I am amazed to find this post! Truong Tran is a friend/colleague/mentor and I’m delighted he harmonized three of my recent photographs into this astounding show. Actually, those photos are from my MASS Project that he helped inspire. His work as a poet and visual artist infected me with bravery.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for years but I’ve not met anyone as generous as Truong. If you know him, you know he says that, in San Francisco, you’ve got to create your own community and you’d better not every become a snob or he’ll rag on you publicly. I heart the guy. And I xoxoxo you Craig for sharing this on Harriet.

k~
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@Henry: Sarcasm is an overutilized device in most comment streams, but your example here is quite good. Still, I submit even you get tired of the same cast of characters doing battle again and again. (Unless you enjoyed Rockys 2 through 6, that is.) Such is the nature of the internet beast, I suppose, but if you’d prefer to continue screwing that particular pooch…or if you’d like to keep STARRING in that movie…well, feel free, Sylvester.
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Since you bring it up: Never said I disagreed with anyone. Never jumped into an argument. I just expressed a general sigh at reading comment streams that invariably digress into the same arguments amongst the same people, almost every time. This blog in particular is great for that.

@Henry: Sarcasm is an overutilized device in most comment streams, but your example here is quite good. Still, I submit even you get tired of the same cast of characters doing battle again and again. (Unless you enjoyed Rockys 2 through 6, that is.) Such is the nature of the internet beast, I suppose, but if you’d prefer to continue screwing that particular pooch…or if you’d like to keep STARRING in that movie…well, feel free, Sylvester.
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No problem.

But notice how the concept of community in your post consists of getting real places into real spaces. (Or private faces into public spaces…). And “heart”-ing real people with sentimental good feelings.

Bobby: I want to know how this impairs my artmaking? Is is because it makes me less likely to believe in objective evaluative standards? If so, I of course agree.

Johannes
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–Thom
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You know, these poetry blogs with their comment threads would be so much better if readers were more like COWS, don't you think? Just placidly chewing their cud, feeding quietly on the poetic grass & legumes we provide to them, uttering occasional moos of praise & grunts of contentment… & believe it or not, this is becoming scientifically feasible – I mean, cloning & grafting poetry readers genetically with cows… it could happen someday. I look forward to it. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we just stopped disagreeing about things? I mean, if I were an Harriet poster, I would not like to have people questioning me or disagreeing with the foodstuffs they receive so generously from us. Cows would make better people.
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Not sure why I deserved the crack about obsession and essence. You took Johannes to task for identifying pro-community rhetoric in certain poetry circles, arguing (I thought) that the way people advocate for community is so various that it makes no sense to talk about it as a thing. I think it’s a thing, and I said as much.

It wasn’t my intention to get you or anyone “fired up,” even in a good way, and I certainly don’t want to be accused of clogging up any more of your threads, so I think I’ll leave things there.
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Amongst young students of color here in New York (high school ages, mostly), and among the students my fiancee Tara Betts mentored back in Chicago, the one poet who gets mentioned/taught/read the most has to be Willie. I don’t know if I can exactly quantify why, except that there is a fearlessness to his language that resonates on many levels. It’s interesting formally. It’s interesting sonically. It makes strong arguments. He brings his locales and the characters within them to life, in a way that anyone can understand, even if you didn’t grow up in East Harlem. (He kinda makes you wish you did, though.) The lesson I learned from Willie about truth in vernacular speech was a lesson I sharpened later reading Sterling Brown. So it was empowering to hear the work as a beginner, and humbling reading it later on, because I was able to see myself in a continuum and tradition.

As for Martín, I was a lonely undergrad at Montclair State University in 2002 when he came to do a reading there. I went to it at the behest of one of my professors, and I don’t think I’d be writing at all if I hadn’t. Espada gave me the permission to be Puerto Rican and Latino, with all the (sometimes) contradictory experience that defines those terms, in the fledgling bit of poetry I had scribbled in my books up til then. And as with Willie, the more I read and wrote and experimented, the more I was able to appreciate the formal strategies in Martín’s work, and particularly the conversations it was (is) having with the rest of (Latin) America…the América of De Burgos and Neruda, that is. Being Latino, for me, is not a limiting thing when placed in that context, and I know that many of Martín’s mentees (there are a lot of them) feel the same way.

Funny isn’t it, how poetics…the deep study and reading of poetry…can deepen one’s identity/politics in a non-surface way? If you listen to some of the assnecks who bash political poetry (some on this blog, in fact), you’d think we were all ranting lunatics who don’t read books. Perhaps that’s for another thread, though.

