Until this year, I always said I learned my greatest lesson about myself from reading The Making of Americans in high school. (Namely, I learned that I was a pathological liar who would maintain that I had read numerous modernist tomes at a very young age.)

However, earlier this year (right around New Year’s Day), I discovered a book that irrefutably altered every conception I have about the world. This must sound like hyperbole, but I mean it with full sincerity. Every other text falters under the conceptual density and semantic beauty of this staggering work. It’s not necessarily that this book is better than all others — rather, it has ruined the very experience of reading for me. My editor requested that I write about something more current. I replied that this was impossible. The only book that means anything in the modern age is The Universal Sweep of the Death ↔ Life Law of Nature by Raymond Westbury Maxwell, Jr. What is it about? Well, the title is self-explanatory. Or I sure hope so. Because I doubt anything else could explain it.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and this is sagacious advice when confronted by a book that appears to have a major typographical error in its title, and was somehow published by a St. Louis train station in 1972. Still, in its own quiet way, it’s as mysterious and insightful a book as Lucretius’ The Nature of Things, or Spinoza’s Ethics. I can’t overstate Maxwell‘s ambitions here: one of his ancillary objectives is to “void Time as a frame of reference to physical law.” It begins with an epigram:

It would be better for one inheriting duoinversive cognition to blind one of the two eyes, sever one of the two arms, obstruct one of the two ears or cut off one of the two legs rather than to deny one of the two inherited inversions. For a physically hampered organism can still witness its inherited duoinversive fluctuations as being in concert with universal physical law.

This is a confident and audacious introduction. It manages to appeal legitimately to both our sense of intuition and our rational judgment, while skirting across some deep abyss of dementia. You don‘t understand it, and then you don‘t understand why you don‘t understand it. On one level, the author sounds like he’s successfully solved the mysteries of dualism; on another, he sounds like a POW cyborg. The passage also makes tremendously cumbersome demands on even the most prepared audience: it flaunts a bizarre lexicon appropriated from some vague academic discipline (philosophy? psychology? biology?); it also asks us to make some sort of ethical valuation of whatever concept it’s attempting to posit as an axiom of consciousness. It would be like running up to someone and asking if they would prefer to submit to an amputation or a bifurcation of duoinversive cognition. Well, I don’t know, please just take my wallet!

And yet, despite these difficulties, the passage is still clearly coherent on some level: the style, the diction, the tenuous and unwieldy assemblage of genuine novelty, plagiarized terminology, and insane ranting. What does it remind us of? Can’t put my finger on it… This is why Maxwell’s putative thesis — that duoinversive, animate ↔ inanimate split entities form the contrapuntal mosaic of universal physical law, commonly expressed as twi Twin inverse effect — is only a bit of subterfuge. The true thesis is parodic and devastating: underneath every endeavor to apply logic to the mind and the universe is the shadow of absolute madness.

Sure, other great minds have constructed similar critiques of Enlightenment philosophy and analytical reasoning, but I can’t think of a more visceral and appropriate demonstration than Maxwell’s book. Here we have a brilliant author laboring intensely for decades to develop a plausible and self-sufficient system capable of elucidating the general patterns of consciousness and logic. And what did he come up with? Well, his life’s work was published by a train station and presented in such a way that even the most sympathetic and patient reader will remain incredulous. (The book’s myriad diagrams of cosmic and psychic dynamics contain symbols for “combWomb,” “lasers,” and “no symbols.”) Maxwell’s book is simply the most grueling and compelling example of absurdity that I can imagine. I suspect this is because we usually have to wait for subsequent generations of intellectuals and philosophers to illuminate the substantive defects at the core of each philosophical system. We need an Aristotle to understand why no sane person can be a Platonist. We need a Kierkegaard to understand why no sane person can be a Hegelian. But Maxwell refuses to wait. All of his sentences are transparently and verifiably untrue. There’s not a single sentiment that accords with anyone’s experience of existence and the world. Even Maxwell himself must have realized the utter frailty of his own philosophical edifice. Or, if he didn’t, it seems safe to say he was literally schizophrenic.

This is not to say that Maxwell is fatuous or incompetent. On the contrary, he’s clearly a genius who has spent a considerable amount of time refining and reconciling all the logical difficulties that plagued preliminary versions of his theory. Which makes the catastrophic failure of his enterprise so damning. Maxwell’s thoughts are patently ridiculous, ineptly expressed, and often inconsistent, and yet I think most readers will come away thinking all these problems with Maxwell’s thought are not really Maxwell’s fault.

The problems are with thought itself.

In effect, Maxwell has stumbled upon a series of propositions — 400 pages’ worth! — that are so egregiously incorrect and outlandish that, at a certain point, they transcend any individual man’s capacity for folly. They are language’s fault, or philosophy’s fault, or logic’s fault. Like the German peasantry, we must hold ourselves accountable. We must conclude that our faculties for effective communication and ratiocination are irremediably impoverished if they permitted this book to exist; any institution or phenomenon that contributed to the production of this book — whether literary, pedagogical, or scientific — must be categorically repudiated and abandoned. Consider the “twi Twin inverse effect,” the cornerstone of Maxwell’s entire philosophy. Even without getting into what a “twi Twin inverse effect” might mean, the phrase uses a word that doesn’t exist and a word that he never even pretends to define. It’s as though an obvious typo somehow mutated into the central concept of the book. One must wonder what other grand ideas from intellectual history began their lives as typos. Occasionalism? Skepticism? Imagism? Darwinism? All of them? Here’s a book that finally exposes the feebleness of man’s intellectual ambitions. It makes me wish ideas didn‘t exist. It makes me hate the very notion of education. It makes me wish I read books authored by rocks and twigs.

***

The reading gestured at below will I hope find readers struck enough by the poem to have become curious, at least, about William Cobbett : and for readers to whom the name is new I shall attempt to trace out an impression such as an encyclopaedia might produce. The older Brittanicas devote a page or more to him : and my edition, from the middle of the last century, conjures Cobbett as “that marvel, a literate peasant” : an epithet which seems to sufficiently introduce the  persona Hill is addressing. An Oxford Companion to Literature of the same vintage fills out the picture thus : Cobbett is said to have written with “perspicuity and vigour” : but his “honesty and shrewdness” are supposed to have been “marred by an arrogant and quarrelsome attitude, and by wrong-headed prejudices.”

The construals of lyric doing that follow will not seem only extravagant, I hope, to those who are more acquainted ― and minutely, even ― with the contrary creature the political Cobbett was. One could properly say of him that he was “not faithless in standing without faith” as he “kept open vigil at the site” : and saying so properly circumscribes an acting in absentia. The poem’s speaker seems to voice such stigmatising questions, I shall now hazard saying, as Cobbett might have asked were he among us : warranting thusly the bid to let stand the entire deposed authority of vision just as it fell : in the like absence that willing readers here come to inhabit. And what the voice that has so bid us proceeds to invoke appear, themselves, as stigmata of deposed authority and fallen vision :

your righteous unjust and cordial anger,
your singular pitch where labour is spoken of,
your labour :

inasmuch as that has brought to pass reborn Commodity. Cobbett’s political labour is worked ― however crosswise ― into the weft of the industrial transmogrification of English polity. That the contrarian impulses of a “marvellously literate peasant” should have been subducted by the progress of industrial democracy is a properly dialectical irony : since industrialization seems to “democratise” by taming every sort of political animal : by turning each into a voting consumer : the ostensible satisfying of whose “preferences” ― reformulated and concerted by the instruments of “public policy” that the “social sciences” have become ― has long constituted the developed polities, as they are termed, of England and America.

• Regarding “subducted” : consider the intent, and the intended readers, of the grammar Cobbett wrote.
• Regarding “constituted” : the word is appropriate only if “polity” denotes the instancing or ‘eventuating’ of some structure : parole rather than langue, in the argot of the structural linguists. English lexis seems to discourage such use : and my first use of the word seems to take a polity for a structure. But construing “polity” as I do just after, for that first use even, does not seem unnaturally strenuous.

 
Consider now that even those citizens of these Occidental polities who most cherish their “civil” origins will find it very difficult to resist being voting consumers : for their bodies have been recruited to the “enterprise associations” these polities become in the course of their industrialization : and remain, in the epoch of Information that seems to have followed.

• Regarding “civil” versus “enterprise” association : the distinction is Michael Oakeshott’s. Enterprise compromises the civil character of polity when, to give a conspicuous example, the State exercises its right of “eminent domain” to pursue “development” : consider the damming of the Narmada.
• Regarding the “recruiting” of the body : inevitable to the extent that national economies are run like extended households.
• Regarding “the epoch of Information” : the extent to which “informational polities” differ from the industrial polities of the First Machine Age does not seem germane here.

