.” The headshot is aspirational: it aims towards a genre-specific creme brulee of professional glamour, aesthetic proximity, and iconography that leans on looking. Since publishers have deemphasized cover art, the headshot emerges as a selling point for buyers. 

People don’t judge a book by its cover, but by its headshot.

4.

P. took my first headshot in a ruinous Alabama cemetery on an outing with the kids. The image on the back cover of the debut fiction collection has its author glaring at something outside the frame, her face troubled by shadows (bad lighting), a torrid braid perched on her home-bleached hair, a gangly magnolia in the background. One wishes she knew better. One wishes, for example, that the author had experimented with display techniques to augment the visual experience for online marketing efforts. The dark circles under her eyes — ghastly.

As we train our puppy to cease pissing on house plants, P. begins a conversation which connects my headshot-horror to a fear of failure, particularly, the failure to be glamorous, the inability to appeal to others.

“Bullshit,” I tell him— bullshit being the gauntlet that leads me deeper into studying this object, this professional set-piece, the headshot.

5.

When my son turned five, he began reading billboards and signs aloud.

I remember his puzzled little forehead, the mind reaching for words: "Mommy, these smiles are trying to take something from me." This awareness of how smiles can be predatory was first offered to me by a child whose neurodivergence makes him, in many ways, a better cultural anthropologist than the articulate pedants of neurotypical hallways—o, hallways, maybe one recalls the predation of high school femmes asserting their smug grins in the silence that follows a whisper session. This has nothing to do with anything except the sound of a young voice singing We have affordable curves as I drove.

6.

Why do I smile when I enter a room?

"Is to see you to feel you or keep you at an unthreatening distance?" Mary Cappello wonders in her memoir, Awkward: A Detour.

In a room stocked with strangers, the smile asserts its own confidence. The smile may be a social badge of having arrived; power comes from the ability to offer the least determining smile in the headshot; the smile designates this particular relation. For me, that is the problem. The headshot promises a sort of relationship that can only develop into iconography.

Roland Barthes described the iconic gaze as the one which looks directly at the viewer— the one whose dead eyes insist on their aliveness. Eastern Orthodox icons witness the doings of a house; I grew up surrounded by their eyes and golden aureoles. Perhaps this supernatural element is what I wish to revoke of myself in recusing the representation of motionless and eternality.

If I’m not twitching with restlessness, the headshot is lying. It presents an unrecognizable self—-a self too polished, professional, surreal, or else too intimate, expository, torn from the sacred corners of my private cathedral. Is it the confessional that scares me? Cappello notices the subtexts of smiles when visiting Russia on fellowship, when a man tells her that she is putting herself at risk by grinning—better to look solemn and "normal." The normal varies across cultures, social classes, time, and language. What is normal today will be the ramparts of nostalgia tomorrow.

7.

"In Sicily, the sun doesn't shine," Cappello says, "it burnishes." The light of time and place changes the way we behold the body; the headshot denies this contingency; it universalizes the writer by holding us in one shape, one light, one moment, for all eternity. Is a headshot a portrait? I could write a book about this perhaps . . . an inventory of how we see one another in the altering 21st century lights.

8.

The policing of professionalism existed prior to the headshot. To take sides in the aesthetic headshot wars is to color the scene with ethical undertones while descending into visceral personalization of critique. God forbid one wakes up worthy of a hashtag on the social media marketplace. As they say in po-biz workshops for authors, brand is everything. The criteria of value is excellence. Honey: money talks.

Headshot discourse has evolved into a close-reading exercise wherein the author's image is decoded as a statement of artistic purpose, a development of brand, an aesthetic gesture, an opportunity to be solicited for features in journals or television.

“Look—” I tell P, “the headshot has a hook for a heart.”

Enter the at-home studio—-a variety of pen lamps with magnificent wattage, mood lighting so that authors on a book tour can take courses on how to look good on Zoom. What follows is a non-exhaustive inventory of things I've read or been told in the industry of headshot acquisition:

Investing in a professional headshot is a way of showing respect for the reader. Showing up with your hair a mess tells the reader that you don't value yourself or your work. The social media headshot should be more approachable than the book headshot in order to provide readers with a sense of intimacy: by following you on social media, they get access to a rawer version of you. When getting ready for your author photos, think of how you’d like to appear when meeting your reader in person for the first time. For the book photo, dress like other authors in your genre, which is to say, novelists ought to look more professional while poets can milk the constellations for whimsy and a slight bohemian aura. In order to keep your brand fresh, one must update your headshot every two-to-three years. If you invest in a grainy headshot, that image will follow you around for eternity.  At all times you should be asking yourself, “What kind of image am I trying to project to the world?” In the mall of desirable books, every image counts. 

The headshot is a glimpse of the person at their Sunday best; or as they want to be imagined; or as , or the self most amenable to markets – I'm not sure that we know which is which. As writers, I'm not sure we have time or financial incentive to consider it. I don't want to stop long enough to become a brand.

“Are you still obsessing about headshots?” P asks, as the deadlines and stacks encircle me.

There are so many Annes that I am, and so many Annes I resemble, without filling definitively —-

9.

In my search for the perfect headshot, I watch a microvideo lesson for authors on how to take your own headshots; learn about Hilary Mantel's pensive, caped headshot; discover that moody black and white headshots are hot; find that professional headshots are harrowing for the anxious or introverted; wander through hilarious twitter self-parodies of author headshots; get stalled in the indignance of authors whose publishers rejected their chosen headshots. 

A typology of headshots emerges: the realistic headshot (which constructs subject as unassuming, unsentimental and sincere); the bohemian headshot (which constructs the subject in opposition to bourgeois aura and interposes the author in counterpoint to the system that publishes him); the whimsical headshot (which constructs subject in relation to fragility of planet and natural world altered by climate change); the assertive headshot (which constructs subject as powerful, reclamatory, and serious); the sexy headshot (constructs subject as eager to be visible in a sexual way, or engage in self-objectifying lens); the regional headshot (constructs subject in relation to geographic terrain and placehood) — all of these constructions rely on an overdubbed mixtape of fantasy and nostalgia which is critical to the capitalist-realist aesthetic gaze. 

The fantastic subject of Walter Benjamin's 19th century flaneur has become the oversaturated subject, but the iconographical aspiration is the same. Part of this can be traced to the predominance of the visual in current marketing discourse: the proliferation of posters for book tours, the coordinated visual palettes and themes related to books themselves, the emergence of the book t-shirt grounded in aesthetic love for a book rather than articulation of theory. This is just business as usual in hypercompetitive markets where so much depends on being memorable. 

Benjamin gestured towards the market-friendly aesthetics when describing the broadening role of ad-space in 19th century newspapers, particularly with respect to the prestige of the reclame. A decrease in subscription rates, news items, serial novels, and advertisements altered the role of newspapers. 

