my vocabulary did this to me

I've been re-reading Jack Spicer's Thing Language. I find very helpful three passages from Ron Silliman's "Spicer's Language," in Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (1985):

[] Spicer, both as poet and linguist, rather aggressively disputed the valorization of language within the process of the poem. "Words are," he said in Vancouver, "things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else's head.... The words are counters and the whole structure of language is essentially a counter. It's an obstruction to what the poem wants to do." (p. 191)

[] [On the first poem in "Thing Language":] I take it as no accident that the first word of the first poem . . . is "This." The assertion of presence is language's most fundamental claim on subjectivity, at once both referential and illusory. (p. 168)

[] [Spicer contends a] concept of an absent presence, the notion that you can have your cake and have (always, already) eaten it too; though, from either perspective, one is left hungry... Spicer achieves this effect by yolking together two nouns, thing and language, into an adjective:noun relation.... The result is not quite an oxymoron, which woulid be too simple. The use of the nominative thing in the place of an adjective is more in line with the abominations of Leviticus, that thing and language shall not lie down together. As any linguist would know, things are not signs. They are not, in a linguistic sense, significant.... Yet both the universe of things and the system of language are total dimensions of reality. An inarticulate universe of all that is real versus a system of articulation which, as a whole, can communicate nothing, and which serves to isolate the individual, both from the universe and from others. This is a vision of language, of subjectivity, as total oppression. That is the fundamental premise of the book Language [where the poetic sequence "Thing Language" appears]. Later, it will be the thrust of Spicer's dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me." (169-70)

Here's the first poem in Thing Language:

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

"These three passages," writes Murat Nemet-Nejat, "show Spicer's profound pessimism about language, its insufficiency (as opposed to Duncan's optimism). The first one particularly about the thinning of language, disputing its valorization, is nothing less than a poetic revolution, shifting the center of gravity from words themselves to the empty space surrounding them, creating a new space. It all starts I think with Homage to Creeley."

elegy for psychoanalysis

One of my favorite early poems of Jack Spicer is "Psychnoanalysis: An Elegy." Check it out in Peter Gizzi's and Kevin Killian's edition of the The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (subtitled "my vocabulary did this to me"), on pages 31-33. (Wesleyan published this fine book. Get thyself a copy soon.)

After reading around in the Collected, I decided to go back to our PennSound Spicer page, and listened again to this remarkably confident, resonant and yet slightly weird baritone voice. A radio voice, was the phrase we used to use for such a person. Yes, Jack Spicer had a radio voice. Which is unrelated--or, then again, perhaps entirely related--to the poet's penchant for using the radio as a conceit in his digressive commentary. See, at the bottom of this entry, my favorite Spicerian comment the wanders into radio.

So I listened to Spicer again. I noticed that we at PennSound have made available an undated 4 minute, 52 second recording of his reading of "The Song of the Bird in the Loins." Nearly 5 minutes to read that short poem. Hmm, too much time for that piece. Perhaps, I thought, he reads the poem and then offers some commentary. So I listened, eager to hear more than that one poem. Lo and behold: the recording is not just that poem but three early works. The other two are "The Dancing Ape" and..."Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." So there's my poem! Now we've unpacked the three, made separate mp3 recordings for each, and now I'll recommend that everyone reading this blog have a listen to this "elegy," a smart, luminous, and slightly unhinged rejoinder to the triumph of the therapeutic.

Q: Are you actually going through a transition in your writing?

Jack Spicer: I'm going through a transition. In fact, I don't have no job, and I...

Q: No, I mean in your actual writing.

Jack Spicer: Well, if the radio set has three batteries which are gone and one that's still left, that isn't a transition in the radio broadcast. It's a transition in the radio set, namely that you don't have very much power. And these things that happen to you in life are like that. If you're only going on one transistor and you're a four-transistor radio, you're not going to be able to get in the outlying stations very easy. KFI doesn't come in.

LINK

Jack Spicer on Wallace Stevens, 1965

In one of Jack Spicer's now-famous lectures in Vancouver, 1965, he discusses (and commends) the "serial poem." After a while he takes questions, and someone asks him whether Wallace Stevens didn't indeed write serial poems--perhaps "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" is one? Spicer's response is fascinating. I've taken the long audio recording of the whole lecture, and selected just the discussion about Stevens. The whole lecture can be found on Spicer's PENNsound page and the excerpt (3:27) can be heard here: mp3.

new PoemTalk on Jack Spicer

Today we've released the newest episode of "PoemTalk"--number 28 in our series. This one is about Jack Spicer's early poem, "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy." Here's your link.

the Stevens wars

Charles Bernstein commissioned me to write a piece that would bring Wallace Stevens' reputation among contemporary poets up to date - from 1975 to the present. The essay I wrote, as has been noted here before, was published in the fall 2009 issue of Boundary 2. Here is a PDF version of the entire article, called "The Stevens Wars."