 
One might summarise thus : voting consumers are joined at the hip in “bodies politic” under the aegis of Commodity : and civil resistance to such jointing would go too much against the grain of such material existence as they thusly enjoy. Their civil selves are rehearsed in absentia if at all, we might therefore insist : and it is into such an absence, over readers rehearsing exiguous civil selves, that reborn Commodity looms, I venture to say now, at the close of our poem : looms, gelid as an allegory in marble, into the  absentia from within which the poem is both said out and comes to be heard.

I have just attempted ― in what will seem a sudden and extravagant way, no doubt ― to characterise the sensuous action which ends the poem : whatever is bodily done by the finial versing, as it were, of

your labour that brought to pass
reborn Commodity with uplifted arms
awed by its own predation

Let me note that I mean to characterise doing : not meaning. I take a poem to mean just what it says : and to do a great deal by saying what it says. The imaginal thrust seemingly natural to English threatens to confine lyric doing here, as I have construed it, to the eye. But the image proffered by “uplifted arms” seems to inflect, only, a primarily somatic sensuous action : which is keyed to “awed” and “predation” : and my “gelid as an allegory in marble” is meant to somatically correct an initial imaginal response.

• The capital “C” seems warrant enough for “allegory” : and with “gelid as marble” I mean to insist upon and qualify the somatic doing of the final line. Coming back to “looms … into” : here are two “somatical” transcriptions : “bulks into” and “crowds” : but these seem a little too “active” for the last line.
• Lyric doing in the last two lines might be formally summarised thus : “reborn Commodity with uplifted arms” traces the contour of such an image as Pound might have prized : but “awed by its own predation” fills out that contour somatically.
• The pronounced “length” of all the stresses in the last line, compared to the preceding two, is the formal agency here : these long stresses slow the lengthening turn at “arms” to the peculiarly “stopped” bodily state that awed by its own predation would be.

 
These last lines of the poem will not, by themselves, abet the characterization of their doing that I have just offered : and to advance my case I must now dress Absentia as I have cast her. The poem begins by presenting us abruptly to her : the blunt assertion of

I say it is not faithless
to stand without faith

conducts us to her without ceremony. The questions that follow limn her presence : as stigmata would, I shall now repeat. If my reading seems overwrought let me step out more coolly : thus : the blunt assertion the poem begins with brings the reader up against the absence its title announces : the medley of questioning that follows draws the speaking voice — which seems to contract itself to a question, almost, even as the questioning mounts — into that absence : which its stigmatising questions themselves scan.

So much for the voice that says the poem out : now for the ear it is pitched at. Hard upon these questions, the renewed bluntness of

I say let stand the entire
deposed authority
of vision just as it fell

compasses the absence they scan, closing the willing ear within it : the ear becoming willing inasmuch as the assertiveness of “I say let stand” deposes itself with “just as it fell.”

• Regarding “compasses” : what we are bid to let stand is the entire deposed authority of vision just as it fell : as much as the entire deposed authority of vison, just as it fell.
• Regarding “deposes itself” : verbal action here might be characterised as a rapid declension of assertoric force : through a contrast with the earlier elaboration of such force, pointed by the later versing.

 
The “absence” I have contrived is close enough, I trust, to receive as deposed authority Cobbett’s righteous unjust and cordial anger and singular pitch : in the shadow ― as I would have it, at least ― of reborn Commodity. I have wanted to diagram lyric doing, only, in such preliminaries to a reading as I have offered : a word like “looms” serves that exercise poorly here : and one could wish now for other means than poeisis employs. But the versing of our poem has enough discursive definition, surely, to show through any obscuring of its doings by my construals of such : by such picturings, for instance, as those construals may themselves induce.

It might be well now to set out what I assume in assaying the poem as I do : and the theses that follow are intended to excuse my rather summary proceeding.

• A lyric poem means just what it says : or, more negotiably, a putative lyric succeeds as such inasmuch as it means just what it says : and, conversely, fails inasmuch as what it means can be otherwise said.
  • Such ambiguity as Empson anatomised only conditions, and does not compromise, a lyric’s meaning just what it says.
• Understanding lyric poems is a matter of following what they specially do : a lyric is a swerving path, one might say, through a field of perlocutionary force.
  • How much more this conveys to the reader depends on his appetite for what used to be called ordinary language philosophy : the sort of thing Wittgenstein’s students got up to. But I shall make no more of the fancy. My purposes require only the everyday distinction between doing and meaning, as that is ordinarily instanced by the use of words.
  • Ambiguity in meaning serves lyric doing : which itself could never be uncertain.
• To formally understand a lyric poem is to gather how it does whatever it specially does.
• What lyrics do cannot be understood otherwise than as their makers’ doings : however “involuntary” or “passive” such doings may be : or however “negatively capable,” only, poets are supposed to be.
  • Or, more negotiably again, what lyrics are taken to be doing must be something their makers could understand themselves to be doing : or to be making words do : however “inadvertently” they may have come to do so.
  • So, understanding a lyric formally could not consist in specifying some underlying “pathology” : of which it is allegedly a manifesting “symptom.” The task of formal understanding is to specify the conditions of “surface reading” rather than “deep reading” : these modes of interpretation were distinguished by Arthur Danto, notably, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

 
I distinguish the completed understanding of a lyric poem ― as a comprehending, however fugitive, of its concerted doing ― from the formal understanding of that concerting : and would insist that sensuous advance toward such comprehending does not wait upon any intellected formal understanding. Such scruple may seem reactionary : or an atavism, vestigially surviving a “modernity” long since undone or outmoded. I can only confess the fault.

One last and topical matter : an example of a taunting if not idle honour. The world’s richest prize for a work of literature ― as The Hindu reports it ― has recently been instituted by an American company whose business is described as “management productivity” : whose principals would belong to the upper echelons of the nomenklatura president now over America : over the participatory plutocracy into which that polity has been latterly transformed, not least by the subverting praxis of Management.

-Bangalore, April 2008

***

To William Cobbett: In Absentia

I say it is not faithless
to stand without faith, keeping open
vigil at the site.
Who shall endure? What force throws off
the verdict of each day’s
idle and taunting honours,
the lottery, the trade in grief,
the outrageous quittance, the shiftless
orders of fools?
I say let stand the entire
deposed authority
of vision just as it fell;
your righteous unjust and cordial anger,
your singular pitch where labour is spoken of,
your labour that brought to pass
reborn Commodity with uplifted hands
awed by its own predation.

***

Michael Nicoloff’s “Punks” was published in 2007 by TAXT Press. TAXT Press “makes visible the work of contemporary poets, writers, and artists previously under-represented in publication. TAXT chapbooks are always free.” “Punks” continues to make waves in the Bay Area and beyond. The work (which can be read in its entirety at Deep Oakland) playfully enacts cultural and emotional moments/epochs that feel at once familiar and eerie. In December of 2009, I “sat down” with Michael to ask him some questions about “Punks” — here’s what the man himself had to say…

Is it important to you that “Punks” was published by a small Bay Area chapbook press put out by one of your friends?

Hi Alli.  I can’t help but take this as a question about community, which tends to lead me to really frayed lines of thought. Community, friendship, locatedness (see, my answer is already fraying into your next question) are central preoccupations in my work and life, and I think recently I’ve been exploring those ideas in a more head-on way that seems poised to shift my writing practice. That’s a vague statement, I know, but I don’t care to be more specific than that right now, which isn’t an attempt to coyly generate intrigue for readers out there, but rather not to fuck myself up via early release of what’s presently less than formed (Jennifer Manzano says it’s like I’m swimming in a Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit of the mind).

What I am ready to say is that while my feelings towards the poetry community you and I share at this point vacillates between okayness and semi-alienation (and I’ll take responsibility for the parts of that that are my own doing), I’m always grateful for the moments when a collaborative impulse draws people together into making things like chapbooks. Writing “by yourself,” however theoretically debunked, is still more collaborative than it’s often perceived to be on a lived level, even in “innovative” writing — we own up to and/or laud ourselves for our acts of appropriation all the time, but the contributions of unpredictable flesh-and-blood humans tend to end up confined to the acknowledgment section in the front matter.

But regardless of the degree of acknowledgment it receives, when someone reaches out and says, hey, I want to publish your poems/for you to be part of this performance I’m doing/want to write an indecipherable novel with you — at its best it can strip away some of that difficulty and ambivalence one (I) might feel towards one’s poetic community and shifts one’s perspective back to one of the other centers of one’s writing life — namely, books, objects, things. The activity of my poetry community seems to center around the poles of going to readings and of the abstract idea of being amongst actively writing people (even if they’re not talking about it). But those poles, important as they are, can feel too cerebral, interior, and diffuse, like mental activity without concomitant object-making. It’s easy to lose track of what you’re doing. At its best, making a material object with other people serves to channel that diffuse energy into something more concrete.