Of newspaper ads in the mid-19th century, Benjamin complains that the ad took up more space and was better designed than the copy around it, so that even when the product was criticized in an editorial, the effect was negligible. Suddenly to be out of date was to be out of fashion —- a sin against the present time.

The news items caught on because they could be employed commercially. Reclames, independent notices masquerading as news items, referred to products that were advertised in the paper. Although they were denounced as irresponsible and deceptive, their use underscores the increasing connection between advertisements and paper sales. These short news items and different typefaces allowed the papers to have a different look every day, pre-disposing their daily purchase, and making them appropriate compliments for the newly defined cocktail hour— the ultimate in non-serious gossip that had become institutionalized in the cafés.

10.

Artists are not new to capitalist realist aesthetics: Marcel Duchamp's avant-gardism borrowed from mass consumption's planned obsolescence without disavowing the artist's protest at being reduced to a mass product. If Duchamp gave us the found sacrilege, Andy Warhol gave us the precursor to LOL with his  painstaking cultivation of public persona to accompany pop art. Set design, lighting, color theory, all came into play in the mythos of Warhol.

We spectate ourselves being spectated by others in order to perform the spectacle of the book launch. We lie to ourselves and locate these gazes in a subset of the numinous or authentic, rather than the commercial. We writers have been lying to ourselves since the pen first graced the page to placate our wild imaginations.

The brand is modernity's version of the icon—a holy image—the secular divination of market forces in action. The iconic headshot sanctifies the latest viral surge. Perhaps it is this fear of being sacralized, or remembered, as the brand, that worries the iconoclast in some of us. What's the point of getting rid of gods if only to insert one's self-image in the hole?

On this reading, a good headshot would be a lie—it would suggest that this self has fit in an image worth remembering, rather than reflecting the incoherent noise that I am.  Remember me, instead, as a consort that never managed to settle into a pose worthy of deification. Remember me as a flibbertigibbet who couldn't remain motionless long enough to warrant your time or purchase.

11.

If I query the headshot, it is to understand my own discomfort with it, or to locate it in relation to my discomfort for icons and monuments in landscapes saturated with the crimes of nationalism and theocracy. Because there is no such thing as a wrong headshot – though there may be some that sell better than others—-I prefer to strip away any ethical readings from the act of interpretation, just as I strip it from personal aesthetic preferences ranging from piercings to plastic surgery to hair color.

The color of one's hair is not a moral position – certainly less so when it pertains primarily to females. Hair color is an aesthetic choice which often reveals trends and social practices of the time and place. There is no universal aesthetic, no such thing as “natural” once you put the first cream on your face. The natural, itself, is an evolving aesthetic criteria.

In theory, the image is just a tool, but there is no space carved away from the judgment of consumers, some of whom are human – and there is nothing lonelier than the pulse of one's aspirational event in the putative icon. Perhaps an “intellectual history” of the headshot is impossible. . . The Algonquin Round Table residents spoke in full knowledge of the persona as they performed for each other at the table: their epigrams emerged ready for quotation, stoked for viral frisson. Maybe the nice NYC cafe wasn't a way of life so much as an enclosed space and a way of being seen as the Intelligentsia. The cafe was the site of that branding. 

The distance between gossip and insight is at the ear's discretion.

12.

Stanley Cavell calls it the illusion of the natural, or the candid — but is the headshot more candid than its textual apparatus, the resume? Which part of the resume is candid about interpersonal relations, or how many doughnuts one eats at the office party before wondering if others have had one? The resume, at best, is well-groomed—it sells itself. The headshot aspires to the same, give or take a wry grin.

13.

But there is a photo I love on the back cover of Brenda Hillman's poetry collection, Loose Sugar.

In this grainy, black and white taken by Louisa Michaels, the author sits before a white wall in a white tank, her lower arms hidden from view, her shoulders complicated by loose hair, her head tilted with an unassuming, close-lipped smile. The lines on Hillman's face are visible; the sunspots on her chest are an open field; there is a glare on the skin under her eyes. By industry standards, this headshot would be a flop. 

After subjecting this photo to the usual close reading, I realize what I value is how little it reveals. How it could not, for example, sell a shampoo or a lip gloss. How it hovers for an instant in the air — a face, a simple snapshot of an author who has just finished writing, and who hopes to return to the page —- and who has paused, for a moment, to look at the world without fashioning herself into it. A sin against the times, the poem’s part-crime.

Notebook: Poems I've kept since high school.

High school. Everything started there— the copying of poems on the cover of binders, the prefacing each day’s journal entry with a verse written by a ghost, the slow seduction of language and the careful attention the poet brings to words.

There was a way of being there and not being there, entirely. Poetry was like playing hookey mentally, opting out of the classroom scenes.

Metaphorical hookey aside, the first time I skipped school, it was raining. And the rain resembled the peasant dress my great-grandmother wore in the portrait which hung on the dark wooden walls of our hallway, except that the peasant dress was intended to symbolize the rain I imagined would arrive when, suddenly and dramatically, I left school after trigonometry, knowing that my boyfriend would likely look for me – knowing he would look and worry, given that we had argued in the cafeteria earlier. But the privilege of seeing him look and worry – the very reason for which I left – was made impossible by my leaving.

As for the rain, it arrived an hour later, by which point I had already been conquered by things I was sitting on, namely, the swing shaped like a metal dragon which resided in the park a mile down the road from the school; I had already been swinging and wondering if he was still looking for me, wondering also if he had realized that there had been an argument which occurred earlier in the cafeteria, an argument which represented the struggle between my hopes for community and my commitment to him, as an individual, with extensive emotional needs, and the sort of vibratory lexicon required to communicate these needs to me, and make my head spin and spin and spin with him. Or, rather, make my head spin a bit with the words I had come to associate with the idea of him — nervy, metamorphic, sensitive, sandy, necrophobic, misunderstanding.

Perhaps nothing came of it. Perhaps poetry is the nothing that comes of things we hold close?

In honor of a new year, and poetry, here is a handful, a small dusting of poems which I first copied then, onto various surfaces — including the doors of my closet, my head, my hands. One shares such things because someone else shared them first. Something abides in these poems—-something outlasts its self. May they bring you closer to whatever you’re imagining or writing.

*Disclaimer: These poems were collected prior to the internet and the world wide web, back in the day when teens went to libraries and sat with books copying poems from them in Alabama towns where the bookstores only held Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The linked translations are not necessarily my favorite, or the best. But they were easier to find. And I erred towards ease ….