One last point: It is also important to me that I can genuinely call these two poets my friends, to the point where I can have conversations with them that have absolutely nothing to do with poetry. I have poet friends who don’t always remember to do that, and it annoys me to death. If I CONSTANTLY had these kinds of meta-conversations about language, power, syntax, formal strategies, and the po-biz, I think I’d be a seriously unhappy bastard. And in that vein, I’m really tired of seeing/reading/hearing poets who are genuinely unhappy boy-children, because they invariably end up clogging threads like this one by waving their wangs at each other and demonstrating to the world how much they haven’t read yet. Fuck Ezra Pound. Have a muffin instead.
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Seriously, though, I feel he accurately describes the experience of connecting with another through words, ideas, conversations, poetry. The other might be alive or dead, live on a different coast or different planet, you might have nothing in common with them in real life or even find them annoying or objectionable as a person, but for that one moment or many moments there is that connection, that spark of understanding. This kind of dovetails with Sina’s latest post on what keeps poetry alive, which I hope to comment on if I can get my puppy to stop chewing on my new scarf that’s dangling off the side of the monitor…
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There is absolutely nothing, generally speaking, wrong with moderation. The problem is that for a long time those in charge of Harriet have seemed to think there is something wrong with moderation. And so we have seen Harriet do nothing until the vitriol got so bad it could not be ignored (as though personal attacks could be self-correcting); we have seen the silly fiasco of thumbs up and thumbs down on comments (as though a “hidden” comment—hidden perhaps because others disagreed with it, or because they dislike the person posting it, or, it may be, because they wanted to be mean—were the same as an objectively inappropriate comment). And now we see a weird process wherein comments can be held for moderation and then posted and then censored because someone clicked “report this comment” (as though the comment, which had presumably already been reviewed to see whether it violated the standards of Harriet, suddenly became inappropriate just because someone—or a number of people—clicked on it). I find the latter method of moderation to be especially noxious and confused, since it wants to claim the banner of the commons while potentially repudiating disagreement or dissention that constitutes the very possibility of the commons—all the while doing so without even minimal transparency. To put this differently, what is offensive at Harriet is not that blog comments are moderated but that Harriet is engaged in a process of moderation that implicitly includes feedback from some readers even as it refuses feedback to others by censoring certain comments without specifying why or how those comments exceeded the boundaries of the appropriate. Who, after all, is responsible when a comment appears and then disappears soon after? It can’t be those in charge of Harriet presumably—otherwise they wouldn’t have let the comment appear in the first place. And it can’t be the anonymous readers who clicked on “report this comment,” since we don’t know why they clicked on the comment, and, it goes without saying, we certainly can’t ask them.

Let me be absolutely clear about this. When I say that Harriet is a private blog, I’m by no means celebrating that fact. But I am pointing to what those in charge of moderating Harriet have consciously are unconsciously been trying to avoid: as a private blog, someone has to define generally what is permitted in this space and someone has to have the final say on whether any particular comment fits that definition. And if they do have that final say, it seems reasonable to expect them to articulate their reasons for making that decision. Harriet is responsible for what goes on here, for what is allowable and what is not, for who gets banned and who doesn’t. It can’t pretend there is some invisible hand that does the work of moderation while everyone is safely browsing Flickr or uploading their lives on Facebook.
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I value Kent’s contributions. Contrarianism is an important part of the mix.

A few weeks ago I tried to post in reference the now-banished foets who made our life so tendentious here last summer. The post never registered. There must be a list of words that will cause a post not to appear.

On strike! Shut it down! ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!
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Hey! I got less moderated on this thread about moderation! Glad I checked back. Now I can go off in a happy huff, and puff and puff and inflate my ego.

P
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so i also apologize for calling it ‘silly’–a bit of displaced aggression as bobby’s comments always get me fired up (in a good way). so yes, i do think calling it ‘essence’ was careless, but i do agree that the invocation of ‘realness’ is a strand of pro-comm rhet. however, my own valorization of community had nothing to do with ‘realness’ (nor intended to put down its anti-). my point was to point to another strand of po-comm rhet: coming through or showing up. with community organizing of any kind (in art or politics) it’s so hard to get people to come through. truong is able to do it. this has nothing to do with realness.

i should also say that truong’s community crosses ethnic boundaries–he brings many different people together.

much apologies again for being un-communal–i hope you know i love ya
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i like what you say about communion, but i’ve always resisted that word cuz i’m a ‘recovering catholic’ (dont tell my grandmother).
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that is not the ‘essence’ of my pro-community rhetoric! and why this obsession with essences?

again, i just disagree that we have to choose one OR the other. and i’ve read thru your DE posts on the subject, and i question why these are so separate for you…so much so that you could read the whole debate on criticism as breaking down to a simplistic choice. however, i do agree that SOME artists will choose the social aspect of being a poet over the more private aspect of writing the (non-collaborative) poem (collaborative poem making throws a wrench into your binary). but SOME poets def are interested in both making the best art they can and living the most artful life possible (whatever those may mean for them). i’m just saying, not everyone fits into this either or category you’ve constructed.
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Hi Johannes,

Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons I like reading your thoughts on this stuff is that you’re admirably frank about what you’re doing and why. (Which is not to say that every artist needs a theory backing his practice, only that theories can be interesting, too.) I think we disagree at a pretty fundamental level in our approaches to art—epitomized by our opposite feelings about kitsch—but that doesn’t mean I’m trying to convince you or anyone that you ought to change what you’re doing or thinking. I’m more interested in how and why one half of the debate (mine) has gone so completely underground in the current situation.
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