And that’s what, I guess, I felt in my experience with “Punks,” which involved Suzanne Stein proposing the chapbook and then madly rushing to design, set, print, and compile the book in time for a reading I was giving a few weeks later. There was plenty of consultation and throwing around design ideas that happened between us, and I give major credit to Suzanne for her excitement in that process, as it, in turn, gave my interest in “Punks” a new life, too, after it had been sitting finished on my hard drive for a year and a half. I know Suzanne enlisted David Brazil, Judith Goldman, and possibly others in stapling and putting the books together, which extends the collaboration, as far as I’m concerned. I think you and I have felt the same excitement when we were putting out Bruised Dick, and Jenn and I have felt it too in working on olywa press.

If I had to reduce this to a thesis statement, I’d say that I believe this (a?) community is at its healthiest when there’s a steady stream of books/chapbooks/objects being produced by individuals and groups of people and then having those items trade hands on a steady basis. It’s an economy in the broadest sense, and while I believe in quality control and, by the same token, don’t want to idealize the mimeo era, I think we might be better off as a group of people if we took a page out of their handbook and stepped up the local collaborative production schedule a notch or two. I think that kind of steady publishing schedule is what’s made TRY! have such resonance for Bay Area folks. It’s kind of the house organ. So, you know, more stapling parties, maybe?

I’m interested in what you say here about the production of objects. What is it about the stapling party, for example, that appeals to you?  Is it that production is intimately tied to sociality, or does it have more to do with the end result, the physicality of a real object coming to exist in the world?

I think the production itself and the end result are both appealing to me, but I tie both of those things to sociality. As I’ve said above, I’ve experienced the small-press production of objects, the actual process, as a sort of temporary de-alienation process that can draw people in and at least briefly strengthen a social bond. But once that object enters into circulation, it has a social function, too. I’ve heard poetry communities referred to as gift economies, though often I think that is equated with barter economy; the analysis stops at the fact that we’re often not giving each other money in exchange for objects but rather exchanging objects themselves. But the fact that it’s rarely an actual “I’ll give you mine if you give me yours” situation tells me that a gift economy is really what we are — it’s not a trade of goods in a market but rather exchange as a total social experience that creates or solidifies a personal bond. This is bringing me back to a thought that I had when reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift over the summer, so I’m going to risk being pretentious and quote myself from what I wrote in response:

I think that giving books away and its creation or solidification of a social bond is a phenomenon that’s there, but it seems like the level of social bond isn’t nearly as high as one might expect. And, well, books aren’t necessarily that common. Exchange of work, is, I think, the more common act of exchange, but I think the person who’s giving the gift isn’t actually who you’d expect. The nature of time constraints means that there’s a lot more work produced, even in one’s immediate community, than one has time to read. The gift, then, becomes the person asking for work and taking the time to read and respond, even in a cursory sense. That becomes a rarer and more “valuable” gift in such an economy.

I recognize that there’s a bit of contradiction in what I wrote over the summer and what I’m saying here, and it’s something I’m still sorting out, but I think the exchange of work — which is facilitated and expanded by publication as opposed to just handing out manuscripts to a few select people — that exchange, when viewed from a social perspective, is most important for the opportunities it creates for conversation, for possible creation of social bonds with the object as a facilitator. The gift of the book enables the giving of a larger gift, which is attention to the work inside that book. And so, following from that, if social cohesion is to remain strong in a community centered around a certain object (books of poems, mainly), it becomes important to have plenty of those objects created and entered into circulation.

At the end of “Punks” you list the various geographic sites of composition. Can you say some about how place influenced the work?

I’m glad to be asked this question, because I think of “Punks” as fundamentally a poem of place. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s a poem preoccupied with the idea of place, seeking it out but not finding it. The feeling of being dislocated was a constant as the piece was being written. I started writing the book in Portland, OR, about a year and a half out of college, in a period of time when I was feeling acutely unsure about where I wanted to live, which is a question that, for me, is tightly wrapped with questions of who I am and what I do. There was an initial burst of activity over two days, in which I wrote 40 poems, and then the work of editing/revision/compression continued over the next year. But, as you point out in your question, in year of writing and rewriting I lived in five places, and on top of it, those places also were pervaded with a feeling of transience, either because I was staying there in anticipation of moving elsewhere or because I was in living situations that never allowed me to feel settled.

Looking over the sequence now, I can see again how that feeling comes through in the content of the work. Not to lapse into too much close textual analysis of my own work here, but if I look at the first four lines in the first poem (“1980 rested on / your mistaken identity / as this layman Buddhist / of the failure movement”), I see my formal preoccupations at the time — to have fun with line breaks and entertain myself with general tonal disgust — but also can see the personal importance (to me) of the subject matter behind that language: 1980 is the year I was born, the “you” of the “mistaken identity” is most definitely me, and the “failure movement” is a turn of phrase that I found funny, but whatever that movement is, exactly, it isn’t exactly suffused with locatedness and positivity. All of that outside information isn’t important to anyone’s reading of the sequence, and not all of the language in the sequence has so personal a source, but throughout I think the language of frustration or disgust is coupled with language related to lack of connection to place and to the personal disruption (and just plain boredom, which is a real killer) that can cause.

One of the first things I feel when reading “Punks” is what I guess I might call polyvocality. I’m interested in how you think about “voice” and “sincerity” in your work? How do you think about “appropriation” and “tone”? Do you consciously (and consistently?) approach your writing from a certain theoretical perspective?

I think that in the writing of “Punks” I was consciously trying to infuse a sense of polyvocality via an experiment with pronouns — these unnamed you’s and he’s and she’s who say or do things throughout. It’s been pointed out to me that that, coupled with the fragmentation and density in syntax, lends to that sense of multiple voices and sources, and I’m willing to accept all of that. But even as I may have had that formal impulse to scuff the surface, to make the speaking voices multiple, underlying it is still the sense that I’m writing, literally, for my own voice, my own speaking voice, with the idea of me reading it out loud. I mean, there’s a link there to Olsonian projectivity, with the poem on the page as a script for reading, which is probably part of why I hate using periods in my writing, because I rarely experience myself in day-to-day life as having those kinds of hard stops in speech. It’s more like I’m trailing off with the constant possibility of continuing. I have, in fact, become aware of my tendency to end a large portion of what I say in conversation with “so…”  I’m not unique in that, but I have no idea how this happened. But maybe the line break is my poetic “so…” equivalent.

But on what feels a more bodily level, the focus on my speaking voice relates back to how I really started writing poetry (maybe “working with” poetry is more accurate), which was in a class with Bob Holman on poetry in performance. We read “Projective Verse” in that class, so the theory was present, but it was the experience of actually doing that kind of “projection” that sucked me in. Later, of course, I got heavy into NY School and Language writers and so on, with the disruption of the univocal “I” and all that. So I guess there’s always this tension in me between a disrupted or polyvocal surface on the page and in live readings and the fact that I feel like I’m writing for my own supposedly singular speaking voice.

To return to pronouns as an example, with “Punks” I liked experimenting on a formal level with how setting those pronouns into interaction with each other can have different effects, but what the pronouns are saying relates back to my personal experience so often that really they’re frequently interchangeable with “I.”  I mean, it’s not as though “get your face / outta the scuff bin, she says” is just a veiling of “get my face / outta the scuff bin, I says,” but I nonetheless experience those lines as personally resonant, as attached to a personal emotional state, even if it didn’t seem right to phrase them so that they’re coming out of my speaking mouth.

I guess that begins to answer your question about sincerity and, with it, appropriation. I once heard Anselm Berrigan give a talk where he said that his poetry may have a fragmented linguistic surface but that he felt like there was a direct, sincere kind of emotional continuity to it, too, which is pretty close to how I feel about my work in “Punks” and in general. I value sincerity in writing, which for me often equates with allowing messiness, emotional risk, and/or personal obsessions to seep somehow into one’s work. I used to call it a Poetics of Freaking Out. Sincerity equates with overflow, with what you can’t control. (That can happen, I think, with a range of techniques — sure, sometimes Flarf and conceptual writing, to use the in-vogue examples, lives up to its purported ironic detachment, theoretical distance, or “coolness,” but it just as easily taps into something beyond just a clever, sexy surface.)

That said, I think I have to earn my sincerity, both formally and emotionally. In the formal sense, I mean that I can’t just baldly express my emotions without a formal structure and think that my sincerity is going to get me a free pass in provoking the reader. In the emotional (if that’s the right word) sense, I think that too much “sincere” expression of any one emotion tends to diminish the force of that expression. Like, no one wants to be friends with that guy who is always trying to pull you in the corner and express how intense his feelings are. Regardless of the sincerity of intent, too much of that expression, in writing or in life, has the effect of feeling dishonest because the expression ends up rendered in a vacuum without  a countervailing force or two. It needs to be couched in a mix of approaches and registers — sarcasm, density, stupidity, humor, whatever. Like, some small talk please, dude. (It’s interesting how emotional concerns immediately slide back into formal ones; my attempt at differentiation of the two completely dissolves here.)

