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In Response To Mark Wallace’s Blog

Moe, your comment makes me wonder whether the problem (assuming that there is one, which there may very well be) is:

1) the concept and/or category
2) the deployment of the concept in the anthology and/or the reading/panel
3) the reading you saw

From this distance I can’t come to any conclusions about that but I’d love to hear why you think the problem may be the category as such–or perhaps it’s the reduction of the concept to a category?

I don’t think the problem is necessarily inherent in the (1) category of HYBRID. Like Wallace, on the surface this seems like an interesting approach to writing that fuses together forms and rejects the static notion of POETIC writing (i.e. cliches, boxes, holing up in CAMPS): “I like the concept of the literary hybrid as one that juxtaposes languages, cultures, and histories in surprising ways and plays with the interconnections and differences between them” (Wallace).

BUT it’s (2) implementation is something entirely different. From what I gathered at the reading (where both the editors of the new anthology were present and introducing the authors in HIGH POETIC VOICE BLEH) this anthology is an attempt to NOT canonize or establish camps, but to merely inform the world that HYBRID writing exists. (And I won’t even get into how even though you SAY you aren’t establishing a canon/camp, if you take all the same steps previous anthologies have to canonize writers/entrench camps then you ARE canonizing writers!) Rather than reveling in the differences and potentials of all the radical poetry happening now, this anthology (from what I understand) attempts to take those differences and potential energies, and smooth them over / rub them out.

This is the problem I have with the whole notion of the American Hybrid Anthology: it is pulling people from all different CAMPS and attempting to say, “See, none of these poets are that different. You can find a unifying aesthetic in all poetry.” What is point of poetry then? To become a COHERENT HOMOGENIZED MASS? And from what I can guess they are staying away from any poet too radical (i.e. Linh Dinh, CA Conrad, Kasey Mohammad, etc.).

And to adress (3): It appeared to me that the authors at the AWP reading (Something) Angel, Mary Joe Bang, Rae Armantrout, and Peter Gizzi (when reading pieces from the anthology) read their least intersting work, something safe and PRETTY that SOUNDED like how poetry IS SUPPOSED TO SOUND. Everything just began to sound the same, and I think that is the single ugliest part of HYBRID.

Mark Wallace on Hybridity

Wallace’s take on Hybridity / likes & dislikes / totally agree with him

AMERICAN Hybrid : sounds good but that shit is mostly frontin’

SOME Poets seem to be hoping this is the AVANT RAPTURE / now AVANT can stretch its wave across the land = new hegemony = mediocrity across the land

I am pro sides / take sides / pick fights / riot / smoothing over is a suffocation of breath of sincerity of exploration of fun

we are already under ice

Quiet/Loud/Quiet

There is less beauty in the closed, opaque line. Coherency is an illusion brought about by lack of reading/thought on the part of the poet,”when in fact this tendency has a consistently more rigorous approach to the question of coherence than does its opposite, which simply presumes it” (Silliman). My tradition / our tradition / THE TRADITION.

“I wouldn’t characterize what I call the post-avant traditions, even in their most extreme forms such as vizpo & sound poetry, as anti-coherency. If anything, I think that the very opposite is true, that they form a poetics of a greater coherency, precisely because it must be a coherency earned by & within the writing, not something easily assumed.” (Silliman)

We are learned beasts. It is harder to deprogram those who believe Frost to be POETRY than it is to teach Zukofsky.

“What makes poetry of the schools of quietude “accessible” is only that they have been institutionally ingrained for a century (or, in some ways, far longer), mostly in high school & undergraduate curricula.” (Silliman)

Quietude VS Post-Avant means nothing. Less than nothing. It is simply “bad VS good.”

Jorie Graham is bad so I would call/put her in the School of Quietude, but Silliman doesn’t. I–like everyone else I know–call the poetry I don’t like “quiet” / I compare it to Billy Collins. I would call Jorie Graham quiet because I don’t like her writing (she’s not THAT quiet all the time–to be fair) but shes does have some of the surface qualities of AVANT writing:

What is the light
At the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,
The corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,
Illuminates, antique, freed from the body of
The air that carries it. What is it
For the space of time
Where it is useless, merely
Beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance . . .

(from Erosion)

There is a disjunctive quality of the line, a looseness of line length / of  breath, and a distance from self that is (just the tiniest bit) appealing on a quick first reading. But these trite faux-philosophical gestures “For the space of time / Where it is useless, merely /Beautiful?” are nothing. The more you ingest this writing the more you want to throw it up. It is for an audience that wants TV. The poem implies a DEEP MEANING that does not exist and is littered with cliched NATURE imagery causing bile to collect in the back of my throat. Each lines is covered in barnacles / poetic gestures and flourishes turned grey and ugly. Graham wants the poem to be DEEP and PRETTY but it is neither. It is time tested / academically approved banality. This kind poetry assumes it makes sense before it examines/investigates how we make sense using language.

Here is an essay by someone who likes this poem and all that HYBRID-ITY BULLSHIT. Which sounds DANDY except that it becomes (as Lacey Hunter said to me) “The best of the worst and worst of the best.” Scatter shot canonization. Faux-new thought. All writing is a HYBRID. It is a building upon what has come before / even in rejection.

There is so much ignored/glossed over in Zukofsky and other fringe Modernists (Objecivists–minus Pound). My favorite Zukofsky poem might be Spook’s Sabbath, Five Bowings based on five violin techniques. Here is “Spicatto” from that sequence, but it really should be listened to (click that link above!):

There was the mechanicalism
of the ice cream scooper,
the Malayan violinist
more expressive than any Caucasian
as he melted into his Schumann
so for his part hard objects
became the buttocks of the heart

The words become tiny vessels for sound. Content arrives second from an unknown origin. Content is unique to the structure and reader / and unique to the sound. There is something gained in the aural that is lost in so much CONTENT driven QUIET poetry /sense-making poetry.  Doesn’t this sound more MODERN / more AVANT than Graham yet he came so long before her.

Paraphrasing William de Kooning: If I painted what I know, I’d be bored. And if I painted what you know, you’d be bored. So I paint what neither of us know yet.

The Dirt Mall Pt.3 (part I)

here

“a medium sized turkey”

I (for the most part) can’t hang on to sound poetry that isn’t in English. It’s weird. I become impatient and claustrophobic. I “wait for something to happen.” I don’t want to Understand, but without the constant connection with my only know language I (feel like I) can’t connect or disconnect word and/or sound, the play of language on numerous levels fails me. Or, at least I think it does. I need something to hold on to, else I slip into boredom and move along.

For example: crickets & not crickets by Aram Saroyan, which I like, but clearly, if I spoke French (or any language other than English) and had no idea what the word “crickets” meant I wouldn’t understand the entire context of the piece: it’s supposed to (vaguely) sound like crickets chirping. And maybe that doesn’t matter to everyone, but it (kind of) matters to me.

And yes, I know I’m really generalizing, but I got the feeling going through the Sound page that I was wading through a bog of fuzz. At best the most I can say (with a few exceptions) is “cool.”

I do like Yoko Ono flushing a toilet though.

“Anna Livia Plurabelle“  from Ulysses by James Joyce via UbuWeb Sound

“A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” by Gertrude Stein via UbuWeb Sound

these honkey grandmas be trippin’

meaning is dumb

“The point wasn’t just to destroy meaning. It was to change it. Tag clouds aren’t revolutionary. They are elements of communicative capitalism, elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition.”

Honestly, this whole argument confuses the hell out of me, technically speaking.

The long and short of it: I agree with Jodi that it would suck if language lost its ability to express meaning in rhetorical ways, but I also agree with Mr. Clover that Jodi’s definition of meaning (in reference to language) is far to static in its purpose and the ways in which communication allows meaning to function.

Also, word clouds are kind of dumb. Are they really the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

The Dirt Mall Pt. 2 @PPP

A “demo version” of the Dirt Mall Pt. 2 is now up at my other blog PandaPandaPanda (because this blog’s margins aren’t wide enoug).  For those of you who didn’t check it out here is Pt. 1 also. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, especially Pt. 2.

The Ghost of Jackson Mac Low or IS THAT WOOL HAT MY HAT