During a site migration (I love technical jargon, don’t you?), a number of Harriet’s journals were lost.  But I’m pleased – and extremely grateful to the crack web team here for their help – to be able to re-present this one!  It’s Lisa Robertson’s dispatch from Jouhet, France.  Here you go…  enjoy!  Discuss!!

MONDAY

In this village, in fair weather the accepted neutral site for mutual discussion of current events (whether political or meteorological or agricultural) is the bridge. A person standing on the bridge, leaning over the stone balustrade, looking down through the water and weeds for fish, often smoking, is signaling their availability for discussion. It was here that an elderly neighbour, Jacqueline, a retired librarian, knowing that I was waiting for news back from a job interview that was important to me, advised me to pray to the holy virgin. The pragmatism of it. Maybe I did not know how to pray.

I think that now America needs better pornography. This idea has been influenced by my early-summer romance with Pauline Reage and The Story of O. Living in France, reading in French, coming across the plain yellow paper volume in a used book shop in the next town, having an ongoing need to build for myself a history of how women have thought, so that I might have a sense gradually of what thinking will be for me in my life, what thinking could become—this is an abbreviated background for my immersion in a text whose anarchism is as sustained, feral and relentless as it is elegantly poised. I think this is the magic formula of O. Each limit or expectation one could have regarding the relation of the subject to desire, to power, to sex, to identity, is systematically obliterated, but this happens in a language whose stylistic achievement is so restrained, so balanced, so modest , that the reader has the feeling she is participating, with sublime effortlessness, in a masque. The only obscenity is the reader’s repeated need to stop and build a moral defense against her own immersion in the imaginary, her own identification with a punitive sadism. Yet L’Histoire d’O is really the first book I’ve read in French nearly effortlessly, voraciously, fast, with full-on admiration. This complex tension, between the sinuous ease of the text as a styled object, the questions it allegorizes—around the relation between embodied will and desire and thus the political—and the reader’s suspension between a received moral hygiene of gender and a freefall into a fantastical extreme—this confused yet poised tension says things about thinking itself as a open form of sustained erotic anarchy.

Pauline Reage was a pseudonym of the Parisian critic, scholar, and editor Dominique Aury. Dominique Aury, in turn, was a name assumed for the length of her professional life by the young woman Anne Desclos. O was first published in 1952, though it was written in the previous decade. The story is a sort of sadistic fairy tale, in the tradition of the sadist contes of Perrault—Bluebeard, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. O follows also of course the tradition of de Sade himself, where the orgy in the castle is a discourse on the practice of political power, and the need to dissolve the accepted limits of philosophical thought, so that philosophy might become a form that opens political life to the variousness of bodies and their many ways of being constituted as subjects, erotic and otherwise. That was a long sentence. What I want to indicate is that this book is part of more than one tradition in French letters, and that it is part of a political history of philosophy, and that, like philosophy, it could show us something new about being a person.

There is a new biography of Dominique Aury, written by Angie Davis, and published this year by Editions Leo Scheer. I came across it in a bookstore in Paris near the Pompidou centre, on my way to lunch a few weeks ago, after seeing the Hans Bellmer show. It’s big, a bedside book rather than a slim traveling volume, the way I prefer biographies, but it has no photographs, except for the one on the cover showing Aury with pen in hand, at a table with her lover Jean Paulhan. Both of them glance out with mild surprise, and behind them is a disorderly book shelf, and what appears to be a screen or room divider covered in toile de jouy fabric. The photograph is dark, and Aury’s face glows with what I am tempted to call frankness, though it is only the light. The book has no index either, by choice of the publisher says a note at the end. I started to make up my own on the back flyleaf as I read.

Some entries:

Donne.

Aury, bilingual since childhood, was a scholar of 16th and 17th century poetry, and translated Donne into French. Her first book, published by Gallimard during the war, was an anthology of French religious poetry of the 16th century. I want to track down her Donne translations, and her anthology. For now I just pull down my old green Norton anthology. (I should also buy a decent edition of Donne) She translated “The Good Morrow”—“I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / did til we loved? Were we not weaned til then. / But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?” Such supple teasing. She wrote the story of O as a love letter to Jean Paulhan, a Gallimard editor and for several decades, and with extreme clandestine discretion, her lover. The myth of the writing of The Story of O, told by Aury herself in an essay called “Une Fille Amoureuse,” is that she wrote in her bed at night, in school notebooks, with no corrections and few pauses, sending the notebooks by mail to Paulhan one at a time, to a poste restante address. In both Donne and Reage, the erotic emblem is opened out, slowed down, suspended, given space, so that something more than a simple identification happens. One is forced to analyze the terms of an identification as it is experienced. The analysis does not cancel the identificatory force; it troubles its transparency, inserting in it a baroque dynamics. In reading we become someone we can’t fully believe.

