In the company of others: a public self

At Target day before yesterday, Trystan chose a shirt for himself off the clearance rack that says "It seemed like a good idea at the time." He couldn't wait to show it to Matthew. I wanted the one that said "I do all my own stunts."

***

"... a public self, a self that is neither the 'me myself' nor the other nor a complete effacement or negation of the core self, but a self that exists, that is shaped, in negotiation, in dialogue."

From Jacob's Ladder

***

"When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I also stumble on some particular perception or other ... I can never catch myself at any time without a perception ... If anyone upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can no longer reason with him. He may perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me."

From David Hume's Treatise

***

Jake makes a reference to Aesop's fable of the bat in his response to my last post. Just happen to have his telling of it:

Aesop’s Fable of the Bat

“The bat lived in the hollow of a tree in the forest, friend to both the birds and the beasts, and was perfectly happy in its relations with the others and itself until ... one day, after much grumbling, the subject of which no one seems to recall, the birds and the beasts had had enough of one another (maybe the birds said that they couldn't trust creatures who could not take to the air; maybe the beasts were tired of being bombed with shit -- who can say) and began to take up sides for a magnificent battle for the order of the forest.

The birds came to the bat and asked it to join their side in the war against the beasts, and the bat listened closely, wanting very much to help its winged friends. But the bat could not, it told the birds, assent to the plan, for, much as it was a bird, it was also a beast, the beasts were his friends, too, and it felt it couldn't fight against them. The birds left in a huff, and the bat remained, sad that it couldn't help his friends the birds, sad that they seemed mad at it. After all, it'd only been honest....

Almost as soon as the last magpie had tucked its tail in a thorn-bush, the beasts arrived to call upon the bat. Hey, bat, we're going toe-to-toe with those damned birds. We're going to even the score once and for all.... But the bat, as much as it wanted to help its friends the beasts, had to demur because it was also a bird and could not in good conscience or comfort fight against its brothers, on either side. The beats skulked off, cursing the bat, and the bat hung in its tree waiting for the action.

At the appointed time, the beasts and the birds met upon the field, and they bent towards each other, until the last moment when, faced with one another, memories of their kinship welled. They called the battle off and went down to the tavern to curse the bat, who'd shunned everyone, they said. And the bat could hear all of these things (it had good ears) and simply hung in its tree, lonelier than ever for, though a bird, though a beast, it now knew it was neither a bird nor a beast, but something different. It started working at night, to avoid the ridicule of its former friends, and found some comfort in solitude, but as it heard the call of the nightjar or the slow padding of the sloth, the bat wished for its former days of kinship and sang out to the dark in notes no one could hear."

***

From Emily Lloyd's praise for Pleiades:

"Because my MFA thesis, which never happened, was going to be half something very near to L=A=N=Gpo, half something very near to heroic couplets. And because I was told I wasn't allowed to do that."

***

Ange Mlinko:

"I thought maybe if I could lower my expectations for art -- assume that rather than an objective standard of goodness existing "out there somewhere" I could reconcile myself to a subjective and fickle vehicle for our desires, built on shifting sands, and having more to do with our erotic needs and psychic wounds than some idea of magnificence -- then I could release some of this pain."

***

From Franz Wright's Fist:

"A few years back, I submitted a batch of poems to a fairly well-known poetry magazine. After waiting for six months or so without a response, I emailed the editor querying about the submission, and attaching the poems in question as a reminder.

I received in reply a VERY NASTY email that essentially said, "I already rejected these bad poems once, I really don't appreciate having to do it again. You're wasting my time." That's not verbatim, but it's pretty close.

I shrugged it off, but never forgot it.

*
Fast forward a couple of years. I'm now an editor for The Canary. The same editor who rudely rejected me (but neglected to inform me the first time) just sent me a copy of his/her new book with a nice note requesting a review. Of course, I'm sure that he/she doesn't remember me or the way he/she handled my submission from years ago, but I do.

*
Well, The Canary hasn't done reviews up until this point, though we have talked about including reviews in the next issue. The question: do I review the book? The second question: do I really look like a cop?"