In it I discuss the varying responsiveness to Stevens in the writings of (in order of appearance) Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Charles Bernstein ("Loneliness in Linden" is a rejoinder to "Loneliness in Jersey City"), Lytle Shaw, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Peter Gizzi, John Ashbery, John Hollander, and again Susan Howe as a very different sort of response than that of Hollander.

Here is the passage of the essay on Peter Gizzi:

Gizzi is one of our most important contemporary Stevensean poets, yet he is adamantly non-ideological about it. Periplum and other poems gathers early work from 1987 to 1992 and Stevens is everywhere, although in the background. Epigraphs from Dickinson, Spicer, James Schuyler, Oppen, Ashbery, Rilke, Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop assert the preferred literary company and don’t so much suppress the presence of Stevens as express a remnant of outmoded embarrassment (Stevens and Dickinson? Stevens and Oppen?) and a debt more pervasive than dedications can allow. The great sequence “Music for Films,” written in Provincetown in August 1990, looks and sometimes reads like the Oppen of Discrete Series but is more interestingly Gizzi’s attempt at his own “Variations on a Summer Day” (1940), floating, chartless, using weather as device for directionlessness and (momentary) lack of poetic ambition.

Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) is Gizzi’s most Stevensean volume. Again the landscape-and-weather trope provides a means of laconic improvisation, a going which way the wind blows, a subject as a cloud, “imitation[s] of life” that can use terrestrial being as an excuse for impersonality and dislocation. Gizzi here is in Stevens’ floating middle period: “Landscape with Boat,” “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” “The Search for Sound Free from Motion,” “Forces, the Will & the Weather,” “Debris of Life & Mind,” even the dour “Yellow Afternoon.” The ironic word-level sonority of “A History of the Lyric” has Harmonium in it, however—

There are beetles and boojum
Specimen jars decorated

With walkingsticks, water striders
And luna moths

A treatise on rotating spheres.

Gizzi’s whole project might be captured in that phrase: “a treatise on rotating spheres”—what Jordan Davis calls a “shorthand sublimity” at the level of the line combined with a knowing engagement with the pathetic fallacy for the purpose of pushing the human to the top of abstraction and thus away from sentiment.

In Artificial Heart (1998), the book in which Gizzi came into his own poetically, the pronominal address is often generalized—points to the poet (even in the first-person plural “we”), an unidentified she (as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” a muse or paramour a bit damaged over time but still ready for verse, a version of the subject: “She sang unwrapping her bandages”)—articles refer to general impersonal states of being (“the body remembers joy”; “The day static with stuck weeds”), and a communal, funereally functioning “they” who arrive at the end of poems—Ashberyian in this sense—to bring stories that were not told in this poem but might have been told had we not done our work of telling about something else. Gizzi’s “Will Call” ends:

It was an average day
An arrangement of place. A state of report
or a state of grace. For centuries weeds have hidden it.
Now autumn. Silence is what we make

of eyes, trees and growing vine. It pierces.
And these are the stories they will bring in boxes.

The ut pictura poesis of “Utopia Parkway,” dedicated to New York School-affiliated poet-painter Trevor Winkfield, is written out of Stevens’s poems about paintings (especially in Parts of a World) and the 1951 MoMA talk, “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” which in its turn had influenced O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler from the start.

"Are we stupider?" is a stupid question

There's been much talk about Nicholas Carr's Atlantic essay bemoaning the demise, in the internet age, of deep reading (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic, July/August 2008, pp. 56-63). Carr's answer is that Google is indeed making us stupid and, to be perfectly frank, I think the question is itself rather stupid. First off, "us"? Second: "stupid"? Reading habits are changing, just as they always have been changing; it's just that they are changing more rapidly than usual. I'd guess that the emergent ubiquity of the daily newspaper in the 18th century probably changed urbanite reading habits as quickly as they've changed in the 1996-2008 period in which the web has become a major source of words to be read. And I'm not sure anyone will ever be able to speak very specifically about wide reading as distinct from deep reading as a positive or negative value. The traditional notion is that deep reading is of greater value than wide. But I've never felt that way. Moreover, when we're moving fast we are wide readers pretending (e.g. in class, at cocktail parties, at the office on a Monday morning) to be deep readers.

One sane response to Carr is at the blog called PolEconAnalysis: here. Disclosure: I found this because GoogleAlerts signalled to me that this blog response mentions me.

Responding to the above, Murat Nemet-Nejat wrote: In my view, the real value of reading occurs in re-reading. The speed at which things occur in the web, the intense flow of time constructs in the web represent -for instance, the way entries of "yesterday" gain a secondary place in a blog, replaced by the entry of "today"- make re-reading very difficult. When Thoreau says that one does not have to travel the world, that examining one's own place is the greatest of travels, he is also referring to the experience of re-reading, the loss of which can be nothing but a melancholy experience.