The Beaver Coat.

The first time she made any half decent money as an arts journalist and critic, and could stop teaching art history to disinterested American students, Aury splurged on a coveted beaver coat, broad-shouldered and extravagantly fashionable. Yet she was known all her life for her soberness, even nunishness, in dress. She preferred the simplest dark toned tailored suits. And then—the beaver coat. Clothing in O plays a highly coded and central role in the story, and is described with almost documentary remove. At the beginning, (and this is my translation) “She is dressed as she always is: shoes with high heels, a matching jacket and pleated skirt, a silk blouse, no hat. But long gloves that go up over the sleeves of her tailored jacket, and in her leather handbag her identity papers, her powder, and her lipstick.” A simple tension in the image is introduced here already—in a story set in Paris in the middle of the last century, a chic woman wears no hat, but wears long formal gloves. Later in the book, corsets, piercings, brandings, lash wounds, and animal masks are described with the same discrete precision.

Knitting, the Knitted Suit.

Yes, she was knitting herself a suit during the war. She alternated between writing and knitting. I imagine it tightly worked on small steel needles, in navy blue. She would have lined the skirt, which was maybe knitted in the round. Since I recently started knitting again, this gives me a little thrill. How I would love to knit the supple navy suit of Dominique Aury. But it would have to be perfect. In every particular, Aury’s style was immaculate. I don’t yet have the skill. My tension is off. During the war she was also working for the resistance. In occupied Paris she distributed forbidden publications of political journalism and analysis. Some of her colleagues were captured and killed. I imagine her sitting knitting waiting for the delivery that wouldn’t arrive. Wearing that suit.

She had a group of them always in her room, on the mantel, or on her bedside table. She wrote in bed habitually, and imagined them to be her interlocutors. She gave her porcelain zebra to her lover (the one before Paulhan) when he was mobilized in the war. On my desk I have a small bear on yellow skis, a life-sized china toad, a terracotta head of a dog, a tiny glass elephant, a black lead Anubis, a metal swan with outstretched wings and white paint chipping off. Now I feel less odd about that. (admittedly my desk animals were partly influenced by the audience of godlets on Freud’s desk, which I saw in his house in North London in 1997, while strangely hungover on alcohol/sleeping pills/jetlag) I really don’t think Aury was any sort of follower or devotee of psychoanalysis, at least not of psychoanalysis considered as the uncovering or revelation of the self. She believed in maintaining secrets, in duplicity, in dissimulation, in pseudonyms, in invented identities, in tales. She was perhaps trained into the imperative of the clandestine by her resistance work, but already it was a literary taste. She believed in the 18th century of Declos. She wrote an essay on les Liasons Dangereuses in the ‘30s. I thought I had translated a passage from this essay in my notebook, but, looking back, I did not—only the jotted phrase—“and for the erotic education of intelligence.” I did, though, translate a bit from her 1946 essay on Violette Leduc’s first book, L’Asphyxie: “There is no longer a secret garden or a lost paradise. Because, in the novels of women today, paradise never existed. Yet the world exists—a world stifling and splendid, crushing and despised, The titles of the women’s books give an emblem to the tone and atmosphere of their stories. And so, Violette Leduc entitles her first book Asphyxia.” (My battered Panther edition is wordily translated as In the Prison of her Skin) It’s an interesting exercise to consider the forms these two mid-twentieth women chose, the confession, and the erotic conte, as two faces of the 18th C. The construction of an image of complete self disclosure, in Leduc, beside the mythically disciplined, and disciplinary restraint of Aury, two versions of responses to the asphyxiating sensation and experience of female corporality in a world of men. It’s a dialectic I’d like to think more about: Confession/dissimulation. I think one reason I decided to move to France, a reason that’s just now becoming apparent to me, is to continue my research on the 18th century. France, especially in the towns and villages, is still in the 18th century. I love how here a conversation is often structured on the mutual presentation of theories, not as conflictual stances, but as entertaining bibelots. Talking together in the evening in a mown field above the river is a formal masque of theories, and also a real politics.