And all of that shapes my approach to appropriation, too. Often I’ll steal something because it feels like it has some kind of emotional resonance for me (and I’ve found, incidentally, that the emotion associated with what I appropriate is most often a variation on humor-inflected agitation), but it might also be to create the right mix of shifts in linguistic registers. I want to be responsible in appropriating something, which is why I generally try to avoid stealing something solely for ironic use (unless somebody is crying out to be fucked with), but regardless, I’m always trying, with success or not, to use that material to cut a sharp formal/emotional/conceptual balance.

Can you say more about this sense of responsible appropriation?  Is this a broader ethical question for you, or is it about writing a piece of work you regard as “successful”?

Attempting to be responsible in appropriation draws on the same concerns as attempting to be responsible in my writing in general, which isn’t really a question of fitting my writing into an abstract and predetermined ethical system but rather asking myself what (or whose) discourse I’m tapping into in the language I’m using and what effect that might have on a reader (particularly one who doesn’t know me). The choice to keep something as is or edit it into something else is often made in part with those questions in mind. Or rather, that’s part of what I think is going on underneath — it may sound, from the description of that process, like I’m self-censoring under the perceived eye of an abstract reader, but the experience in the moment feels much more like I’m making aesthetic choices rather than subjecting my work to ethical sanitizing. The ethical and the aesthetic are just so bound up in each other that it’s hard to unpack what’s what. And I’m okay with that, really.

I know that messy, unconscious things are going to work their way into my work, and I and others might end up uncomfortable with the result, but to try to become obsessively aware of it and then edit all of that out in the name of my stated ethics or politics — which is what sanitizing implies to me — seems impossible and undesirable even if it were. I may learn things I don’t like about myself later, may have others point those things out to me in their readings of my writing, but I think that kind of messiness is what makes something end up alive, interesting, and smart rather than inert and non-provocative. But what I can do in the process of writing is step back and make surface aesthetic choices of “yes, I think I can use this charged/offensive language here because I think the context makes it work in a way that complicates it” or decide that something just feels flagrant, excessive, or wrong. By context, I mean the language around a word or phrase, but I also mean my own subject position. Like, I’m willing to accept the idea that at some point a deep-seated patriarchal aspect of masculinity might come through in my work, and at times I may be exploring maleness in what I’m writing, but even in the context of that could I, as a cisgender male person, use the word “bitch” in a poem? I don’t think I could in a way that’d feel okay to me. If I were, I would really have to earn it, not just use it sensationally or in the name of an imprecise and lightweight satirical impulse.

All this said, those more surface linguistic choices aren’t always easy or clear, and I may not agree with my initial decision later. For example, in “Punkses,” an audio piece that riffs off of “Punks,” I use an audio sample of Alexyss K. Tylor, who hosts a public access show in Atlanta called Vagina Power. The show has an amazing intelligence to it mixed in with some stuff that is really bizarre. I noticed in the process of making “Punkses” that thematically there was a lot of material related to male sexuality, and so, whether unconsciously or not, the choice to use a sample of Tylor saying “a man’s life force is in his nuts” felt apropos as well as funny. But I’m left with the nagging question of whether it was right for me, a white male, to use this sample from Tylor, an African-American woman, whether my aesthetic choices in the piece were intelligent enough to impart the sense that while what Tylor says is funny, the piece is not trying to laugh at or make a mockery of this person. Is that what comes through to the audience?  Or am I just tapping into that long white American tradition, the discourse, of appropriating things done by African-Americans and using it in a mocking, careless, or simplistic way? I’m still not sure. The answer, ultimately, is probably not as simple as either of these, but I at least hope that it’s closer to the former than the latter. Regardless of this specific situation, though, this examination of the web of discourses I’m tapping into becomes the central ethical-aesthetic practice in my writing process. I just want to try to be aware of the active choices I’m making, even if what comes through unconsciously is inadvertently uglier.

***

Century of Clouds attends a fundamental thing. What happens to us is profound. In using that word I don’t want to obligate our minds to something ponderous, stone faced, or even, more mildly, wise. I mean then what happens to us if full of content, so full in fact that very little can be known in full measure. That’s a problem right? An opening. What do we see through that occluded keyhole, & what structures the ground on which we stand to look? Positions that collapse; structure & event, capital & love life, choose the figures as you wish. How do our dreams of a life lived otherwise than this one appear in how we represent ourselves, to one another in our social interactions, & again, to one another in our writing (a social interaction to be sure, although mediated here a little differently, & there, not so much. The distinction has value through enlivened specificity. Yet, let me mark my belief. The whole gambit is social — life that is,  & understand going forward if I mention a distinction I mean only to convey a modal variety of, well, conveyance!)?

What happens to us is profound because our feelings are endeared to our politics by way of lived relations. The dampers of authority circulate through us, as do its correctives, glimpsed or bursting through. Every second contains both as intermixed swarms, atomized & kinetic, forming into an arrow like a cartoon mass of bees, pointing always-already, “no way out but through,” & then suddenly reforming in the shape of the whip, the iPhone, the lover’s calf & thigh.  This fullness of content begs a correlative mode of attention. Bruce Boone points us to the story. For Boone, the story is a promise to the body — that the body’s existence on several simultaneous social planes will apprehend a living register of jouissance & dissent, wherein the terms of the latter will make, with the former, bedfellows which, after some habituation, will reveal their activist vibrancies as effect in everyday life.

And yet & so it goes that more than a few clouds have passed since this book first made its way into the world. Originally published by Hoddypoll Press, 1980, Boone’s book hand’t until now seen another printing. In his marvelous foreword to this new edition, Rob Halpern calls it “one of the great fugitive works of prose from the late twentieth century” & he speaks to the fact that its reappearance in late 2009 has the feeling of a lovely correlation, as if happening upon an old acquaintance one day you discovered your sympathies far from having waned had been enriched by the intervening years, despite often bracingly different situations. These things are true in every sense.

Indeed, our estrangement from a “thinkable future,” marked as it has been by the rise of reactionary neo-liberality & the totalization of life under the sign of the spectacular market, has kept time with the absence of this text. So there’s a tempo, a caesura, an interruption & resumption of this book as present fact limned by our lives in two separate centuries. Those clouds in the title have a disarming provenance: they’re from Apollonaire, one of the great tribunes of Modernity, who wrote them at the start of the century just passed. & guess who should show up in Bruce’s book among the many other Marxist intellectuals at the study camp convened in St. Cloud, MN, where much of the action takes? Fred Jameson, great theorist of all things post-modern, whose thinking brought insight to the cultural workings of that century’s end! Minding the book’s pre-occupation with scale it’s only right that these big, interrelated parts (futures, centuries, philosophers, clouds) should find some coalescence in their drift through this work, as well as winning testimony in the prosody of its re-entry into print.

Ok. So. That’s a lot of just like. . .stuff that I  like to think about & am happy to have this opportunity to say. But if you’re not familiar with Bruce’s writing you might not be too sure what to make of all of this. As such, a little background — Bruce Boone, along with Robert Glück & Steve Abbott, soon to be followed Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, Kevin Killian, Mike Amnasan & others, formed the core of New Narrative writing in San Francisco in the 70s.  A movement of hard-won affinities, these writers conjoined the vitality of movement writing then nascent in communities gathered in solidarity around oppressed minorities, theoretical vocabularies attentive to concepts of subject construction, the revealing social compacts of gossip, the laden surfaces of porn, the spiritual expenditures of Bataille — conjoined all of this (& more!) to a surpassing interest in narrative & it’s relation to a politics of queer liberation. The narrative-as-such behaved as a figure twinned to that of “the present” — situations loaded with intensities delimited by structures of hierarchical power & its remanufacture in formal illusions of coherence. So deformations, queerings, were the order of the day, & were undertaken via numerous strategies. Often, a breakdown in genre convention made visible structures of artifice, thus clearing space for critique, deconstruction & polemic within stories which prized affectivity for its ability to amplify decisive mutuality. Such a spirit begat many innovative techniques, which, to this day, have not been exhausted & are in fact now finding ever more purchase. Boone’s somewhat well-known method to this end has been described by him as “text/meta-text,” in which the anecdotes & stories presented undergo an immediate analysis grounded in what Boone describes in his afterword as “a somewhat dated Marxism.” (More on this datedness later.)