To which I casually wrote: You're certainly right about re-reading. I think re-reading prose in particular has gone or is going out the window. Fortunately certain forms have the experience of re-reading inhering in them (or seemingly) - poetry being one. I might be unusual in that I do in fact re-read a lot of things that fly past me digitally. I save them, put them somewhere (bookmark, saving-as, etc.) where I can find them again. I take advantage of the new portability. But again I take your point. I like your second point even better - yesterday's blog entry becomes secondary. But but but...web searches produce old blog entries and bypass that hiearchizing within any one blog. Make sense?

Then Murat again: Particularly in its manifestation in blogs, but even more generally, in its incredible ability to produce, to replicate, the internet makes the passage of time very concrete. By definition, reading/re-reading is a meditative activity, involving a slowing of the time process, in Spicer's terms, going against its grain. Here is the dilemma, for me, in the contradictory nature of the internet, both its intense allure, its power, and the peril involved in this fatal seduction. I do not mean by this that one can or one should wish to undo this historical change, as if not more profound than the industrial revolution; only that one must -particularly us as poets- develop a more complex relationship to it.

Jacket magazine discussion at upcoming MLA

John Tranter, founder and editor of Jacket for many years and for 40 issues, will be coming to Los Angeles from Australia to join a panel (roundtable discussion) about Jacket at the Modern Language Association conference. The editors of Jacket2, Michael Hennessey and Julia Bloch, are among those who will join John on this panel. Marjorie Perloff will join too and give a response. The session is Saturday, January 8, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Olympic III, J. W. Marriott. Here, below, is a summary of John Tranter's presentation:

- - -

Jacket magazine: a summary

I had misspent many years of my youth working with various print literary magazines. When I saw what the World Wide Web could do with type and layout, I put together an issue of a poetry magazine, with international contributors, one October day in 1997, and launched it onto the waters of cyberspace. I had no idea whether anyone would know it was there, among the other hundreds of millions of pages on the net, but a week later a fellow sent me an email thanking me for publishing a long interview I had done with the British poet Roy Fisher in the magazine. “I like his work,” he said, “and it’s hard to find material on Fisher up here in Nome, Alaska.” I knew then that Jacket would be all right, and find its readers. Or rather they would find Jacket, with the invaluable assistance of the search engines that make the net workable. Since then Jacket has grown to forty issues stuffed full of mainly contemporary poetry in English, though many other cultures appear there too as well as interviews, book reviews, and critical articles. The counter on the homepage shows more than 800,000 visits.

Jacket has featured poetry and criticism from France, Turkey, Poland, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Netherlands, as well as features on John Ashbery, computer writing, Mina Loy, flarf, Yasusada, Anne Waldmann, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, Jack Spicer, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Pierre Joris, George Oppen, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge, Omar Pérez, hoax poetry, Kenneth Koch, Jonathan Williams, H. D., J.H. Prynne, humor in poetry, Mallarmé, and many others. Several issues have been collaborations with other (print) magazines. The latest issue, number 40, is over 1,200 pages long and growing. Jacket is free, and the contributors don’t get paid. In fact no one gets paid. That’s poetry.

I am delighted that Jacket has found new friends and a new home in 2011, and has moved holus bolus to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Jacket will flourish and grow there under the guidance of publisher Al Filreis and editors Michael S. Hennessey and Julia Bloch, and many other keen supporters.

Poet John Tranter has published more than twenty collections of verse. His collection Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won lots of prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, 2010). He is the founding editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket (jacketmagazine.com), the founder of the APRIL project (april.edu.au) and he has a homepage at johntranter.com.

top PennSound poets for January

Most oft-visited PennSound author pages in the past month: 1) Ginsberg, 2) Pound, 3) WC Williams, 4) Ashbery, 5) Creeley, 6) Olson, 7) Howe, 8) Baraka, 9) Christian Bok, 10) Spicer, 11) Reznikoff Holocaust page, 12) Berrigan, 13) C. Bernstein [60-Second Lecture page].

This last item is the video recording of a 60-second lecture given by Charles Bernstein on the topic, "What Makes a Poem a Poem?" It has a punchline ending, so be sure to watch.

is email ruining writing?

The image here (click on it for a better view) is cropped from an AP news story that was given the title "Is e-mail ruining the way we write?" It was published widely in papers that take stories from the Associated Press on and around December 12, 2005. Here's a link to the whole story.

Perhaps a dozen times in the past four years I've been asked by radio shows (among them Day to Day and a live talk-radio show in Seattle) and print journalists (including the AP reporter who wrote the story above) to talk about why and how email and other digital writing forms (they especially want me to talk about IM) have ruined writing and reading for the new generations. The line is always a version of: the IM'ing, texting, blogging teen (or twenty-something) is a barbarian at the gates of good grammar and thus of culture.