“For the Anniversary of My Death” by W. S. Merwin
“This world is not conclusion” by Emily Dickinson
“A Confession” by Czeslaw Milsoz
“December 11th” by Anne Sexton
“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand
“Elegy” to Marina Tsvetaeva by Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Abyss” by Charles Baudelaire
“Mock Orange” by Louise Gluck
“Untitled” by Cesar Pavese
“Love Songs” by A. R. Ammons
“Marriage” by Gregory Corso
“O Lull Me, Lull Me” by Theodore Roethke
“No Childhood” by Adam Zagajewski
“Recreation” by Audre Lorde
“Third and Last” by Anna Akhmatova
“A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde
“Elegy, owed” by Bob Hicok
“Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
“Vita Nova” by Louise Gluck
“I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke
“Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Two Poems for T.” by Cesar Pavese
“The First Elegy” & “The Eighth Elegy” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
“Fame is the one that does not stay—” by Emily Dickinson
“Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
“Knee Song” by Anne Sexton
“My Faithful Mother Tongue” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara
“Posthumous Remorse” by Charles Baudelaire
“My Heart” by Frank O’Hara
“Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium” by James Wright
“Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“With Mercy for the Greedy” by Anne Sexton
“Autre Eventail” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“You Who Wronged” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Sensibility! O La!” by Theodore Roethke
“Purists with Object” by John Ashbery
“Late Echo” by John Ashbery
“Etiology” by Linda Gregg
“Last blues, to be read someday” by Cesar Pavese
“Night Song” by Lisel Mueller
“Tortures” by Wislawa Szymborska
“The Aeolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Room of My Life” by Anne Sexton
“Constancy to an Ideal Object” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“And then we cowards…” by Cesar Pavese
“People at Night” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Copious amounts of Leonard Cohen, including “Owning Everything” & “The Only Poem” & “These Heroics” & “I am dying…” etc.
Poets in Romanian (Stanescu, Ana Blandiana, Enescu, so many others)—this would be a longer list

Apostrophe

Lost lists and silences.

1.

I’ve been thinking about lists— particularly the lists one is asked to assemble after the death of a loved one. The legal system frequently requests an “inventory” of the items which belonged to the loved one, a list of things which can be contested by beneficiaries and inheritants.

Lists have their silences. I did not include my mothers’ shoes in the inventory of her estate. But my mother loved shoes; she preserved her 30-year-old boots from Romania carefully in her closet. The boots were useless in Alabama, where sorority girls sport Uggs with shorts all over campuses that never see snow. Why did my mother keep those boots near the black heels she wore to work?

2.

Is silence listed or unlisted? I don’t know.

In contemporary memoir, in the industry of unpacking wounds, silence often appears as the enemy, the erasure one writes against. Silence is violence, and the text serves as indictment. But silence is also protective, a way of preserving the sacred, a way of acknowledging the unsayable. Marguerite Duras hints at this in her “Letter to Centro Racchi,” where she bows out of an invitation to speak at conference, due to fear of being asked a question which would ruin a silence central to her life. 

Duras fears being asked why her characters are always Jewish, a question she cannot answer; the possibility of speakers or audience members theorizing on an answer to what feels unanswerable, the chance " that someone might tell me why" is "intolerable" to her. She speculates that silence is what binds her and her characters to Jewishness—"We keep silent together and that makes the book."

Waking up at 16 to a world that included disaster, Duras says:

"What happened to me in between, the war, the children, love, everything fades. The Jews remain. Which I cannot speak about."

3.

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young.."

[ John Keats to Charles Brown, 30 Nov. 1820]

4.

In court, this refusal to defend oneself is often interpreted as an admission of guilt. To refuse to satisfy the answers of others is to deny the world's claim on justice, or to complicate its relation to reality. More than anything, silence challenges our ways of knowing the world. And a kept silence, an impermeable, living silence, cuts off our access to the sacred, or that which is set apart.

5.

Excerpt from Ryan Bradley’s “The Lost List” (as found in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee)

I love Ryan Bradley’s essay, “The Lost List,” which touches on the inventory of absences compiled by the mind. It prompts notebooks.

Reading Bradley, I thought of Judith Schalansky’s marvelous book, An Inventory of Losses (translated by Jackie Smith). In it, Schalansky invokes what archivists know, namely: "chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition--is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order," as "the world is a sprawling archive of itself."

The world is a sprawling archive of itself. Everything depends on what is selected as worth remembering. Or what it determined to be forgettable. What we consecrate with legend.

6.

Joan of Arc's trial is notable for its silences —- she is, after all, being tried for heresy against a god administered by rulers, or the power of those on the podium.

And she responds with refusals: "I won't answer that.... Even fire won't change my mind..... The voice has forbidden me”—-the voice being God; fire being the way she would die, condemned for relapsing into heresy, exposed to a public recitation of her countless sins, and the response: silence. Like suicide.

The film still as quotation.

3:37

Tobias shares a photo of a girl with blonde hair surrounded by a golden nipple of light, a dusky illumination – this gilded creature keeps appearing in his Instagram photos, and then disappearing when he clicks on the photo. He has no idea who she is.

The days of muskrat Twitter have dawned and even this angelic pixel-host seems seems connected to the present uncanniness—- an uncanny knit further from the eerie than the commercial.

Mystery has changed. Even mystery feels slant, invisibly calculated, algorithmically-inclined, in the spaces of social media, those mediums which mythologizes us to ourselves.

3:39

A DM from a bitcoin miner followed by a DM from a writer expressing concern about our role in the systems of dominance. My dog Radu barks at a squirrel.

4:01

X confesses: “I like myself better on screen. Being away from Twitter reminds me of how despicable I find myself in real life. The real me screams at her kids and fails daily. I am an actual failure.”

The way social media defines time, or infects our relationship to temporality, feels so loose, so wrong, so—to use a twitter expression — unhinged.

I console myself with the fact that my work originate there – in that hustle of headshots and fake luminosity.

4:08

Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, as translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, arrives. I get sucked into it quickly…

5:18

“The Internet has rung in the revenge of the archive and sounded the death knell of the show, which used to set the beat for the triumphal march of the present,” Renouard writes.

The show-and-tell of tweetland— the instability of our attachments to it. One would have to be mindless not to consider the effects. Purisms aside, Renoaurd’s critique is right. And yet, I hope Twitter doesn’t die before I do, since I scheduled tweets for the year 2031, which I can’t imagine actually seeing.

We all have our dubious experiments; each manuscript invests in the variant dubiousness. On restless writing days, I inventory conditionals and fondle the dream of my posthumous bird voice carrying on without me.

One conditional: If Twitter dies, the ghost I wanted to be will die with it.

9:32

Revising an essay on Celan alongside a book about files, truth, and surveillance. Staring at photographs cut from family films. Thinking how quotation resembles the film still—the scavenged screenshot.

Addressing the shadow gives it weight.

One cannot read Paul Celan without absorbing this somehow. He says it directly:

the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.”

I speak to you in order to give you substance, to point to the thing attached.

As I remove these lines from the palm, I set them apart. Like S. Cavell, my interest drives me to write what arrests me. In turn, I arrest the image in a manner that turns it into a still from a film. I rip it from the context of its motion, of its life. Because I have isolated this photo—these lines, this particular shadow—I read it differently, there is no longer movement, the frame is reduced to the intensity of these lines.