Poussin.

Aury was a passionate devotee of Poussin. What did she love in him? Grandeur and restraint, perhaps, a formal, even emblematic approach to the symbolic structure or logic of the image, stylistic exactitude and rigor, but over all this a gentle or even humorous or loving sense of the glorious inevitability of human stupidity. Lytle Shaw and I have been having an off and on conversation about why the English Romantics loved Poussin. (they did. Hazlitt wrote on him, (see Tom Paulin on Hazlitt) Keats owned the first memoir of Poussin’s life, written in 1820 by Maria Graham—a book I impulsively ordered from Abe two years ago simply because at the time I was earning money and I could). It seems at first like such a deep mystery, this love of Poussin, if you approach the idea of romanticism as an expressive plenum, the romantic artwork as an elevation of individual passions. But what if we think of romanticism’s austerity, the measured analysis of convention in social expression, a sustained dignity of formal attention paid to the minutae of quotidian stories? Then emotions become treated as ritual. They become visible, discernable as more than encompassing flows. In this way, Poussin could be a kind of key to the cabinet that is the story of O.

Violette Leduc. (see above)

What is it about all these fabulous French women writers? Aury, Weil, Leduc, Colette, de Beauvoir, Sarrazin. Not that many other nations aren’t also yielding brilliant women, haven’t always for centuries. But in France they seem more part of the centre of the culture, more accepted as necessary fixtures in the history of thought. For example: a common brand of Dijon mustard, typical in every grocery store and pantry cupboard, comes in a re-useable water glass with a blue or green round bauble for a stem. The glass, my 76 year old neighbour tells me, is a copy of the stemware of Georges Sand. So Georges Sand’s stemware is part of the domestic vocabulary of French kitsch. Can we even begin to imagine the same with Emily Dickinson? Would her thimble arrive as the prize in a cereal box? Collect the set? Or Susanah Moodie? Who? I digress. A few weeks ago at a local dinner party I was overcome by the excitement of meeting two people who found it perfectly normal to spend the evening talking about Bergson and Hannah Arendt. (Why should I have been surprised? The dinner was at the house of the pornographic bookseller who had sold me my copy of The Story of O, in its original ample format and plain yellow cover, then later, Reage’s Une Fille Amoureuse, and Regine Deforges’ O m’a dit, a book of interviews with Aury from 1975). We ate with our fingers the fat white asparagus the French love, dabbing it in various sauces before stripping the soft pulp from the fibrous part by slowly extruding the dripping shoot from between tight teeth. I dipped and blabbered on about Arendt, in the full excitement then of delving through The Life of the Mind. I said how few seriously recognized women thinkers there have been. I was called for my thoughtlessness immediately. Not true. They started naming women philosophers—and all of them were French. I was reading Kristeva on Arendt too at the time. (A book that’s part of a trilogy on the notion of genius in women, and includes Melanie Klein and Colette.) I saw they were right. Here Kristeva and Cixous and Irigary or Duras or Yourcenar or Labe for that matter are not part of a dated or quaint marginal camp called French feminism. They are simply serious thinkers in the culture. They offer analysis on current politics and on history. They are part of public life. Ah, public life. Maybe because there still is a tenuous public space here, a serious sense of the necessity of a critical and unsponsored secular discourse, women can be part of it. Discourse as I know it in the USA and Canada seems to be a mostly private activity, sheltered or promoted or squashed by corporations. And so there is not the space for a public tradition of thinking to accrue. I’m familiar with the Habermasian critique of the public sphere, its basis in class privilege. Yet here public discourse seems to persist in spite of the inevitable circulation of power. It is still a site where unimaginable change or resistance exerts creative force. As in the most recent public protests—the student protestors won. Women can be part of public life because public life exists. (But I distrust the simplicity of this formula.) (and public life erodes also. See the recent essay on political life in France in the London Review of Books, by Alain Supiot.) Which unfortunately doesn’t guarantee anything at all about the status of individual women in family or social life. Aury, after her early divorce, refused re-marriage or even cohabitation, preferring to conduct her love affairs with women and men clandestinely, and to maintain her status as an autonomous member of french cultural life. She worked at Gallimard for about 30 years, and was the only woman in that field during that time. So her compartmentalizing was not only a question of intellectual erotics. It stemmed also from a pragmatism in relation to the real politics of gender, the way it circulates in marriages, families, workplaces.