They never assume that I might disagree with the premise. I tell them that they really don't want to talk to me because it's my view that writing has improved since the rise of electronic mail and since typing at our keyboards, of all sizes (even the tiniest), has become one of the two or three activities we do most often daily. For most people, let us say in the year 1945, writing would not have been in the top 15. Whereas one's writing can improve (and I'd say most often improves) when one writes - the best way, when all is said, to become a better writer is to write - and whereas we are all writing so much and so much of our communication with each other is through typewritten language, there's more writing, more improvement when the quick response to your writing indicates that you were confusing, more effort being made to say what one means, etc. I didn't say success; I said effort. Failed efforts receive doubtful responses fast.

The easy worry and complaint (shared by many journalists looking for the story they know is out there) is that the shorthand of adolescent IM'ers, which leads infamously to shortcut spellings, will erode proper writing to the point where it's unconscious, sloppy, bad communication. (These stories are the descendent and distant cousin of all the juvenile delinquent stories from the late 1950s.) Well, I say: on the contrary. If you can get past the shortcut "mis-spellings" and the rat-ta-tat style of back-and-forth, you can see writers in the making through a constantly repeated practice, a practice that is associated with the most vital part of the way we live. When else was writing deemed by young people to be so close to the heart of living? There's great promise here, I think. (And a more important role, than ever, for teachers of writing to take some advantage of this sense of necessity.) My kids (13 and 16) are super-conscious of writing as the main way they communicate complex thoughts. They talk about it all the time. Yes, folks, picture it: teenagers, sleepily over breakfast, talking about writing. When I was their age, I found writing to be a struggle - and I was relatively good at it, and once I got going my sentences gained a certain flair; I knew how much harder it was for some of my friends who didn't, until perhaps much later, find any such flair and who perhaps only thought about writing when at our relatively mediocre public high school, in English class being "taught" the 5-paragraph essay (the one "form" I was taught, other than haiku or sonnet I suppose, in 12 or 13 years of pre-college schooling). I just didn't do it as much as I should have in order to find comfort. And sitting down at a blank page on my Smith Corona was always at first a frightening prospect. Writing letters by hand was even more frightening.

The folks who want an English professor to comment on this expect me to whinge and express fear of writing's demise. Instead I express excitement and hope about the immediate future of writing.

The above-mentioned Day to Day decided not to have me on as a guest. I told a very nice editor there of my view and said that I was not especially interested in talking about how all this might effect students' results on the new writing SAT, and they realized I was the wrong guy for them.

Many reading this entry will disagree. The conversation we'll have about it will be written and I'll bet that the writing will be interesting. Write me at afilreis [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu.

A faithful reader of your daily Al, Jean-Marie Kneeley, responds (in part) as follows:

On the one hand, you're absolutely right -- people are writing more and that IS a good thing. On the other hand, I think email encourages people to write carelessly and thoughtlessly--I see this all the time at work--and that is decidedly NOT a good thing. I was trained to think/write on a keyboard (my journalistic background) and I do find writing on a computer infinitely better that my old Smith-Corona (remember correcto-type!). But I mourn the loss of handwritten letters sent through the USPS. How I wish I saved all my letters from my college years, especially from my first love (who I almost married)! And one thing that you can do in a letter that you can't do in email, slip a few bucks into the envelope. My Mom used to do that every now and again back when five dollars was a princely sum! In the end, I do agree that any writing is better than less writing. And email does allow you to share thoughts that you might not have otherwise bothered with. (Bad sentence structure there!) Much like this one.

So much to say in counter-response, but I'll restrain myself and point out a few reasons why I especially like this. First, it is doubtful that the exchange between JM and me could have happened in letters - and that's not to mention that you (others reading this now) would ever get to benefit from it. Second, JM's sentence, the one she thinks is "bad" and ends with a preposition, is something she wrote quickly, on the fly, at her desk at work, on a Thursday morning, and it does say what she wanted to say, however incorrect in a technical customary sense. I'm glad to have it just as it is, because it enabled her self-referential comment, wittily: "Much like this one." It's not "free writing" (I don't think I believe in such a thing) but its freer. Some of the most exciting writing I've read in my life - and long before the advent of electronic mail - has been or seemed composed "carelessly and thoughtlessly." Writers whose writing ranges as widely as that of Kerouac, Thoreau, Jackson Mac Low, Laurence Sterne, T. E. Hulme (via visual thinking), Jack Spicer (let thought come from somewhere else), and Wordsworth (through memory & thus not being quite here) all contended in one way or another that emptying out thought, going thoughtless - and then writing in such a state - might produce something true.

For the record: I'm not devaluing the handwritten letter sent through the US mail. It's just that the economy of written media is larger than it was, and the subgenres - under the capacious rubic, "letters" or "messages" - have multiplied.