The critic uses the imperative when they elect to quote or phrase a section of a poem. I want you to look.

9:43

The shade is the name for the ancient ghost. The lampshade changes the light. The order of life versus the disorder of death. Fourteen DM’s from friends trying to figure out whether they should migrate to another platform. Twitter slows fills with Muskrat experts and Muskrat reportage to reflect the new contagion. “Hyperbole is everything,” my teen daughter announces in her book report.

9:49

Order. Disorder. Simply put: I want twitter to die after me. I don’t want to witness the death of a book published posthumously. It seems rather wretched for logic to ask such things of the mind.

12:51

Renouard mentions “the aura of things glimpsed once and then lost forever” with respect to a book manuscript he lost. This missing book is the one which haunts him (I think of Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident).

The sad lovers crawl into my mind near midnight with their furious foreheads, their rage-curved shoulders, the books I have seen and lost. Projected books that come back like the ice pic of a migraine. As Renouard misses the written book, I miss the unwrittens—-the stories half-lived, half-remembered, the poem’s sharp clip, the shadow—-not a plot I’d wish to inhabit again but something I treasure like a lost tooth or a lock of hair cut from a corpse whose skin hasn’t betrayed its pastness yet.

Notebooks: the end of November.

Background: Tony Morrison, George Steiner, Danilo Kis, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Roland Barthes— all eventually wrote towards the aesthetic and ethical value of openendness.

Discursiveness, theory, worry – the mind alone with a book in a room at night.

Point of origin: There must be a starting point which isn't loss.

Cosmology: Heidegger said "questions are paths toward an answer"; each path will be unique to the mind who sets off asking it. Schools turn paths into highways by sending us to chase the same question and to compare our responses.

Being able to ask questions is more important than being able to answer them. And the belief the answering questions is a measure of intellect diminishes the range of thought, both formally and institutionally.

We cannot dismantle the house in which we live by coming up with new answers. Dismantling requires undoing, reformulating…

The right answer – the one directed by the textbook – testifies to its own idolatry, or to the belief that one answer can stand for eternity.

Technical considerations: Good criticism reveals the supple shoulders and strength of an idea, its gait, its range, the terrain it travels in a landscape of inter-textual topography.

How steep is the slope of the gradient away from convention in comparison to other ways of knowing?

What is the degree of this gradient, its effects?

The ways language fails those who put their faith in it.

The aesthetics of idolatry uncovered by the author, whether personal or cultural. The particular lineaments of loss — not to start in that space, but to acknowledge its potential dominance.

Subjects: Amatonormative relationships.

Class as construed by the cognoscenti. Power.

The nature of belief and its relationship to the vatic voice.

Memory as elsewhere or otherwise.

Longing as a failure of markets.

The apocalyptic heart of modernity. 

To seek the metaphysics of how language changes, and how unstable the world conveyed in a word, whether we read it from experience, cultural limitation, or time.

The insight and the apercu, the personal portrait set against the pain of the text.

The posthumous voice on trial for what it failed to anticipate, and dialogue with her grief continues to challenge semantics.

Barthes quotes from Gide's 1927 journal: “They want to make me into a dreadfully anxious being. My only anxiety is to find my thoughts misinterpreted.”

Abstractions: You don't know what you don't know until you've built a house which must be undone by it.

The hunger for purity rationalizes violence.

Therapy doesn't provide solutions to social problems – it merely offers attention to those who can afford it.

Social problems are not resolved by privatized solutions.

Asides: We mistake citations for rigorousness, just as we mistake the use of complicated lexicons for intelligence.

Neoliberalism offers to each the opportunity to each be the hegemon of our own hallway.

Storyline: Someone wants to rule the world so they run for local office. 

Poem: The sapling stripped by winter. 

The rawness of the leafless thing.

The incongruency of raw evoking meat when I mean is a bone.

Distractions: Piranesi, piano tuners, baroque variations. 

Samuel Beckett saying to A. M.: “It gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest. It’s very painful, very difficult.”

Contentions: Modernism relies on the sense of observable time as a form of authority.

Schools tell us a statement is true or false but life reveals the truth or falsity depending on its moment of utterance and its situation.

Tempo: The velocity of engagement and the language which enacts this. 

Cigarettes in the bathroom: Memory is elsewhere or otherwise.

The moment of utterance.

Counterfactuals. Sincerity and good faith: both require a commitment to error.

Mysteries: The way ideas are used to explain a perception, and what it triggers in the reader. What sort of re-cognition is involved.

How a poem has its own landscape and selects its own characters.

The specifics, the details, the blitz.

The visibility of voice. ….Is the poet whispering to someone else in the room? Why not?

“Resonance” rather than “reference”, Daniela Cascella calls it in Chimeras, this decentering of academic citation and direct quotation.

Non sequiturs: The discourse of great seriousness may not be serious.

Language doesn't become a god just because we put our faith in it.

Moral choices require the existence of other people; ethics exists outside of the closet of our personal feelings, in the space which is social, in the cafeteria.

How a book creates a sense of reality.

How a poet encounters temporality.

You don't know what you don't know.

And yet, one hopes to somehow build a house which is undone by it. 

Black widows, embodied cognition, and memoir in confessional culture.

"The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all." 

-Gyorgy Lukacs

“Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.”

-Mahmoud Darwish

1.

Black widow webs resemble messy tangles tucked into corners and crannies of things, under logs, sometimes littered with leaves; splashed by the surrounding spiders' white urine that attract scavengers with its strong scent. Often on the face-down side of old car wheels.

Sometimes she eats her lover. He plays her web like a lyre.

She may eat him before even copulating, or she may decide to not eat him after sex and then he dies alone.

When torn with a stick, the widow's web sounds like paper crackling in fire.

2.

The black widow spider benefits from what Ed Yong calls “embodied cognition”, so the web, itself, is part of the spider’s body:

Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).

The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication…..”

She may even eat him before copulating…..

3.

Which brings me to memoir, confession, webs, network-weaving, corporate malfeasance, the vacuity of authenticity in the never-ending hustle to keep our work separate from our personal lives. Or, at the very least, to be able to maintain control of our information space.

Eda Gunaydin’s “Tell-All” approaches the challenges of memoir in a confessional culture:

A friend who is a memoirist and I talk about the compulsion to disclose. Like her, I want to make disclosures – build intimacies to overcome the sense that this is so fucking mundane, that we, freshly emotionally regulated full-time job holding perfect subjects of neoliberalism, are now trapped in a prison of pretending like we don’t want to talk incessantly about one of three things: trauma, sex, anti-capitalism, that we are ever thinking about anything but these things. The way that any sleepover builds this heterotopic space which devolves and opens up necessarily into a conversation about fucking. The way that every game of Never Have I Ever is about fucking. The way that we all want to say to each other what the worst thing we’ve ever done is, and be forgiven.