Intimacy, scale & intervention, compressed or attenuated throughout the stories in the book, form the engine through which the work derives its ecstatic, digressive momentum. To think through scale & how it operated as a figure for Boone, there may be no more exemplary Modernist text than Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” which Halpern points usefully toward in his foreword. Benjamin writes: “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” Boone’s book then is a full-on remediation of this break, taking the symptoms of such loss as ground, & implicating the “exchange of experiences” in an exhibition of communal futures manifested through the telling of stories. The stories Bruce tells draw from everyday life, the very zone in which this alienation has been indexed as “the way things must be,” & proceeds, by analysis, fantasy & critique, to the “way things may become.” Do you remember years ago on Saturday Night Live, the skit called “Tiny Elvis,” where a shrunken Nicholas Cage doing his best impersonation of “the King” would remark with trepidatious wonder over the size of a salt shaker? “Boy that salt shaker is huge,” he would say. Hegemons here are like shakers of salt, as are the equally large & yet unrealized derivatives of friendship, a cherishing whose repertoire finds structural flower, a daydream so inflated it bursts into calcified relations & changes their terms. As such, the everyday life of Bruce’s book takes place in two actually-existing communities which vivify features of potential & stultification; that of the Marxist Summer Study group, thinking through theory & practice, & that of the religious order he belonged to at the end of his adolescence.

As I said earlier, Boone speaks of his analytic frame as being that of a “somewhat dated Marxism.” As some of the incidents Boone relates in his tales from the study group demonstrate, this is partially true. Still concerned to varying degrees by the interior workings of European vanguard parties & the implications of Stalinism, facets of the politics here are sedimentary in their moment. Too, as Halpern notes in his intro, gay politics was charged by a set of energies soon to be repurposed by the AIDS epidemic & the struggle for survival it occasioned. Yet for all of that, there is an urgent resonance in Boone’s textural politics for our moment subsumed in the circulation, crises & abattoirs of global capital, related directly to this thinking-through of affectivity & scale. In Brian Holmes’ essay, “The Affectivist Manifesto” (from November 2008), he writes that for us, in the early 21st Century, “existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales,” He names these nesting-doll frames as the global, the regional or continental, the national, the territorial, & the intimate — the very zones across which Century of Clouds opens out. Here’s Holmes on the smallest scale, the intimate —

And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a café. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.

Boone’s book examines intimacy exactly as “a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture.” The ‘unpredictable force’ of intimacy is ever present in Century of Clouds. It informs the book’s every movement & stance. Here’s Boone, from early in the book —

Yet for me the problem was, and is, a more intimate one — it involves accounting for a large sense of loss in life. I can’t burden myself with its duty to sadness without first conjuring it and recounting it in anecdote after anecdote, accumulating kindnesses to match its own and wrapping it in language with the layers that decency demands. Wrapped so tight, won’t that loss rebuke its bonds and leap out to new life, transformed? In my view anyone’s piety in writing their stories rests on this. Without need, who would write? Or do politics? Or believe in the power of names?

I’ve just included a tiny little bit, but from there you might kind of get a sense of what the voice telling these stories sounds like, a sense of who is speaking to you. It is for sure “a you,” & thus “a we,” that is being addressed. This voice is constructed with a disposition set on enabling the aspects of intimacy & scale I’ve described, & embodying them too. Halpern again, this time on Bruce’s voice, writes that it is “informed, on the one had, by the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer and John Wieners; and, on the other, by the radical gay critiques of Guy Hocquenghem and Mario Mieli.” Let me seize for a moment on the figure of O’Hara as an aspectual predicate for some of the tonalities Boone’s voice exemplifies.

Boone’s voice here, like O’Hara’s, is immensely likable. It’s a voice that is ruminous, sweet, & knowledgeable, activated by a splendid vocabulary & restive in  its self-examinations, with an eye always turned toward collusion with the reader, outward bound. Alice Notley, writing on O’Hara’s poetry, says that his writing is grounded in part on something like the following notion: ”You don’t try to say something without being worth knowing, & you aren’t worth knowing unless you come off it so the person who wants to know you can be present too. Thus ‘my heart your heart’ for that statement certainly spreads to the reader of the poem.” With that in mind, let’s listen to Boone think through a sort of extrapolation of this quality in O’Hara —

Being a good writer is making people like or love you! But the question is, how do you do that? Well, one way of course — and a rather obvious way — is to make people feel you that you are a really good person. Kind, generous, loyal to your friends and so on. Then is a more sophisticate tack — you appeal to their better natures. You point out the wonderfully charming sides of their own potential virtues. Here is where you bring in politics. You suggest they will be far better and more developed and happy with themselves in life if they will start to be a little political now and then. And then you hope that if they do start getting political, they will thank you for it. They will want to attribute wisdom to you, and esteem you. Yet in the long run, neither of these two tacks goes far enough, I decided, because basically, people are egoists. The truth is, people really want to hear about themselves. And they want pictures of themselves they can recognize. I decided to think of this as a personality “effect” — a feeling of recognizing people. I would make images of people in my stories so they would have the pleasure of seeing themselves. With every person named, life would be tangled in the text. I wanted people to feel they had a stake in this writing and credit and affirm it… Your text could not begin until people were able to start loving and hating you on account of it.

Hilarious in its recognition of our vanity — & practical about it! — Boone’s elaboration yields an ingratiating program, a sort of Personism stenciled with activist will. “With every person named, life would be tangled in the text.” Boone sees clearly here how O’Hara’s practice of embedding the names of friends in his poems was an act not only of memorialization, but also a wager on the delights of presumed familiarity & its consequent purchase on the reader. This familiarity is vexed by the way power-relations are embedded in almost any discourse — “Writers get their hands dirty, they’re culpable. Isn’t it pointless to claim innocent intentions?” writes Boone. As in O’Hara’s famous “Song,” where dirt is simply what one thinks of in the city, so power, complicity & desire are elemental to writing. In O’Hara’s city you don’t stop breathing just because there’s dirt in the air, & in Boone’s art you turn these pollutants against themselves by creating an aesthetic that animates such dynamics in the name of wishes that grow ever more dear as they blister up along the path of most resistance.

There’s an essay of Boone’s  called “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara.” It appeared in the first issue of Social Text.  Sadly, I haven’t read the essay, but I’ve read about it a little recently in a great piece by Kaplan Harris entitled “New Narrative & the Making of Language Poetry.” As Kaplan reports, Boone’s essay revised the existing critical reception of O’Hara, calling attention to the poet’s situation within a gay milieu at a time of relentless oppression, & thinking through the strategies of O’Hara’s art as a response to the contours of just such a social situation. As such, Boone reads camp in O’Hara as a mode of political intervention, a textural irruption of codes intent on conjuring a gay consciousness, making it present, a political fact.  This confronts then prevailing notion of camp as depoliticized, countering the claims of Susan Sontag. Boone sees in camp not only exuberance, but “somber overtones” freighted with the cargo of lived oppression. So O’Hara then provided a model voice for an art that looked to wed intimacy & intervention without sacrificing a single bit of pleasure & charm.

Have you ever thought that the phrase “life’s not fair” is kind of the capitalist’s credo par excellence? The bludgeon of negligent authority, everywhere it finds its rejoinder in Marx’s “the point, however, is to change it.” Of course, for us the word “change” has of late been heralded to a kind of semiotic afterlife, stripped by ill use of its charge, it drifts around seeking new bodies to inhabit. Reading this book, we sense that, as Halpern writes, “it’s as if a whole register of emotional life that was emergent in the late 1970’s has since become vestigial within our own structure of feeling, haunting us like a spectral presence.” These are the ghosts of nascence, & the atmosphere of potential it nurtured. Boone’s calibrating stories here are tales in which power is confronted. Tempered as the results of such confrontations may be, our relation to them is colored by designs of emotion that arrange their intensities along a doubled axis of political desire & radical conviviality that feels like the most refreshing & wondrous arc one could pursue, even now. Tracking it, from the pages of this book into the air above my desk it glows, it takes my breath, it makes me unspeakably happy. Bruce writes in his new afterword that, “to construct an invisible mechanism that succeeds in prodding readers into the fabrication of their own ecstatic destiny, is, paradoxically, to make them genuinely feel.” Oh Bruce, this invisible mechanism, even if thrown in bright relief, it works. Oh my god it really really works!

Century of Clouds ends with a synthesis of all of this ecstasy — a night of sociability, a night out with friends, at the bar.  This takes place during a Marxist summer camp as well, but one the year after the session that occupies Bruce for the majority of the book. So in one sense it takes place in “a future.” Pop songs play, & their redemptive erotics are curative, healing up wounds & divisions in a community working together through the nettles of conviction & politics & sex. Everyone’s there, all the characters we’ve met along the way, like the end of the Wizard of Oz. This is better though than a dream or a night terror’s end. It feels like the intimate longing that so enervates this book has traversed, & enveloped those vertiginous scales, escaped along a barely glimpsed path, gotten out by having gone through. In this instant of tenuous collective euphoria, the book, the writing, seems to strobe & fluoresce with the auratic radiance of new relationality. Just as you, dear reader, may strobe & fluoresce all anew reading Century of Clouds. It is among the most astonishing books of its time, of any time really, of ours.