At this point my index dwindles on to:

Poetry as political resistance.

Sade

Curiosa, Locked Cabinet of.

The Peruvian Copiest

Libertinage at the Louvre

The imaginary cabin or house

Migraineuse.

But to return to my first proposition: America needs better pornography.

O begins when the heroine and her lover, strolling in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, enter a car that is like a taxi, yet is not a taxi, and O’s lover has her undo the closure of her perfect grooming. First he asks her to give him her handbag, containing makeup and identity papers. Then he asks her to remove her under wear, her garter belt, her stockings. She sits feeling the embarrassing sensation of her silk slip on her bare thighs. He blindfolds her. He takes her to a chateau at Roissy (now site of the Charles de Gaulle Airport) were she agrees to be prostituted to the desires of a group or cult of men. They may ask anything of her, and she agrees to comply. She agrees to submit herself to this condition. She is dressed by another woman in an open-bodiced gown that lifts easily to emphasize the general availability of her breasts and groin. Her mouth and nipples and labia are rouged and perfumed. It is a banal fantasy really, making use of the usual props and humiliations. It’s the extreme to which Aury stretches it, coupled with her cool stylistic reserve, and her innate understanding of the simultaneous layerings of allegory, that make more of this fantasy than the typical titillation. O, passed among men like a sort of emptied token of exchange, becomes a slave, then an owl, then nothing. These men become progressively more limited in their capacity for any sort of thinking or compassion. The final man is called simply The Commander. Who consents to the dissolution of personhood inside a cult of authority?

Searching for an explanation for this intuition I have about L’Histoire d’O, I think of Swift then pull Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World from the shelf, a book I haven’t looked at since the late ‘80s. Then I open a new notebook, a big dark grey one from muji, and start writing a story. As I write I have a feeling the story might be for Allyson Clay. Together we’ve been talking about a video script that would be a conversation between two identical images of the same woman.

The Economy.

As in myth and ritual and politics, nothing was true in this landscape. Violence, prohibitions, limitations, fear, and intimidation together moulded a grotesque, a living tableau that night gave over to the imaginary. Nothing was left for the senses, nothing but the feminine in its extremity. I noticed the extreme difficulty in separating out external compulsion from the experience of desire. Maybe they weren’t different. The entire system of degradation and travesty, the relation to social and historical transformation, the element of relativity and becoming, the material bodily lower stratum: change became this image to which I learned to submit. Nothing was left but the smell of crushed in passing. I myself am an ornate and abstract allegory.

It’s not far from evening and its autumn. Part of political life is not visible. I am dressed as I always am. I go into the world. I’ve emptied all the pronouns. The religiosity is structural, rather than ideal.

I am interested here in new thought. I am standing dressed in the skin of a sheep or a cow in the occidental forest. My name shall be she to them. It is a shame. It is velvety, voluptuous, and odorous. The sky, the cunt, each thing’s hunger is my fate, is universe of the undiscussed. My name shall be she to them, in grotesque, monstrous, most ancient mixture. This is a class.

This work was made under the auspices of material opulence. I think we talk about their ancient secret glowing like a money.

A good blouse, long gloves that go up over the sleeves of the tailored jacket, in the leather handbag the identity papers and minimum of makeup: Our entire relation with objects can’t be subsumed under the rubric of reification.

In my own pornographic experience I accept the imperceptible harnesses, the deafening panting of desire, the unregulated passivity. If I went home to this one emotion, to lovingly read obedience as liberty falsely improvised, that is, specific spiritual liberty, this is my account, is universe of the undiscussed, is nobility of information, is a class, like the inward opening window, called also a casement. I’m still you, in axis inward flung. I simply watch. And the breezes licking the lush terrains peopled with creatures, the authority, the virility, her submissive fidelity: I solicit all this. Each is progressively more limited. I demand a more exigent passivity and I supply it, to see what will happen. The private lumber turns dangerously.