Her observations on “communicative capitalism” will not sound strange to poets marketing their books, struggling with the blur between persona and human, and the ways in which confessions, themselves, have been a shock-market. With disgust, a part of me is forced to acknowledge that Trump knows this his market; his victim-centered memoir of his time in the White House will net millions.

For the Right is milking the teat of white male victimhood in earnest. It is doing this by constructing its own reading lists and special canons. And this confessional often involves some intense bootstraps, as Andrew Marzoni observes:

The frontier archetypes of Republican discourse – the antiestablishment maverick, the lone-wolf vigilante, the rebel, the patriot and the self-made man – draw most explicitly from the bootstraps myth of the rugged individual at the heart of American exceptionalism, which conservative authors exploit wholesale….

The pro-life thriller Gideon’s Torch (1995) by Charles Colson, formerly Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, is representative of this literature in that its depiction of ‘Christian white men in a persecuted light demanded,’ as Mason writes, ‘a deft appropriation of oppressed peoples’ actual histories and a revisionism that ranged from outright Holocaust denial to comparisons that likened antiabortionists to abolitionists.’

The current trend of far-Right literature presumes itself academic (i.e. operates to dominate the conventional elite) while lacking its own innovations. As Marzoni notes, it is characterized by “its Romantic environmentalism, neoclassical worship of the male physique, and its fixations on technological determinism and irony recall literature of the early 20th century….The narrative function, too, has remained the same: to stoke feelings of bitterness and solitude into a politics of reaction that is intellectually justified only after the fact.”

4.

Carol Mason’s “Right-Wing Literature in the United States since the 1960s” is a must-read for anyone tracking reactionary literature. To the degree that living in the South involves constant Civil War Reenactments, which I take as theatrical, nostalgia-inflected confessionals rooting the hearts and mounds of countless men in confessionals, Mason points to the sort of “rough agrarian” xenophobia that still exists in Alabama on both sides of the political spectrum, often eager to shame or reject those who don’t “sound” southern enough:

Less documented than the proliferation of right-wing serials in print, or the love of a conservative tradition of great nonfiction books, is how the reading of fiction and poetry compels right-wing movements. Five literary journals helped shape not only what to read but also how and why literature played a role in conceiving a conservative society. These literary reviews were heavily influenced by the Agrarians, a group of scholars trained at Vanderbilt University who promoted a radical conservatism. Beginning in 1930, with their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, the Agrarians responded to the rise of modernism as a challenge to Victorian values and to the modernization that rendered the Southern economy more industrial, forever changing society with it. Throughout the mid-20th century, writers such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, and Paul Viereck presided over or engaged with the following five literary journals that were important to conservative thought.

All of this remains complicated, and if one pulls a strand of the web, the entire edifice quivers.

5.

Kate Manne has written extensively about media that constructs "himpathy", as in Fargo: we don't see the violence because we identify with the male, and worry about his future.

Misogyny is a problem women face "not because they're women in a man's mind, but because they're women in a man's world." Misogyny enforces patriarchal norms while sexism rationalizes them. 

“There's no control group in a patriarchal culture….”

6.

Simone, Sartre, the relationship of loyalty which resembles forgiveness on the part of female intellectuals. We want to imagine more from Hannah Arendt. We want their intimacies and loyalties to align with our own descriptions. We want, I think, an extreme option that caters to Western feminism, or to the abrupt ending. The divorce. 

I have always mistaken loyalty for what might be freedom, or the commitment of engaging the ideas which failed us, but the ideologue's promises of liberalism and liberation are not separable from the anointment of their eyes. To be chosen as a partner in thinking - for some women, this is greater than marriage or birthing children.

Sexual freedom is not separate from intellectual freedom, or the ability to reflect on the desires and fascinations of one's life. When torn with a stick, freedom sounds like a letter being dropped in a shredder.

Who for his hunger?

In 1977, Roland Barthes gave a lecture to an academic French audience wherein he claimed that his study of semiology grew from disgust for "this mixture of bad faith and good conscience which characterizes the general morality." The mixture of bad faith and good conscience is critical both to the paranoid reading and to the virtue signaling which has evolved in order to get ahead of the anticipated bad faith.

Is it interesting that we expect to be misread?

Is is problematic that our longing for authenticity has developed into an expository seriousness?

*

The poet sits and stares at the sunrise with due disgust—she is not a morning person, not an “angel of the morning,” not one who finds release in donning lyrca and running around the block or counting her steps.

*

There is a short poem by Victoria Chang which fascinates me.

To The Margin

I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs.

Notice how things accumulate in a sort of negative theophany…. I will never love.

*

I will never stop seeing a god in our hungers for recognition.

*

Trauma is persuasive precisely because it ends a conversation – there is nothing to discuss after someone has laid human pain on the table and labeled it thus. Perhaps it is better to describe trauma as manipulative rather than persuasive; it speaks by silencing. By making speech impossible.

*

The underside of the market for self-improvement is the growing aisle of trauma products. Not every behavior or thought can be credited to the burgeoning industry of trauma. In the US, the market for trauma includes sub-aisles like gun culture.

I will never stop seeing a gun in the eyes of every human who bump-stocks their American Jesus.

*

Our hunger becomes text.

Our fears take shape in figurative language.

"What we know that we will soon no longer have before us, this is what becomes an image," wrote Walter Benjamin. The rotten scent of ungathered plums dangling in the air. The vines whose flowers open at night and emit a fragrance to attract nocturnal pollinators. Not all poems do their work in the daylight —-

*

The language of the promise presses up against Paul Celan's poetics, or borrows from the apophatic nature of communication by depriving it of testability. The modern promise is scientific, and therefore testable, or subject to verifiability. Testing the promise is part of the nature of a promise, as Stanley Cavell said.

*

What is the name for a prophet who never prophecies, or who gets all their predictions wrong? Are they still a prophet, or does their being and identity depend on having kept their prophecy? How does the prophet profit from speculation?

In the same 1977 inaugural lecture to College de France, Roland Barthes said: "I cannot function outside language, treating it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon."

And yet, he does. He does both. Who, shall I say, is calling?

Rabinovich's "Murphy Laws" for poetry.

The Murphys Laws of Poetry

Poetic Murphy’s law: When someone thinks he can write a poem, he always does.

Murphy’s Law of Duality: When someone thinks he can write two poems, he’ll end up with a triptych.

Corollary of Archimedes: A poem expands to fill the entire volume.

Exception to the Murphy’s law: Any fool can write free verse.

First corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed.

Amendment to the First Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed, even unprintable.

Second Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: All poems, however unprintable, will end up on the web.

Sequelae to the Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Not a single poem will be read.

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics: Editing makes everything worse.

First Principle of Poetic Evolution: “...so peerless amid all the Amazons. com...”