Let me end with a bit from the beginning, to see pretty plainly where, & with what care, we might go so as to meet one another —

In the years of friendship I see those I love in mosaic-like patterns, and me along with them. Who will ever know our names in a hundred years! We’re like the catalogs of flora, and moving toward a brilliant future. Wave upon wave of collective life displaying ever new patterns. Like the stripes of the sea bass; like the desert cactus in bloom after years of waiting. It’s spring, and the acacias are beginning to carpet the streets with their yellow pollen fuzz. Patterns, designs, excesses I love. At night I look up to emptiness, and the Milky Way is a ribbon of distant faces turned outward, still asleep. Will they wake?

***

If the gossip rag Life & Style Weekly differs from its sister magazine In Touch Weekly in its goal of helping readers incorporate the details of the celebrity gossip they read in their own lives, it makes sense that I can see myself in Marie Buck’s Life & Style (out from PatrickLovelaceEditions): the jacket, designed by Dirk Rowntree, is (literally) reflective, so your image appears within reach of the outstretched rubber arms that let you know you’re inside the scientist’s glovebox. The front cover implies that the reader is untouchable, if embraced, and it wraps around across a text-less spine to a back cover whose bottom third is the same reflective coating, with white text excerpting the book in a form of self-blurb. The left shoulder of a man in denim fills the right corner with a sunset in the background; could be from an advertisement.

The same text that ends the book on that cover restarts on the first page with the title “Girls Came to America,” a sentence-length story that gives the book its context: girls here are, as usual, the subject, and their examination takes place within a highly American reconfiguration of what has and is being said about them. And, what they say about themselves; the paragraph/poem continues: “He asked them if they were lesbians and they replied that they were like ravens. They believed virginity was when they hadn’t skied.” The girls are able to self-describe in unison; they are a group whose individuals don’t seem so discrete.

The second poem’s title, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” — in which Yeats’ last line “I hear it [water lapping] again in the heart’s core” becomes “I hear again the basis of travel, late to physics.” — hints further at the vehicle the girls took to get to America. As Buck writes later in the book, “pretext is where I [she] cut his purse”; the pre- of this text is multiple, in that the titles and structure of much of the work comes from famous poetry, while the text that translates or builds those structures appears to be largely taken from the internet. But it is, most importantly, stolen. The early appearance of this title also points out immediately that the sources here are not hidden; obfuscation is not one of this book’s tricks. A shorter chapbook version of Life & Style was put out by Beard of Bees in 2007, and began with a preface that made the book’s intent clear:

One of my aims in writing these poems was to situate a gendered, lyrical subjectivity within the language of MySpace, a site that intrigues me in that its form dictates so overtly as to nearly narrate the continual collapse of all forms of identity into identities of commodification & commodity consumption. The content of most of the poems is collaged from MySpace, and the forms come from a variety of authors: Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Wyatt, William Butler Yeats, the Gawain poet, and Charles Baudelaire. I found text to collage by putting phrases from the source poems into the MySpace search function and snagging language from the profiles that popped up.

In accordance with this, the next poem is appropriated not from literary history but from a quiz widely circulated around MySpace itself, renamed as “I am ___ % Happy” (I scored 72%), which invites the reader to check off any statement that applies. Among the more interesting criteria for happiness are “Your room is big enough for you” and “You collect something normal.” Owning the book already fulfills the latter for me (if its still normal to collect books), while the former pairs with the more expected “You have your own room” to get at a feminist problem best phrased by Virginia Woolf, which gets the book ready to think about space and form, and about what kind of space or what kind of room the girls in question need. In an interview with Kareem Estefan on his radio show Ceptuetics (all of which are now archived at Pennsound) Buck talked about the appeal of MySpace’s sincerity. That’s often the appeal of Life & Style as well: the continual collapse of gendered subjectivity that she would write happens with a necessary level of respect for the sincerity of its sources. So much so that the criteria for happiness laid out by the MySpace poll reappear as evidence in later poems: “I feel sorry for girls who don’t have a good/ growing up. I had a room.” Having had a room is certainly a better position than becoming one, as Lindsay Lohan laments on the next page: “A sad life/As a room/Instead of a person.” The original poems on which these are built, along with the individualized profiles of the website from which text is being mined, become empty containers in which some sort of subjectivity can be formed. Not without interference, of course — some of the original poem can get left behind in the new text, and spam and advertisements find their way into people’s profiles — but “filling-in” is the process here, in an effort to build a profile of Girls in America. In a text that shares a name with a celebrity magazine, the possibility of the inverse, of becoming a vessel into which others can project themselves, has to be confronted.

The poem “Gravitate to Me” demonstrates Life & Style’s straddling of the possibility of building subjectivity through others or becoming the structure in which others’ subjects are built. The second line, “Cut short the confession. I observe Katie and Tom,” insists on the speaker’s position among other celebrity-watchers, but as the poem continues, it appears that the person observing here is a celebrity herself, Suri, Tomkat’s daughter — the title of the poem is now either an invitation or reproach to those that observe her. Throughout the book, we’re reminded that all this visibility can be something sinister: “You can take all my pictures down but you can’t make me disappear.”

The most frequent poet echoed in this text is Emily Dickinson, with many numbers titling poems in this book corresponding to the numbers assigned to the chronological assembly of Dickinson’s work. Across these poems, the transformations that occur include Dickinson’s conversation between May and July becoming a new conversation between Nip/Tick and emo kids (from “386”), and the last line of Dickinson’s 34 (The Rose ordained) is omitted in Buck’s version and replaced by an ASCII image of a rose that precedes the other lines. The restrained, clever, sometimes depressing lines of what often reads like one woman’s experience becomes a location for the explication of an experience different enough to be contemporary, but similar enough to look like translation.

1533

On that specific Pillow
Our projects flit away —
The Night’s tremendous Morrow
And whether sleep will stay
Or usher us — a stranger —
To situations new
The effort to comprise it
Is all the soul can do.

1533

Women rights people pillow Fight
I templated my 23rd Think Pad —
At night Cash’s tremendous Music
& whether the guy will text you
& tell you ‘I wish you were here’ —
a stranger — still working at the Big K
I have my license now — effort to comprise it
Listening for you is all my soul can do.

Dickinson is not the only poet subjected to this treatment, as Buck explained in the preface quoted above; other notable translations include the first line of Ernest Downson’s “VITAE SUMMA BREVIS SPEM NOS VETET INCOHARE LONGAM” — “Our path emerges for a while, then closes” — becoming “Our mutual sharing of Kegels instructor left me recovering.” In borrowing the text from MySpace, Buck creates translations/mutations that at first seem altogether contemporary, but which are also bogged down by history — not only of the canonical texts she subverts, but occasionally by the fact that MySpace itself is already somewhat out of fashion. It is still a popular site, but it’s not the ubiquitous nexus for online social encounters that it once was, and its replacement, Facebook, wouldn’t create the same text as Life & Style: MySpace has always been messier, more easily infiltrated by spam, more poorly designed, more trolled by people looking for sex, etc. The fashion of websites like MySpace is marked by moments of intense “mutual sharing,” following by periods of recovery — an emergent path subsequently closing — as described above. The book ends with Dickinson’s “But History and I” becoming “History gets tag-teamed,” in a text where “we are English Freaks, pissed off by Stupidity,” where what’s “Around us, every Day—” is not necessarily witchcraft, the subject of Dickinson’s 1583, but systems (whether MySpace, Facebook, language, magazines, or women themselves) that work hard at describing and positioning women. The history of that process is taken on here by Buck’s restructuring of some of the more contemporary examples into these poems, which stake out a place for girls to occupy:

And it’s girls girls girls who shave their pussies. And it’s girls girls girls who are cute and busty. And it’s girls girls girls who get drunk and strip . . . And it’s girls girls girls who are next door . . .  And it’s girls girls girls who answer in tears of my lost heritage. And it’s girls girls girls who live and prosper.

Life & Style offers very strange, even uncomfortable language as poetry, but reassures you that poetry is happening with titles like “Vowels” or “The Beheading Game.” It begins with girls’ uncertainty (“They believed they were vegetarians who were never going to see unicorns”) and ends up with girls who “plan to handfast as soon” as they can. It that sense, it is a growing-up text, but the place (decidely American) where all the girls in this book grow up (whether we’re talking about the “girls girls girls” above or Linsday Lohan, Paris Hilton, or Emily Dickinson) is not always conducive to that process. Marie Buck helps the girls who become subjects here navigate the terrain, reorganizing text in a way that does not render women’s experience any clearer, but does provide a way out of the typical modes of observation or description in which people attempting to talk about girls girls girls get caught.