***

From Little Emerson:

"Innocence—indeed innocent ignorance—of schools of thought, styles, forms, ethnic backgrounds, politics, growing up, would surely result in something different."

***

From The Nature of Too Bad:

"Like many of you, I'm sure, I enjoy watching DVDs. But I have an urgent question that needs answering. What exactly do people do to their DVDs that make them all scratched up so that in the middle of a movie, just when the plot is beginning to turn toward its downward slope, the thing freezes, skips, halts, stumbles, stutters, and no amount of fast-forwarding or scene-skipping will cure it? Let me tell you what I do with my DVDs and then maybe we can compare notes: I get a DVD in the mail from Netflix (or from the Hollywood Video when we're really desperate between Netflix mailings), I take the DVD from its sleeve, I hold it carefully by its edge, I drop it into the DVD player, then reverse those actions when we're done watching the film. What do other people do? Use them as coasters? Clean the counters with them? Play fetch with the dogs or frisbee with the kids? I'm having a hard time figuring this out because this happens way too frequently. If there is something that people are reguarly doing with their DVDs that is not simply putting them in a DVD player and watching them, I want to know."

***

From Therapist with a Dream Inside:

"There are too many different kinds of poetry. American poetry will never develop a cohesive audience because, unlike television, poetry hasn't developed 'a sitcom,' 'a newsmagazine'—something easily consumable and endlessly replacable. For example, imagine every book was written by Ted Kooser or a Ted Kooser surrogate, or a writer mentored by Ted Kooser or what have you. People might develop a taste for that."

***

From Early Hours of Sky:

"Both my girls are home now they have been separated for four days. This is how they love each other: they compare their bodies; height, weight. Olivia shows Bella a new scar and it goes on like this for twenty minutes—what has wounded them while they were apart. Isabel says, I ate a hot dog for breakfast and no one stopped me. I sat in the front seat of the car and I did not die.

Sometimes I feel bad that I have never loved any adult the way I love my children. I know their smells. I can feel them enter a room without turning around. I sometimes feel frightened that when they are old enough to take an account they will say, “she has never loved anyone like us” and I will be blamed."

***

From Home-Schooled By a Cackling Jackal:

"I apologize for stating the obvious, but I feel it needs to be stated.

No Tell Motel is an online poetry journal, not an actual motel. It is not an escort service. I cannot and will not have anything to do with you getting laid."

***

Lorna Dee Cervantes:

"Read Rosie O'Donnell's new poem for Tom Cruise here."

***

From Little Red's Recovery Room:

"As I've been thinking, given a push by Deleuze, that Michael Jackson might be what we all really look like or are deep down, if there were a deep down, the diabolical result of the declaration of universal human rights which no-one really respects, neuter tupperware product of the we're-all-the-same machine which means we're all equally worthless, little neverlands occasionally allowed to rock out and moonwalk and crotch-grab in our own music video, in which case it might be a good time to express my demolisment at the hands of and admiration for Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, which reminds me that documentation of a life survived need not locomote along the tired rails of heroism and recuperation. It's a pure past, the past that was always past. I mean, I didn't feel manipulated, only burned and in that fire asked to consider the value and consequence of putting oneself in the third person, of bearing up under the dissociative disorder which washes events of all localizing emotion except a dim, diffused love in whose wake a brilliantly edited montage of super-8 footage, polaroids and post-disco effects dances on the pin of a head. Because, even if we let the 'eighties and 'nineties narrate for us, it's still important to have been allowed to be a person sometimes, on the beach perhaps. Like Frank O'Hara! Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm an imbecile of memory, that I remember little of my life before, say, twenty-eight and what I do remember seems horribly overprocessed, totally fucked by a Byzantine network of footnotes and false leads and a few scraps of grainy security-monitor footage. I read Proust with an pained nostalgia empty of all reference, wary of Orphic neck-injuries. Not gone? Just walled off by a moat and a rusty drawbridge? But "I do" "remember" days when the shifting points-of-view of internal dialogue were a monstrous thermometer: I and I, they and me, you and I, we and you. We was the worst."