Conclusions of the Emergency Orthodontist: Rhymes, teeth, and barstools fly Saturday nights.

First Axiom: Any poem can be set to music.

Corollary (the all-thumbs rule): Of the myriad tunes, they will invariably choose the one guaranteed to do the greatest damage.

Second Axiom: There’s a doggerel for every tune.

The Law of Poetic Frequencies: Anthologies automatically open on the page with the host’s poems.

The Cardinal Rule of Poetic Merit: Real poetry is what I and my friends write.

First Rule of Literary Criticism:: Shakespeare is dead.

First corollary to the First Rule of Literary Criticism: Hecht is also dead.

First Law of Publishing: The shelf life of a book is inversely related to the poet’s expiration date.

Second Law of Publishing: Publishing in the vanity press is better than vain attempts at finding a publisher.

The Main Rule of Literary Criticism: I don’t like your yellow blouse.

The Law of Humpty-Dumpty who sat on Wall Street (next stop Bowery): One writes for children the same way one writes for adults, only worse.

The Law of Poetic Linearity: The author’s enthusiasm is directly proportional to the reader’s dismay.

Poetic Relativity (e=mc2): Poems travel with the speed of blight.

Third Law of Publishing: Poetic license comes with a flea and tick collar.

Mikhail Rabinovich translated by Anna Rozenshtein

*

Mikhail Rabinovich was born in 1959, in Leningrad, where he worked as an engineer. He came to New York in 1991. Here he works, of course, as a computer programmer. Rabinovich is his pen-name, though his real name is also Rabinovich. His works came out in print in four countries, ranging from "The New Russian Word" to Odessa's "Fountain" and from the "Slovo/Word" journal to "The Independent Newspaper". Mikhail was a collaborator in ten prose and poetry almanacs, published on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. He is a winner of the Internet competition "Russian America" (as part of "Tenet-2002" project). He authored two books: Far Away from Me, a book of short stories, as well as In the Light of Unclear Events, a collection of poems.

More from Mikhail Izrailevich Rabinovich in translation.

Roland Barthes' "contretemps" and Akhmatova's glove.

Anna Akhmatova’s glove is already there on February 17, 1911, at Sarke Isala, where it sits at the end of a first stanza:

the door is half open,
the linden smells sweet…
on the table, forgotten,
a riding crop and a glove.

And then again, in the same book, it is the image which dominates "The Song of the Last Meeting,” on page 87, where the poet, pulled the sleeve the glove for my left hand line break onto my right. "

Song of the Last Meeting

My heart was chilled and numb,
But my feet were light.
I fumbled the glove for my left hand
Onto my right.

It seemed there were many steps,
I knew – there were only three.
Autumn, whispering in the maples,
Kept urging: 'Die with me!

I'm cheated by joylessness,
Changed by a destiny untrue.'
I answered: 'My dear, my dear!
I too: I'll die with you.'

The song of the last meeting.
I see that dark house again.
Only bedroom candles burning,
With a yellow, indifferent, flame.

And all the earth colludes in wanting to vanish, in the disorder of the mind, and the maple leaves waging her to die with them, in the season of dead love which feels like autumn. September 29, 1911.

The seasons of Akhmatova continue. In March, in the spring, March 18-19, on Wednesday at 3 PM:

my ring finger was stung
by a buzzing wasp.

She addresses the lover who is absent.

She stares at her ungloved hand and wonders if she will weep over this men whom she calls "the strange one”.

The question is critical to the poems turn, as is the address which combines both the lover and the poet, like the effect of looking in a mirror while planning what to say to someone only to find that you were speaking to yourself.

Will your countenance smile at me?
Look! Now on my ring finger
there is a fine smooth ring.

The sting is in the ring.

The blood beats ever stranger
in a body wounded by desire.

She wrote this in “The Fisherman” on April 23, 1911.

It is these bourgeois markers—the rings, the gloves—which Akhmatova uses to signify loyalty and romantic enclosure. She lays before us the enigmatic objects which enable the subject to ask questions, or which ask those questions themselves, but which cannot answer them, or be cinched by particular claims.

Fragments in favor of archaic language.

What is the subject of this photograph?

How can you tell?

What is in the foreground? The background?

Does the photo have a middle voice?

Who is speaking?​​

How is the effort to sound familiar or comforting a form of deception?

*

The caption above the photo— “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in the novel” — comes from the first page of Roland Barthes’ alleged autobiography, which is titled Roland Barthes.

*

“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

Ander Monson writes in his essay, "Index for X and the Origin of Fires.”

Is the caption the alias or the alibi?

How does the subject’s relationship to the foreground or background alter the as if of speaking?

*

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song." The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil, but its Latin name is Arista Lakia elegans, which sounds like "a person, unique and singular. "

If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name— which Berger thinks you wouldn’t do, if you knew it as birthwort. Archaic language is singular – it jostles and demands attention, it asks to be seen and tasted as unique.

*

Black cherry (Prunus serotina) represents immortality in Chinese lore; its wood wards off malevolent spirits.

Humans acquire values from cultural events that tell us something matters. We are socialized into valorizing certain things, like baseballs, hot dogs, barbeque.

Vervain was a divine weed for the Romans; it cured the plague, stopped rabies from progressing in animals, halted the damage of snake and insect venom, and reconciled enemies. It had the power to draw out poison or evil. Annual feasts, the Verbenalia, were held in its honor. These feasts created relationships between young Romans and the plant, vervain. A village woman in Romania told me that she placed a wet rag with vervain over the foreheads of women in labor.

*

“If you love something, does it need to love you back in order for you to feel connection? Think about the story of The Velveteen Rabbit: loving the doll so much that it became real.”

- Markie Louise Christianson Twist in an online presentation on digisexuality

*

Robert Walser’s sentences are extraordinary. His short piece, “Fragment” (translated by Tom Whalen) constantly shifts between speakers and places and situates the reader inside the mind of writer exploring a story. Or picking up a thread, and dropping it for another. Lifting a lens, staring through it, and then setting the scope back on the table.

There are no transitions—and no paragraphs. Notice how he gives us the “noselet” in describing a character he invented:

She has turned out a bit thin, strong nose, a noselet would suffice. With its feather plunging down in back, her hat makes an impression. Skirt short. Magnificent how he succumbs to her threat. Since then I can't shake free of this Edith.

The writer is diddling, piddling, playing with thoughts, but the characters obsess him, which is to say, they intrude in his life. He would like to meet them. Or, as Walser continues:

Recently I sat in a restaurant and stared out into the street in the hopes of seeing her pass. But it didn't occur to her to show herself, which I found proper. There are wishes we don't wish to see for the filled because they are too to to us. If they were fulfilled, they would be lost. The desire to see her means more to me than her appearance.

A beautiful frame inside this collage of fragments.