***

With the outline of a severed head coated with removable censorship material as cover image, Brad Flis’ Peasants quickly addresses its reader as the spectator of a general horror, and its consumer as the producer of the human (face) within. The glare required to produce the image of Peasants’ cover title text, studded within a metallic gray rectangle of lotto-scratch latex ink, seems to pierce the material and reappear in flight and gloss, an arc around pages turned, and captured in a double-photographed saucer shape. To look at Peasants, and write with a coin, triangulates unidentifiable masses famously subject to a secondary mysteriousness by federally mandated non-specificity — casualties of war or violence, economically disadvantaged classes, and anonymous airships.

This book approaches its own specificity within the more abstracted narratives offered by socio-political information authorities, moving against the delimiting character of a generality which can overcode visuals with a kind of determining knowledge. Although initially shifting the choice to see death from news source, or government PR machine, to reader, a treated, tampered-with quality inherent to multiple mediating severances remains an informant of Flis’ text. Our murky economic relationship to the appearance of distant subjects speaks to the final censorship of the deceased face as thoroughly as a respect for the dead. The uneasy considerations of future readings which interactive or modifiable art objects inaugurate (will its meaning-making be “used up”?) plug into local action as a concrete archive of desire: where the immediacy of the images afforded by this reader-erased cover can be reified by metonymic cultural matrices that turn seeing into thinking-the-already-known.

Later interactions are consistently framed by an index of localized human activity, embodied in the scratched material, referencing previous drives towards a more complex knowing, or at least a wanting to. It is a motif capable of juxtaposing the disparate moments of our own interactions with the book, and it emphasizes the text’s interest in how we decide to figure historical instance, and its cause, into their contemporary counterparts: in Peasants, the symbols or narratives of sovereignty, and the politicized event.

There is a sense of travel through the languages employed to construct human situation, always-already in progress towards the technical goals, and violences, of an indefinite politico-managerial vocation. “Anti-conquest” starts the book with the cold questions (“What are the ‘generic’ terms?”) of a strategist, interlocking with playful references and challenges, and proceeds with creation myths, underlying an interlocutor’s understanding of occupations, systems of classification, and selves:

[...]

The titles and texts of section I most literalize travel, with the longer “thinking” pieces kneading ostensibly separate events and objects into one another (“Nuptials,” “A Demon I Tie On”), inter-cut by interpolative border or boundary encounters (“Speak and be awesome nationalist”). Brad’s texts take place over three sections, each projecting the whole distinctly, a factor that contributes greatly to the inter-textual minutia that instills a bureaucratic eeriness, already eminent to more overt subjects (such as the WTC attacks).  When “American Idol,” the poem of section II, unexpectedly underscores an awareness of our “understanding of the links between impact and impartation” tied to the “working language,” it glances askew at subjects produced by section I, recasting the “Modern English farmers” of “Anti-conquest” as farmers of the Modern English Language. The mix of long and short poems in each section enhances a realization of one’s attention span — themes appear and reappear, manipulating a cognitive reading map to include densities beyond the weight differential between pages in the left or right hand. When section II ends in one page, for example, it suggests both an immediate rereading and a share of meaning-function equal to its surrounding sections.

Innovative forms also send forward these backwards-facing reverberations. Two pages into “Anti-conquest,” Flis’ brief introduction of lines (“ | ”) first restructures the relationship between the appearance of words and their sensible position within the text, then subtly shifts our knowledge of the pages’ motions (up to that point) towards a unified vertical alignment — instead of the left to right of pages passing before us — by breaking and reinstating a length of “ | ” between two pages. This sudden unification of disparate parts (“Have you ever thought about killing yourself?”) emphasizes a theme of misinterpreting the original stakes and ramifications of communication and its mediums.

At “checkpoint @ first ingress”, the interrogative dialogue of “Anti-conquest” gives way to a repetition of the authoritative giving-it-to-you-straightness of “What I’m saying to you is”, slipping manically between defining ground conditions and hinting at accusations, inviting the fear of misunderstanding, the confusion when being stopped or arrested:

The terms of passage seem as if they can be even more terrifying:

These concerns over mi(ss/x)ed signals or effects, detached from their causes, reach the foundations of our current political climate most clearly in how section III deals with the WTC attacks: “Time to go up there, and tell them what you are / doing” (“Time to Bomb Saddam”).  The events taking place in each portion of “Flight Simulator” call to mind the terrible portent said in hindsight, of the suicidal attackers in training: they wanted only to fly, not land. The poems move from, to our eyes, excessive arcane spellings, through “pared down” contemporary language and its fragments, ending finally at letter groups from which looping lines indicate the flight of associated words: the last four letters of “h s a e h a p e s e b a a d o l n t o h t,” for instance, producing “[tonight].” Here, the challenges of working out potential significations (word, material, and arrangement) are refracted through the dangers of letting things settle too thoroughly:

[...]

“Legends of the Fall,” a centered list or index of webpage topics concerning the material collapse of the Twin Towers, asserts the mundanely technical complexity of any event — again, unnerving and pausing the credibility of what we imagine to have gathered from the text thus far, a condition borne into theatricality when we realize that numbering only the book’s odd pages has allowed section I’s first numerated sheets to be 9 and 11. These “inside job” moments, in which conspiracy passes over the book’s earlier gestures, appropriate the gradual semblance of irresolvable data proper to fringe web journalism. Computers and the internet appear silently in Peasants as both mass reference sources for the eclectic knowledge-modes in use, and as a technological interface providing the initial structuring of these elements.

Although some lines and sections may contain appropriated language, and although a poem such as “A Demon I Tie On” could reference Brian Kim Stefans’ term for the program or codes used to produce computer poems, Peasants possesses a consistency of voice bound to an excellence of word choice and tonal development. There is an enormous variety of work present, including a kind of tele-drama featuring sniper Lee Boyd Malvo (really the United States’ 43rd President disguised as Malvo), and Ground-Zero (“Are you some sort of jerk-off?  Some sorta dummy? / Nominees, / Open your mouths and I will fill them / With song ideas for you.”). Peasants is an extremely engaging book, frequently rewriting its own terms and examining individualistic methodologies of embedding temporal markers into what we mean when we speak of an event or object occurring over a period or series.

***

[at] PROTECT PROTECT: a museum dispatch from Sara Wintz

Jenny Holzer’s recent exhibition at the Whitney provides great opportunity for further exploration of the relationship between writers and the visual arts.

This exhibition, called PROTECT PROTECT, contains Holzer’s past fifteen years’ work; it is both well-attuned to recent trends in poetics, as much as it is to the media and politics of present day. Holzer’s use of unconventional media, such as digital screens and projections, firmly roots her practice in a larger internet-influenced art-making culture. However, her use of visual language also bears likeness to the “scripted, visual-works” produced by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay, Ed Ruscha, and Sophie Calle.

Naturally, visual writing stretches as far back as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, if not farther. But PROTECT PROTECT is representative of a mass culture much more recent than Ed Ruscha or William Blake’s origins. At the Whitney, Holzer’s exhibition begins with “For Chicago,” eleven outstretched LED signs installed on the gallery floor. Then further along we find “Lustmord” (“lust-killing”), a series of Holzer’s writings prompted by the systematic rape of women and children by Bosnian-Serb forces in the war of the former Yugoslavia. The eerily sparse, sterile presentation of human remains with neatly bent cibachrome tags drives home a deep sense of absence — physically, but also intellectually. Who were these people? And what information is left that still must be told? Holzer retells from the perspective of witness, victim, and oppressor:

HER BREASTS
ARE ALL
NIPPLE.

[...]

SHE HAS NO
TASTE LEFT
TO HER AND
THIS MAKES IT
EASIER FOR ME.

Her writing, and her choice of source material, is defiant, unrelenting, and politically charged. Readers are faced with a barrage of details that the news media tends to leave untouched. In the two examples above, her narrators’ perspectives ooze with entitlement, power, and an amplified degree of scientific detail. Holzer’s writing reflects upon and refracts from a station of power: it traditionally appears in all caps, with specific dimensions and characteristics dependent upon her level of physical access to a site; it is nearly dictatorial and oppressive, booming in scope. Yet, from within this position, Holzer broadcasts narratives that question the position of power in the first place.

Holzer’s medium is language, despite her use of non-traditional media in place of the voice or page. And her belief in the power and scope of language is not unlike that of the Flarf and Conceptual Poets (who read at the Whitney recently, in conjunction with this exhibition). After all, it’s a rare moment when a visual art institute presents work so verbal. Holzer’s decision to cite, quote, and manipulate language, within the context of a contemporary art space, demonstrates her underlying desire to process news media as a way of interacting with the world at large.