***

"... no-one is more in need of the crowd than the schizophrenic, who is crammed with stings and feels suffocated by them. He cannot find the crowd outside and so he surrenders to the one within him."

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

***

"I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other."

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

***

From litwindowpane:

Ivy said: "May I inhabit your attic and be your bat?"

***

"I am a kind of burr, I shall stick." --Measure for Measure

"So much for self--self, that burr that will stick to one." --Shelley, letter to Leigh Hunt on the anonymous publication of Julian and Maddalo

*
Feeling quiet lately; thinking about something Jake said to Jonathan in response to his questions for Silliman and Everybody, some small thorniness in question number 2 that comes up in Jake's post to question number ten that sticks to me fast and a little painfully for its hard accuracy.

Jonathan asks:

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alongside one of yours in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

Jake says:

I think the second question supposes a clear sense of artistic or aesthetic community in a contemporary setting, and that question asks something of my I cannot provide [sic]. I suspect many of my blogging peers, with the possible exception of Gina Franco feel much more comfortable and connected to main lines of contemporary practice, and many of them seem to have a much more well-defined community of interest.

*

practice: v. 1. to do or perform habitually or customarily; make a habit of : practice restraint. 2. To do or perform repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill. 3. To work at, esp. as a profession: practice law. 4. To carry out; observe. --n. 1. A habitual or customary action or way of doing something. 2.a. Repeated performance of an activity in order to learn or perfect a skill. b. Proficiency gained through repeated exercise. 3. The act or or process of doing something; performance. 4. Exercise of an occupation or profession. 5. The business of a professional person. 6. A habitual action. [praktikos, practical]

--American Heritage

*

To do or to perform. Say there are two sides to this word "practice," as in "the practice of poetry": 1. the introverted doing--the habit of writing words down, the compulsion behind the morning exercise, the doing it again and again, and the refining that comes through repetition--and 2. the extroverted performance, the vocation of the poet, or the profession of poetry. One has to do with preoccupation while the other involves occupation; you practice your skills that you might practice in your field. The former does not necessarily lead to the latter, nor should it, but if you are a publishing poet I suppose you are a practitioner of both introverted doing and extroverted performance.

What I'd rather not suppose is that what you practice is what you preach, though I might suppose it all the time. I might call you derivative or experimental or traditional or political or ____X____. Especially when you publish in ____Y____ and hang out with ____ZZZ's____. Nothing against Crystal Williams but she once introduced me to a peer as "a kind of new American formalist," I suppose because I was bringing sonnets and terza rima to workshop. I published my collection of poems with "Camino del Sol: a Latina and Latino Literary Series." Those poems are primarily narrative, I think in a neo-Romantic "Ruined Cottage" sort of way, though the back of the book says the poems are "drawing on a rich tradition of storytelling in Latino literature." I don't want to know what you suppose that means about my aesthetic values. I don't. But I can't keep you from supposing that my poetry is my poetics.

"Practice" suggests that even introverted doing works to achieve some kind of mimesis, some internalized grid of Platonic perfection that's been floating around "out there." Internalized because once external, of course. It was a consensus, perhaps, sometime: "now that is a great line, title, rhyme, etc." Everyone nods. There is no way around this extroverted interest for the practicing poet. It is poetry's history or its empiricism at work. I am interested in what poetry can do, for example, because I have a sense of what it has done and I would have it do it again differently that I might do it better. There is always likeness to contend with, and for those with a predilection for simile, metonymy, juxtapostion, there is the seduction of likeness too: the sweetness of repetition, the safety of community, the logic of aesthetic consistency, of editorical bias. You know the places you might publish. Where you might find a home out there.