I fear greatly for my hero. No hair do I leave unharmed on the one sauntering across fields, who perceived nothing more important on his ramble than a peasant woman swerving off to where, from time to time, we all discreetly swerve. It was night, and with the good book in his head—thus intent on generating literature—he paced slowly back and forth in front of a façade, drawing the attention of cabman to his Renaissance behavior.

The male narrator has a love interest, and his wooing comments mock the posturing of courtship, the strange gallantries of puffed-upedness:

He continued: “I climbed through a concantenation of encouraging constellations, apparently high into life, in order, apparently, to fall. One is what one presents.”

*

Anachronism and archaic language expands temporality; it brings to prose the broadness of poetry and photography. Obviously, this isn’t an argument. It is merely what others have called an opinion.

Poetry, collage, and bleeding between subjects.

1. The dog in the room

My head was whirring today—-everything blurred inside it. So I sat with my youngest child, who was busy making collages of our dog, Radu, from old literary magazines. Something about the wordy dogs she created made me think about language, about shapes, about fragments and vessels and colors and detritus.

The anxiety of a prior day's drafts, the loom of deadlines, the paralysis of procrastination—these are not unusual in the writing life. One way to move past them is to enter the work (and subject) sideways through collage, using the peripheral vision or sidereal eye in writing, staring less at the subject than into the space around it. 

Collage is a vehicle that helps reveal the nonlinear. And nonlinearity is poetry’s starter fluid.

2. Mark Jarman’s “Unholy Sonnet 1”

To inventory in a nonlinear way—this is also how the collage works in a poem. A list that doesn’t need to be read in order to mean something. A cloud of images collated from other places, whether the mouths of others or folksay.

Mark Jarman’s “Unholy Sonnet 1” makes the reader aware of its constraint from the outset: we know this will be a sonnet. Beyond that, it cuts and pastes, or inventories the names for God.

So we have a simple white paper background, or a material basis that doesn’t want attention. (A sonnet seeks to blend itself into the poetry landscape; it uses the field in a manner that accords with out expectations.) What Jarman does is bring a mixed diction, a blurring of holy and profane, into the poem.

3. Staring at a collage can generate poetry

This is just another way of saying that collages make me want to write. The layers and juxtapositions—-the fragmented nature of the visual encounter—-can lead to ekphrastic poetry, whether one acknowledges the ekphrasis or wanders off into a different imagined space.

There is a woman on his hand….

Joel-Peter Witkin, Le France et le Monde, 2011.

4. Collage unsettles the distinction between uses and abuses

Collage can be used as a discursive tool to prompt conversation—or extend existing conversations in uncanny ways— as well as a subversive tool which undoes the settled object relations in our minds.

Like a poem, the composition of a collage depends on its entirety, or the whole. Working too closely distorts the view and foregrounds the parts over the whole.

In both poetry and college, I think the best view is one that alternates between moving up very closing and stepping back, up close and then back, again and again, until both the whole and the parts are radiant.

5. Max Erst is a must for every writer’s notebook

I save collages and illustrations by Ernst on my desktop to needle me towards unusual words and images.

Max Ernst, Approaching Puberty… (ThePleiades), 1921.

5. PICTORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: a collage exercise

For this, you will need a print-out of a comic triptych with three panels. You will also need a glue stick, some magazines, scissors, and colored pencils (optional).

Once you have your materials, draft three collages in cartoon-like triptych. Each panel should depict the following phases: 1) childhood 2) teen years or adolescence 3) adulthood. Flip through the old magazines for ideas. Consider how you could represent yourself symbolically as a character, a chair, or a fox or maybe a cockroach. Let the images and materials in the old magazines shape how you tell the story of your life.

Georges Hugnet, Mademoiselle Lachèvre, 1947.

6. DIRECTED COLLAGE: a collage exercise

Assemble the following materials (piece of cardstock paper or old cardboard; colored pencils, old magazines, scissors, glue stick, acrylic paints or watercolor, paintbrushes) and then follow instructions without thinking too hard about why you're doing what you're doing – go-with-the-flow – work fast; go by instinct. 

1. Use a large paint brush to cover one half of the page with the paint color of your choice.

2. On the unpainted side, use a colored pencil to scribble the names of 24 people in your life who were important or significant, however you choose to define that.

3. Tear a number out of a magazine & glue it to page. Add another number near a name.

4. Find the following and tear and glue them: an animal, a vessel, a form of motion.

5. Pick up yr black or dark paint. Just hold it for a second. Now put it down. Put it down.

6. Rip out an image of a map or a diagram from a magazine and glue it on the opposite corner from the animal. When I say rip, I don't mean cut with clean edges; I mean remove with the hand in a way that reflects the imperfection of borders when we try to remove anything by force.

7. Text your ex. Or pretend to text your ex. Don't text your mom. Don't text your mom's ex.

8. Keep working. Push yourself to the limit even if you feel lost. Find ways to evoke or create relationships between those names. Paint over some of them in light paint, if you want. Use colored pencils to connect or displace. 
   
   

7. Additional collage techniques to enact slippage between subjects

• Dropping spots of bleach onto tissue paper with an eyedropper allows white to bulge, creep, and contaminate the material in unpredictable ways.

• Using tissue paper as paint—think of stained glass windows, and how the layers of glass create new hues in relation to light.

• Bleeding colors at the border of tissue paper resemble the shoreline on a map.

• Crumpled and flattened tissue paper in the collage translates the wrinkles into slender traceries. It can be used as an overlay, or an underlay.

• Small sraps of paper scribbled with pastels or watercolor paints are also fragments that can be added to unsettle or alter the collage.

• Old maps and tourism brochures, wallpaper samples, trash, fabrics cut to the shape of buildings or flowers, inventory of bird beaks, thesaurus entries, diagrams from a science magazine, the shape of people dancing cut from maps and bombed buildings, tourism brochures.

• A splash of coffee or wine.

• Scribbling over the paper with wax crayons or with a candle before painting over it and watercolor adds texture, creates a sort of ghost writing in the background.

• Always consider the contrast, the juxtaposition, the brushstrokes.  Move by deformation.

Noah Davis, Frogs, 2011.

8. Collage Paste Recipe (vs. glue stick)

If you’d like to make larger collages, there is a certain paste that people create for this purpose. You need a bowl and some white Elmers glue and a brush. Dilute the white glue with water until it has the consistency of milk, then brush it on the back of the paper and also on the surface. This diluted glue brushed over tissue paper creates texture, like a layer which absorbs light, adding density. Unlike a glue stick, the glue paste enables you to paint over the various objects and layer from above (rather than underneath, which is how we use the glue stick). 

Babi Badalov, Schizopoetry collage

9. Assemblage

An assemblage is simply a collage made with 3-D objects rather than fabric or paper.

Tate Museum traces assemblage back to Pablo Picasso’s cubist constructions, the three dimensional works he began to make from 1912. An early example is his Still Life 1914 which is made from scraps of wood and a length of tablecloth fringing, glued together and painted.