***

Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique
Gert Jonke
Dalkey Archive Press, 2008
Review by Alex Linhardt

Gert Jonke was a brilliant and slightly berserk Austrian novelist. If you want a less pretentious appraisal, you might also note that he was funny, accessible, and deeply caustic (at least two of his books feature lengthy diatribes about inept city planners). His style totters erratically between the abstraction of a high modernist and the gibberish of someone who retains the curiosity — and incoherency — of a toddler.

In 1969, at the age of 23, he wrote the astonishing Geometric Regional Novel, and then went on to win the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Austrian State Prize for Literature, among many others. His writing is an impenetrable mist of horror, comedy, beauty, and oddity; it is difficult to identify any of his direct influences (Kafka and Robert Walser seem like the most legitimate reference points). Perhaps there is a certain contemporary analogue in Thomas Bernhard , who wrote with the same precision and peculiarity but without Jonke’s jarring convulsiveness. Unfortunately, Jonke is still not widely known outside of Central Europe. Barely any of his poems or books have been translated into any language. When he passed away this January at the age of 62, the only English-language obituary appeared in The Guardian’s Books Blog. Indeed, 1977’s Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (translated by Jean M. Snook and published by Dalkey Archive Press) is only his second book to appear in English.

As the title indicates, Homage to Czerny is really only a novel in the loosest sense; its concerns are compositional, structural, and tonal, and his narratives and sentences are almost self-resistant. The language is fairly limpid, but it fails to communicate anything in particular. When you read a given page, you have the uncanny sensation of conversing with someone distracted by unknown obsessions and anxieties. This must have made the book’s translation problematic, since the reader is compelled to treat the most marginal grammatical or syntactical aberrations as critical ciphers: the italics, the pronouns and prepositions, the punctuation marks, the paragraph indentations, et cetera. At the same time, the thematic content of the novel is constantly struggling to conceal this textual nuance; if you’re reading a story about skyscrapers made of smoke, or about bulls who spray water out of their horns, it’s tough to be too attentive to the grammar. This is to say that Homage possesses the strange momentum of a novel whose thematic fabulousness is constantly impeded by the precision of its language.

Beyond these general complexities, the novel is bifurcated into two mysterious sections — “The Presence of Memory” and “Gradus Ad Parnassum” — that have virtually no narrative continuities, aside from the fact that they employ the same narrator. “The Presence of Memory” is the real tour de force here, both conceptually and stylistically. The premise is ingenious: the narrator attends an absurdly bourgeois party hosted by two siblings, but the party is intended to be an exact repetition of last year’s party in every way. The siblings have also ornamented their house and garden with oil paintings that perfectly simulate the environments they are hung upon (a picture of a fence placed on a fence, for example). Additionally, one of the siblings is photographing all the guests and events. So, in a sense, the entire novel occurs within compounded spatial and temporal repetitions; the book is the representation of two siblings replicating their past interactions in an environment that consists of duplicated images of that environment. The novel’s characters inhabit a world that is constantly depicting them inhabiting a world: a textual representation of a photographic representation of a pictorial representation of a fence hung on a fence. As the narrator observes, this elaborate semiotic morass could conceivably lead to “a repetition of the repetition of the repetition of last year’s party.” Lest it seem that Homage is all some sort of unendurable postmodern abyss, it’s important to note that this skeletal plot owes far more to Lewis Carroll than some academic theory of iteration, and the situations often seem more humorous than profound. This also means that the party’s ongoing duplications summon a sense of dreary monotony, which is so intense and satirical that it verges on lunacy: “The same guests, said Johanna, are going to have the same conversations at the same time and tell the same stories they did last year, with the same movements, the same gestures, same looks, same sentiments.”

There is certainly a political (or at least critical) aspect to this section. The novel’s comedic value usually depends upon Jonke’s portrayal of a stultifying sphere of high society, one that alienates the groups it purports to unite and then divests conversations of all meaning and emotion. Intellectuals debate classical mechanics by swilling beer; proctologists flaunt their knowledge of art; and everyone sits patiently for a zero-piece chamber ensemble (as satire, Homage recalls Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which the bourgeoisie’s cultivated sense of decorum transforms a lifeless party into a literal prison). And yet, the excruciating asininity of the guests’ discussions becomes so circuitous as to attain some sort of incantatory power — the simplest explanations become tortuous logic, and as fantastic as fairy tales. Witness what happens when a civil servant attempts to explain chimney construction:

When the architects back then planned these factories that are so indispensable to our city and the proper functioning of our economy, planned them together with their smokestacks, I can’t remember how many, around a hundred I think, the specialists’ calculations for their optimum height turned out to be much too low, because during the project studies on site, the north side of the city had been experiencing a tremendously strong wind, which was remarkable in that it was so unusual there, in every respect absolutely atypical for the north side, because as you know even when a real storm blows through our city and the surrounding region, it nevertheless always remains completely calm on the north side, and only there, the wind will not blow through there, it’s always refused to blow through the north side of the city, it always avoids it, circumvents it, blows right around it, but back then, of all times, when the architects were planning the factories for the north side of the city, it was extremely windy in the north, no, not just windy, but downright stormy, although at the same time it was completely calm everywhere else in city and also in the surrounding countryside, but right then and exclusively in the north side of the city it was storming for the first time, as it never had before or since, and that was of course a real stroke of bad luck, as you can imagine, because that was just when the architects responsible for the construction of the northern part of our city were carrying out their surveys and drawing conclusions about the necessary heights of the smokestacks from the strong storms prevailing during their visit, which conclusions would have been absolutely correct if the wind that was blowing then in the north part of the city had continued to blow thereafter, but which unfortunately proved to be false immediately after the factories went into operation, but of course the architects couldn’t be blamed for the fact that their wind had stopped blowing; the height of a smokestack is calculated according to the average weather conditions at the time of calculations, the higher up the wind, the taller the smokestack has to be, and we should really think highly of the architects for having planned to give us any smokestacks at all for our factories during a continuous storm of that nature….

The more the civil servant attempts to clarify his point, the more opaque, meaningless, and useless it seems. In the end, the language itself — the processes of elaboration and redundancy in quotidian speech — seem far more interesting than whatever that language was hoping to express in the first place. Throughout Homage, Jonke endlessly demonstrates how prosaic greetings and dull social conventions betray deep psychological frustrations that are cosmically hysterical. As the novel’s introductory poem suggests, the goal of his writing is to find a legible map that “also shows dangerous trapdoors / through which people slip down into the root cellar.” To find the places where rationalism, civilization, and practicality disintegrate; to find the moments when the narrator realizes he has no idea what is happening or why it matters. However, as the narrator acknowledges, these questions — maybe all his creative engagements with the world and with art — must “rely on banalities” because this is all we are born with. The questions that come to paralyze him in the novel’s second part are: how does a writer take the rote, unimaginative situations of life and transform them into something enthralling and indelible? And does one find truth and beauty in the repetitions of everyday life? Or must one resort to dreams, sensory deprivations, psychotic hallucinations, alcohol binges, and alternate realities?

Perhaps the most evocative metaphor for these anxieties is the narrator’s attempt to grasp a theoretical form of music that is irreducible to either sound or silence, but which seems indissoluble from life itself. At one point, a radical pianist argues that “not only are musical instruments bothersome crutches that have to be thrown away, but audible notes and tones also do nothing but interfere with the experience of music, distorting it beyond recognition.” In response, the narrator begins to hear mesmeric music with no origin or content whatsoever: “I couldn’t distinguish whether the music that was so penetrating me disappeared into me or rather I into it, whether I was being devoured by those sounds for which I would gladly have given up all the music and musicology I had studied. And everything else too.” He wants to sacrifice his entire life to listen to an arbitrary moment extracted from that life; it is the discovery of a music that is omnipresent, indiscernible, interstitial, and endemic to all experience. And he cannot determine whether it comes from him, through him, or despite him. This divine music mirrors Jonke’s general compositional digressiveness, one that intentionally precludes any coherent plot from emerging.

I often refuse to let — or am incapable of letting — the next natural note follow upon a note I’ve struck or imagined, because I’m always waiting for something astonishing to happen between the two notes.

In finding that empty intermediary space of thought — language’s gaps and microtones — the narrator and Jonke try a variety of techniques. At times he projects his own delirious fantasies into reality. After a prolonged and comparatively sober description of a sunrise, he suddenly observes that “sitting inside the wide boathouse, where we were detained for several hours, the entire building seemed to me like a huge official jellyfish balloon anchored on the shore of the sky.” At other moments, the humor of his surreal imagery gives way to an arresting beauty that both contravenes and emerges from the day’s “banalities”: “Now the air high up formed into little ponds that expanded into lakes and these soon flowed into each other, and the thick clouds were run through by streams of light that expanded to rivers of light, on whose shores many boats were kept tied up and ready.” If there is a single reason why Jonke seems particularly palatable for an experimental novelist, it is because he hopes to find tedium, absurdity, harmony, and beauty over and over again — in the same conversations, the same experiences, and the same sentences.

***