TUESDAY

I have wanted to read this novel, Tous Les Chevaux du Roi since 1986, when I first read about the author, Michele Bernstein, in Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces. This would have been my introduction to Situationism, that alluring French counter-tradition of radical ambling. I lost my copy of the Marcus books years ago, I think when I offered a pile of books to the general library of the Sea Cabin, a sway backed hippy shack become cedar and glass architectural object, back on the west coast. (The library there was composed of warped volumes from the two great 20th century counter cultural moments, the ‘30s and the ‘60s—so HG Wells rubbed shoulders with Rosicrucian tracts, palm reading manuals and handbooks to healthful fasting with the help of cayenne, early New Directions and City Lights editions of Snyder and Ginsberg, The Golden Notebook, The Female Eunuch, and various philosophical treatises by Watts, Suzuki, and Alexandra David Neel, on tantric matters and zen. Around the year 2000 I thought that Greil Marcus, along with an assortment of early titles from Zone, on the history of the body and anthropology of the sacred and so on, would supply the crucially missing dimension of the quite recent, but already slightly tangy, bibliophilic past. It was a kind of reciprocity since it had been from the Sea Cabin’s driftwood shelves that I appropriated my crisping copy of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Reader, my introduction to Reage).

What I remember about Michele Bernstein is that she had been married to Guy Debord, was herself a member of the Situationist International, a frequent contributor to the magazine Potlatch (some of her texts can be found online), and that she financially supported Debord and herself by writing the horoscopes of racehorses for a betting tabloid. Could this be true? She also wrote various art and literary reviews for the TLS, and two novels, both of which were pastiches of wildly popular books of late ‘50s France, one by Francoise Sagan, and the other, Nathalie Sarraute. This one, All the King’s Horses was a takeoff on Bon Jour Tristesse, and also a roman a clef about Bernstein’s apparently complicated ménage with Debord.

It was published in 1960, has been out of print for decades, and I’ve never been able to find a copy. Then the same day I spotted the bio of Dominique Aury, expecting nothing more, I found myself asking the clerk at Les Cahiers du Colette if he might locate a copy. Amazingly, I learned it is in print again for only six Euros, in a slight and elegant little paperback from Editions Allia. I ordered a copy, and later read it on the way home to the country on the TGV. The cover, in moodily pixilated dark greys, shows Bernstein mid-sentence, a thinking pixie in standard issue chunky black turtleneck. The bio note on the back flap says simply that she was born in Paris in 1932, and that this was her first novel. I haven’t found it possible to learn anything more about her. In one of my periodic Google sessions in search of her trace, I once reached the conclusion that she was doing radical political puppet theatre in the streets of San Diego, but surely this is wrong. After her relationship with Debord ended, she was for a time married to the English Situationist Ralph Rumney. I think that she wrote a column for a while in Liberation, but I’m not sure. She leaves no biographical detritus behind her, resisting entirely the spectacle of publicity as Debord himself failed to do. I assume she is still living.

I’m amused by Bernstein’s deft appropriation of pop genre. Francois Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954 when she was 19, was immediately as successful as it was scandalous. When Sagan died in Paris last year, the kiosks were filled with glossy souvenir special editions of the ladies magazines, commemorating Sagan’s racy life, her penchants for casual sex and fast cars, her refusal to pay taxes, her honed life-long garconette style. (Now I can’t believe I didn’t save my copy of the special Sagan issue of Marie Claire.) At her death, Sagan had become the bad girl’s Lady Di. Already in 1960 she was fabulously rich, bought and crashed fancy sports cars at will, slummed on the Cote d’Azure, and grinned impishly into the cameras of a million paparazzi. Why not detourne Sagan and maybe make some housekeeping money at the same time? Both novels narrate the summertime frolics of open marriages, between Paris and the hot south, and involve prematurely sophisticated gamines. But the startling thing about Bernstein’s novel, the quality that hooked me right away, is its deadpan humour, entirely at the expense of the marginal art scenes the couple frequented. The scenarios and conversations she describes could be taking place right now in East Vancouver, or somewhere in Williamsburg or the 19th arrondissement.

(from the middle of the novel:

—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .

—Reification, Gilles replied.

—It’s serious work, I added.

—Yes, he said.

—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.

—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.)

Here is a crisply worked opportunity to laugh at ourselves, to feel just slightly, and slightly intelligently, outside the scrawl of theories and complications we use to decorate the fiscal and popular minimalism of a freelance life in poetry. I began to translate as soon as I finished the novel. Here, a draft of a first installation.

Michele Bernstein Tous les Chevaux du Roi

I don’t know how I caught on so quickly that Carole attracted us. I had only just heard about her the night before, in a small gallery stuffed with that crowd that always comes to the openings of painters destined to remain unknown. The few old friends I ran into there were precisely the ones I would have rather not seen again. In a loud voice that tried hard to be worldly, the gallerist spoke of her shoes so that anyone important could understand that she was already cashing in on the success she felt coming. There was no bar and we had nothing to drink.