But Dadaists (and Surrealists) made the most interesting use of assemblage, in my opinion. Kurt Schwitters’ “merz” technique relied on scavenged scrap materials from the streets themselves, from dumpsters and trashcans. It was degenerate in the most controversial sense of the word.

In David Lynch’s assemblage, the golden frame evokes a sort of childhood nostaglia for framed family portraits—and Lynch makes use of this frame to unsettle the ordinary. The juxtapositions create the associative language, and the nightmare grows from these associations.

10. Zine Folding

Since much of this play came to me while prepapring for Zine workshop sponsored by Sarabande Books, I wanted also to share their video for how to fold a simple zine from a sheet of regular paper, and to consider how this can be used as a medium for collage as well.

In praise of the cento, with free PDF at-home workshop.

The cento is a poetic form that relies on appropriation. It is a collage built from lines taken from other sources.

In Latin, cento means ‘‘patchwork’’, evoking the collage-like nature of combinations. In a patchwork quilt, the creative freedom comes from two places:

1 the choice of fabrics (i.e. the lines selected)

2 the particular stitching between patches, or how the poet combines the various lines (i.e. enjambment, spacing strategies, fragmentation, use of the field, etc.)

There are many cento strategies, and the form really allows you to be creative about spacing, attribution, interlocutors, line breaks—it’s a wonderful form to use in order to study poetry more closely.

A cento has the thrill of a logic puzzle, or labyrinth, without a particular ending. There are many persmissions in the cento form, and each permission is a creative opportuntity, or a way in which things could be otherwise.

Play with lineation/enjambment so that selected lines are not always one complete line. Mix different source lines by stitching together fragments. Change tenses (or not). Add conjunctions/prepositions(or not). Use the original punctuation, or add your own. Use the original capitalizations, or change them to fit your plan for the cento.Use the cento in a novel way to create a tribute to a poet or school of poets…

Anyway, here is a free PDF you can download and share to play with the cento. Just click on the image below (whose illustration is by Alice Notley and part of one the writing prompts) and enjoy.

And here’s a sample writing prompt from the cento fever workshop.

Mary Ruefle: The Utmost of It

“The most of it was her handwriting.”

Mary Ruefle is the poet of the Utmost of It.

Or, that’s what I call her in my head, and on the pages of the notebooks where I address her, or question her, or simply continue the dialogue my words find with her own work, and how she sees the world.

Technically, Mary Ruefle is the poet-prosodist of The Most of It , "her first book of prose" titled after one of the 30 pieces, which is titled after its own first line: "My Aunt Miel, who never married and whom I never met, was eccentric, and the most of it was her handwriting. "

Aunt Miel was Mary’s mother's sister. The most of it was her handwriting. Miel worked as a Singer sewing machine model who sat in windows and doorways to demonstrate the aura of electric sewing to others. She was beautiful, alluring, and she wrote long letters that arrived on Thursdays which everyone wanted to read but no one could because her lettering was too large. Those too-big letters, that too-big life, that ginormous persona imagined by the speaker who remembers a game she loved playing when she was six.

The game involved standing inside of Miel's O's, and then lying down, allowing them to encircle her perfectly, hopping from to to o in "soon,", while her own sister “crucified herself” on the t's.

Both girls "would like our letters side-by-side"when the word "Tom "appeared the sisters are performing for their mom but also sharing in the letter from their aunt.

And the question about letters is how one can live in them, or how one can relate to them across time. Miel’s 25-foot letters couldn't be kept or preserved, but they are also the combination of every child's dreamed freedom — page 63.

”The most of it was her.”

Confession: I love taking one of Ruefle’s claims and cutting off the end to see how the claim walks afterwards. The most of it was her handwriting. But the most of it was also her, somehow, this woman named Aunt Miel who was living in a world the child could only imagine.

“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips.”

Here is how Ruefle qualifies that metaphor.

From Ruefle’s My Private Property.

Ruefle’s irreverent reverence is epistemologically contagious.

I mean: one way to play, or to write, or to do whatever it is we do with a pen and paper, begins with borrowing the head of someone’s else’s statue and building your own torso, maybe adding hips, or even fleshing out feet.

I mean: “Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips…” is where you begin.

“Fear has only the word ear inside of it.”

Ruefle frequently uses a word as a starting point for a poem or essay, and then circles it, poking at it, shining light on it, setting child minds around it, exploring the ways in which the word relates to life.

Sometimes, she leaves this word in the title.

Her essay, "On Fear," is wonderful; I return to it constantly, particularly her articulations of dread. And I’m excerpting this portion just to emphasize how Ruefle literally plays with etymyology —- how she treats etymology as a form of human play rather than scholarship.

From “On Fear” by Mary Ruefle.

“I want to go into the forest and collect lichen.”

"How could I recognize the dead lichen among the living lichen?" Ruefle asks in "Lichen" when trying to find a way to collect forest lichen without causing any harm by "kidnapping a lichen mother".

“I had to admit I could not tell the difference between the living and the dead,” the speaker acknowledges.

Because the poet knows the lichen is "not of " her species, she knows that she does not know the shape of their lives. Nor could she know the shape of their death – although she concludes that lichen "certainly did not bury their dead" because she seems to associate this burying only with humans. The evidence that lichen bury their dead would likely look similar to evidence that lichen did not bury their dead, which is to say—- how would a human know?

"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he previously imagined possible." This is how she opens "Hazeline," trying to figure out when her father died if he claims to have died during surgery.

What happens to those who die and live? What does it mean to die for a minute? At what point does one become officially resurrected? Ruefle's interest in theology intersects with moments of human absurdity—and I love this aspect of her irreverence.

Look, sometimes the poet destroys us by redefining a word with an image. “Deconstruction” will never be the same.

Utmosting Our Way Through the Dark

I want to end by sharing the talk on bringing joy to your writing practice which Ruefle delivered at the Bennington Writing Seminars Commencement Address on June 11, 2022.

And to draw attention to how Ruefle plays with words in order to parse them, how, for example, she evokes the relationship between “poetry” and “poverty.” But also to note her respect for ruins—for the ruins of books, humans, stones, artwork, civilization, idols, “slow-motion cherry blossoms,” and anything we don’t see disappearing, anything which disappears without giving a damn whether we see them doing their disappear-tango thing.

I love her.

I love how she quotes Tom Cruise so that I can laugh and cry at the futility of this calling, or the absurdity of dreams, hopes, beliefs, hero stories, Tom Cruise in general…

“Words, words, words”—Ruefle, more than any contemporary poet, prepares me to write the incredible joy of not knowing anything at all, and watching in fascination as language rips open the seams and mouths bloom like a run in the crotch of tan pantyhose while standing in line, waiting for a sanctified wafer which may also be the body of a human who died.