*

But this is language we're talking about, common ground, so these terms--likeness, difference--make us/me very nervous. The colonizing imagination begins naming, raising up gods and myths and canonicity, killing off populations or keeping 'em too poor to eat, or wiping out aristocracies by the unfraternal headfuls, and does so in the name of likeness. Re-form:

"Why don't you write more like us? Like me? Like what I like? Because I'm sick of mainstream poetry, confessional poetry, objectivist poetry, Adrienne Rich and Leslie Scallopino, nature poetry, and the way contemporary poets are all using the word 'how' these days":

how the burr sticks. How I am a kind of self.

*
How would you define contemporary poetic practice?

Self: a kind of burr that sticks.

*

But in the warped mirrors of my imagination, I do have a little "community of interest." It occurs to me now "they" are perfectly ignorant of my sense of "them," because, well, it's all about me again and my introverted doing, which each of them once engaged with, generously, profoundly. Selflessly. Besides my mentors, there are only three of "them." All beautifully idiosyncratically burrsome. I love them for it. They don't know this. They probably don't remember that they helped me know what I think. What interests me.

(Karen Anderson, Jasper Bernes, Jake York)

*

Read somewhere recently that history begins in heresy and ends in superstition. In with the new, out with the old. Dull dull dull! Karen once said, "as a poet I want everything available always available to me," or something like that. Me too. Absolutely. No practiced restraint, no closed venues. No progressivist tyrannical hierarchical fantasies. No no. And I don't care if it's impractical.

I'm so sick of being tired of you.

what kind of fool am i?

You are the Fool card. The Fool fearlessly begins
the journey into the unknown. To do this, he
does not regard the world he knows as firm and
fixed. He has a seemingly reckless disregard
for obstacles. In the Ryder-Waite deck, he is
seen stepping off a cliff with his gaze on the
sky, and a rainbow is there to catch him. In
order to explore and expand, one must disregard
convention and conformity. Those in the throes
of convention look at the unconventional,
non-conformist personality and think What a
fool. They lack the point of view to understand
The Fool's actions. But The Fool has roots in
tradition as one who is closest to the spirit
world. In many tribal cultures, those born with
strange and unusual character traits were held
in awe. Shamans were people who could see
visions and go on journeys that we now label
hallucinations and schizophrenia. Those with
physical differences had experience and
knowledge that the average person could not
understand. The Fool is God. The number of the
card is zero, which when drawn is a perfect
circle. This circle represents both emptiness
and infinity. The Fool is not shackled by
mountains and valleys or by his physical body.
He does not accept the appearance of cliff and
air as being distinct or real. Image from: Mary
DeLave http://www.marydelave.com/


Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Glenda

Low tide hours in and the beach is filled with pools. For a week I ran the wet sand packed along the shore while the sun rose and the waves heaved and I was clumsy in my bare sore feet, my knees, my eyes in the light, the condos' rise, and my ankles swelled and the miles swelled and on the way back the sand was a changed thing.

Sage and Chris

He is six today and so horrified he insisted for a panicked hour that today is June 19th, not the 20th, and wouldn't hear of happy birthdays--not yet--not while six is so leary and toothsome, and he withdrew from us and sat alone quietly in front of an infomercial and twirled a singing top and sang a little, very softly, forgetting six as much as possible, and I watched him forget and thought that's how I feel most mornings. Not six. Please not six yet.

I'm John Ashbery??

If possible, beach

weary and sunburned beyond regret. But God I needed Mexico. I'll post photos soon so you can see what fishes I saw on my early morning runs.

I'm back in the desert folks. Anybody in AZ who wants to have coffee or tequila, write. I'm listening...

(Dearest Jim: I won't leave the state without seeing you--iPod or no. Call me again with a number? Lovelovelove, g.)

In the Peoria airport,

thank you, wireless. Boarding now! --More soon.

Pulled that card for you, Suzanne:

Sunny day! I tend to think of you that way, so know my bias. But let me look some things up.

iM in love:

What iM doing right now? iTunes and a new green spring slip of a thing. Peas in a pod, we are.

Got PDF proofs from Fence today for "The Box." iM happy.