When I looked around to rescue Gilles, I saw that the painter was talking to him excitedly. A little group was already forming around them. He was a bad painter but a charming old guy, a fossil of an obsolete modernism. Gilles answered without revealing his weariness, and I admired his style. The old painter was already lost in the generation before ours, but he didn’t let that discourage him. He liked us. Our youth inspired his, I guess.

Me, I was stuck in a conversation with his wife.

—I should really bring you my daughter, she was saying. She’s almost your age, but she’s not very mature. You would do her a lot of good.

Indulgence rarely accompanies boredom. I assessed the blandness of this lady. A girl like her, outdated on top of it—I didn’t want to imagine her upbringing. But one ought to take an interest in people. I asked what the girl did.

—She paints. I think she has some talent, but she hasn’t found herself yet.

—Like her father I say rudely. Then I find out that she’s not the daughter of Francois-Joseph, she’s from an early marriage . . . By the end of the sentence I’m saying how much I really want to meet her. Was my eagerness convincing? I’d rather Gilles was in my shoes. He always seems nicer than me.

But finally, after she had finished talking about Beatrice, her daughter’s best friend, who wrote pretty good poems for her age, and who she’d give the copy of Rimbaud she’d just picked up, she had invited me for dinner the next day, with my husband.

The meal was pleasant. Francois-Joseph, not thinking now of the fate of his canvases, was at ease. His friends trotted out in fine form the ideas of thirty years ago. It was amusing. The people of that era appreciated black humour. Even their nonsense could take on a certain ambiguity. When, like good Frenchmen, they evoked the allures of the person who sold paintings without even offering finger food, Francois-Joseph defended her hips.

—Not like you, Carole, he said, you don’t have much yet to offer the gentlemen.

—I’ll have my day, Francois-Joseph, she replied as she moved sinuously in her chair.

Francois-Joseph was so visibly sensitive to this possibility that I hesitated to assist him in his awkward efforts to help Carole loosen up. He’d obviously been digging himself into this hole for quite a while. Maybe I looked at Carole because she was the object of this annoying attention.

A girl of twenty quite easily makes fifty year old men understand that she finds them decrepit, and this girl better than any. I took advantage of the moment when she got up to make coffee. I went to the kitchen to help her.

I felt half-hearted suddenly.

At first I found her quite tiny and incredibly slender. The tousled bangs, the cropped blonde hair, the childish outfit—white collar, blue pull-over—she didn’t look her age. But her awkwardness was expert: Carole didn’t make coffee, she made disorder, ostensibly. It was to give me the chance to lose, if I showed the slightest domestic capability, or if I was ridiculous enough to give her advice.

There’s nothing like a trap avoided. When I run water or look for cups, I am capable of a contrariness that could dissociate me completely insidiously from this group. They were speaking about rare publications. We served a black liquid that caused friendly indignation. Objects now of a general disapproval, it was inevitable that we felt like accomplices. To take advantage of this, I trained a slightly ironical conversation on Carole, speaking to her parents like an equal. Francois-Joseph, happy to focus on her, babbled on. Disconcerted, she kept quiet. I heard that she lived quite far from there, in the 16th district, and that she played the guitar. Gilles also remained silent and looked at us with an interest that I recognized.

But it was me who proposed to take the girl home in a taxi. And when Gilles found me later in the corridor and teasingly asked what we were going to do, I replied:

—Win her, of course.

