Archive for July, 2008
Alan Gilbert
Interpretations of dreams
Dreams are corrosive agents. Although dreams are usually imagined as expressions of unconscious desires or fears, it’s their form that’s most important: a fluid attack on the least secure parts of the psyche’s structures. That this happens while a person is sleeping doesn’t qualify this action but amplifies it. Dream imagery and narrative are secondary to their flow through trembles and tremors.
I want a poetry that’s as corrosive as dreams. I want a poetry that finds vulnerable spots in the facades, and that seeps around or beneath what it can’t confront directly. Poetry is to presumption as sappers are to a castle, as love is to need. Its content is for each constituency to decide; what gets shared is its yearning for freedom.
Dreams have a morality in which no one is right. Their logic comes after the fact. They seek to discover the hidden, without ever finding anything except their own fierce and tender movements. This makes them impervious to categories though not to interpretation. A dream can never be paranoid, but neither does it heal. Like a poem it’s always in between.
Alan Gilbert
Switch it up
Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.
Don Share
Either/Or(r)
I’m a little surprised that the exhumation in the New York Times back in May of a pair of poems written by Barack Obama hasn’t excited more twittering in the blog-po-sphere. Here they are…
D.A. Powell
Yonder All Before Us Lie Deserts of Vast Eternity
I was going to call this entry “Why I Am Not a Critic.” But then I realized I’d probably get blasted for that, because, after all, everyone is a critic—and—everyone is a critic. But what I mean to say is that I generally don’t write a whole lot of criticism. The truth is, I don’t much care about criticism. I think it’s wonderful that people are able to write criticism; I read as much of it as I can stand to read, which isn’t that much; and I quote from it when I need to, which is usually when I’ve run out of my own views, as happens more often than I’d like. But most of what I think about contemporary poetry happens at an instinctual level. Let’s call it “feeling” for lack of a more socially acceptable term. I often “feel” things about poems—i.e., whether or not I think the poem is “good” or satisfying or intriguing; whether or not I’d like to read it again; whether or not I’d be moved to put the poem on my wall or show it to a student or set it outside my office in the pile of “free for the taking” stuff (which usually means either I have two too many copies or I have one copy and simply think that one is too many).
Mark Nowak
On Bill Griffiths, Skeptical Militancy, & “Ghost Town”
Back in the early 1980s in the anathema that was Reagan-era Buffalo, “Ghost Town” was as close as it got to our anthem. “This town… is coming like a ghost town… All the clubs have been closed down…” Little did I know then that, across the pond, Bill Griffiths (who I’ve mentioned here before at Harriet in “Poetics (Mine)”) was penning a “skeptical militant” verse about parallel scenarios in Thatcher-era Britain.
Travis Nichols
Summer Camp with Bernadette Mayer
Poet and teacher Bernadette Mayer has put out a call for poets to come out to her upstate New York house for weekend experimental writing workshops focusing on “investigations of traditional forms made new.”
Mayer is a legendary teacher, providing the catalyst for countless experimental movements large and small, from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Studying Hunger to countless dorm room parlor games.
A few samples from her list of writing experiments:
-Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how
thought becomes language, or does not.
-Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be
handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary.
-Write a work that intersperses love with landlords.
Alan Gilbert
Art or propaganda? Both.
I just spent two late evenings at Matthew Barney’s massive studio in Long Island City watching grindcore and death metal bands play, along with a bizarre and hilarious “diarrhea humiliation” performance. (Not sure if coverage of this might turn up, though I don’t have a sense Artforum.com was there.) I also had to write two short reviews over the weekend: of Takahsi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut for The Believer and Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman for Modern Painters.
Mark Nowak
Rethinking Working-Class Literature
Sonali Perera, an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers, has published an engaging new essay in this year’s first issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies that dovetails in unique and productive ways with much of what I’ve been writing here for Harriet the past two months. “Rethinking Working-Class Literature: Feminism, Globalization, and Socialist Ethics” performs a detailed comparative analysis of the writings of Tillie Olsen (with particular attention to Yonnondio and the documentary poem “I want you women up north to know”) and the Dabindu (sweat or “drops of sweat”) worker-writers from Sri Lanka’s free trade zones.
Reginald Shepherd
Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse
While I am still in the hospital, I’m having Robert post this piece:
Jack Spicer’s notion of poetry as dictation is hardly original (and originality is a notion Spicer would quarrel with in any case), but Spicer acknowledges its sources and rings his own changes on them: Yeats’ spooks bringing him metaphors for his poetry, or Cocteau’s Orphée writing down poems broadcast on the ghost radio. That the idea of dictation can itself be read as dictated makes perfect sense. Part of the point of Spicer’s poetics is that everything comes from the outside; there’s no romantic interiority generating poems in the sensitive soul. This is a useful corrective to the fetishization of personal creativity, proposing instead what Robin Blaser calls the practice of outside. As Spicer writes of his posthumous collaboration with Garcia Lorca, “It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim” (After Lorca).
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