**********

i'Ve loaded a little over 250 songs this afternoon--had a couple of students tell me they'd loaded over 5,000 (my mini holds only 1,000)--so now i know how they spend their time.

Radiohead is good. i want more of it. --And what the hell happened to my Fleetwood Mac Rumors? Not here. I grew up with that shit. Can't live without it.

*********

Have received lunatic numbers of referrals from google this week: "poems for teachers" and "poems about teachers." Not at all from the same domain. It kinda freaks me out. So sudden. Now is the time for all good students to offer poems to their teachers: such ceremonial end implied.

Tomorrow I say good-bye to my seniors.

Farewell gifts I've received (among them no poems) this term: two squishy toys, magnetic art, a pair of earrings, a little book entitled The Writer's Block shaped like, well, a block containing inspiring quotations and exercises. An illustrated childrens' book, several cards.

Also phone calls from a few questioning their grades.

What's there to hide?

Had a conversation with a friend tonight about preparing for house sitters, particularly student house sitters. I've been thinking about putting some things away, in nondescript cardboard boxes, in the back of the closet, in the basement; things such as old journals, or embarrassing fetishes in my music collection, or the little wooden box where I store my birth certificate and expired credit cards, or the contents of my underwear drawer: my mother's pearls, a few old letters, an envelope filled with lavender, my dainties. Do I want her to see my socks? My crumbs beneath the sofa cushions? I've thought of leaving my old laptop available for her, but I'd have to clean up my bookmarks and documents, wouldn't I? My stored passwords, my poor unfinished poems. My friend tells me she has a trunk with a lock on it. I don't have a trunk with a lock on it.

What have I missed? Maybe the tarot cards ought to go away too. And the unused lotion collection already at the back of the closet. What does that say?

And then my friend said that what we hide from our house sitters would make a great essay.

The Things They Hid.

(--Add self-help books to that list, I think...)

Did you miss Sea-Camel? Well, Alberto's back--

and he's calling for poetry submissions! Just got this by email:

"Little Emerson is on the air. I kindly request—and isn't my tone
proper?—that you take a look at it. It is absolutely demented. Aside
from that I kindly (again) request that you do the meme thing: that
you, should you care to, send a message to three people that may be
interested in this sort of crazy thing, so they can send it to another
three people who may be interested in this sort of thing, and so
forth. I know I'm coming short; this isn't about your favourite ice
cream flavour, but what the hell. I know I'm being redundant, but I am that insecure. Give it a whirl. Participate. See what comes out of it. Nothing will be just as well.

Thanks.
Alberto Romero Bermo"

So now I will visit three or so blogs and direct you towards Little Emerson, as kindly requested. Good luck with your great experiment, Alberto!

Hey Ithacans! I'm going back

to do something unconfinable with the great Cornellian Romanticists. All these people rock. I'm a little bit star struck. What will I wear?

--I'll see you if you're around in October.

Dear Gina,

Cynthia Chase and I are putting together a conference called "Unconfinable Romanticism" for next October 21 and 22 (Friday and Saturday) and would be delighted to have you take part. The tentative plan is to have three sessions, one on Friday and two on Saturday, each with three or four speakers. One of the aims is to call attention to the important work on Romanticism that's been done at Cornell. We're inviting a number of former Cornell students, including Karen Swann, Adela Pinch, Anne Mallory, Laura Quinney, Ted Underwood, and Josh Wilner. We're including Will Hacker and you of more recent vintage. In addition, Anne-Lise François (who we've offered an assistant professorship to and who will be at Cornell for the coming year --and we hope longer!) will take part. We're also including two non-Cornellians: Rei Terada and Orrin Wang.

Each participant will give a half-hour presentation. We hope very much that you will join us.

The conference will be unofficially linked with the Gottschalk Lecture on Thursday the 20th, to be given by another former Cornellian, Marc Redfield, who will also attend the Friday and Saturday panels.

As you can tell from the title, the sky's the limit as far as what participants talk about; Wordsworth and superstition would be of course in the mainstream but if you'd prefer another topic or focus we'd welcome whatever you settle on.

R.