WEDNESDAY

Will someone go to the Guggenheim to see the Zaha Hadid show, and report back? I once sat on a red ponyskin couch she made. It was the rumpus room of some eerily wealthy Parisian collectors whose house I was writing about for Nest magazine. They had coupled it I think with a big Basquiat canvas, was it, or maybe something lumpy from the support et surface group. (In this house each furnishing seemed to be paired with a canvas to make a kind of very high end pun, and the pun had to do with the cultural rhyme of two names, such as Hadid/Basquiat, more than the desirable objects themselves.) This ponyskin couch had the coarse fur rubbed off it at many points, since the children of the house used the thing like a long, undulant but quite sturdy gymnastic horse. Is that what those things are called, those wood and leather hard contraptions in small town high school gymnasiums, all rubbed to a shine by the labours of several generations of sweating adolescents? I think I would like to have one of those in my living room. Anyways. I suspect I should be in awe of Zaha Hadid. I love her little manifesto “Randomness vs. Arbitrariness.” An incredibly important differentiation to make. “Randomness in architecture is a visual translation of pure mathematical order and thinking which is guided by logic, whereas arbitrariness has no underlying conceptual logic. . . . Arbitrariness has to do with a generation which has been brought up on shopping for ideas. A catalogue exists from which they freely copy anything and apply it with little relevance to any situation. But in architecture our responsibilities are far greater: we must create a new dynamics of architecture in which the land is partially occupied. We must understand the basic principles of liberation.” (1982) Could we differentiate like this in writing please? Could we recognize that arbitrariness is not in itself liberatory? Is arbitrariness truly attractive? How far can randomness go? How could a text partially occupy a site? By scrupulously pursuing a logic it thus transforms to an abstract symbolic apparatus? (I think here, maybe a little predictably, of Kenneth Goldsmith’s work; also of the work of Dan Farrell, Fiona Banner’s The Nam and Lytle Shaw’s Cable Factory.) It seems to me that we could climb all over this simple distinction Hadid makes, explore it and rub it shiny. I’d like that kind of exercise.

I’d like to try to think through her idea of randomness in relation to catalogues and cataloguing. Are the artists of randomness, in Hadid’s terms, the ones who are now constructing new catalogues, rather than shopping arbitrarily among the existing ones? Some seem to ask—what is a category and how is it constituted? And the indexical relationship of catalogue to culture has an elasticity that can’t be subsumed under the positivist notion of the enlightenment project. Indexical work now emits a Gothic mood. The index is the forest or the ruin where we may be lost. This is a partial occupation. Seeking a universal thoroughness, the index or catalogue must always fail. That is its huge attraction for me. It is like a textual unconscious yet it follows a scrupulous compositional principal. This tension compels me.

A letter arrives from Matthew Stadler, and he’s inviting me to an evening of conversation with old friends from Vancouver, Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, at a restaurant table in Portland, part of a supper talk series he curates. Max and Hadley are conceptual artists who work as a collaborative unit, making installations, paintings and photographs in galleries and apartments, projects that have to do with redecoration, love, popular dissent, and the hokey song lyrics of the recent past. Matthew suggests we talk about community in relation to the writing and art scenes in Vancouver.

This word community is a common currency right now in poetry blogs and certain bars. Community’s presence or absence, failure, responsibility, supportiveness, etc—everyone is hovering around this word. It could be that I just feel its ubiquity since I moved to rural France from Vancouver, ostensibly away from “my community.” When I think about it from here I feel ambivalent. I don’t miss community at all. I do miss my friends. How much of this notion of community is an abstraction of the real texture of friendship, with all its complicated drives and expressions—erotic, conversational, culinary, all the bodily cultures concentrated in a twisty relation between finite, failing persons. When I try to think of what a friend is, I imagine these activities we pleasurably share with someone we love—grooming, reading, sleeping, sex perhaps but not necessarily, intellectual argument, the exchange of books, garments and kitchen implements, all these exchanges and interweavings that slowly transform to become an idea and then a culture. Or a culture first, a culture of friends, and then an idea. Or both simultaneously. Writing is an extension and expression of friendship. Maybe friendship is more dangerous to think about and talk about because of its corporal erotics, mostly not institutionalized, not abstracted into an overarching concept and structure of collective protocols. For me, the drive to talk, to be in a room with someone I want to laugh or dance or fight with, to feed, all of those things—this has more to do with how writing happens for me, and also how I receive others’ writing, than community does. I think my friends have become models and incentives for my relationships with books and writing. Certainly I primarily write to my friends and for them, seeking to please and delight them above all, and sometimes mysteriously and painfully falling out. But I don’t want to call this community. I want to preserve the dark body of friendship.

Is the idea of community in collective cultural life replacing the broader notion of a participatory public politics? Is our sense of broader collective agency being reduced to the limited scopes our most immediate productive microcosms and economies? I think that maybe the political disempowerment experienced by huge swathes of populations in the United States certainly, but everywhere, under the expansion of the global neo-liberal economy, is gradually causing us to act out our political drives within smaller and smaller circles. I have to say that for me the micro-economy of experimental writing or visual culture does not in itself constitute the polis. I can’t pretend the stakes correspond. And I don’t want to euphemize the complicated bodily texture of my specific relationships in writing and thinking.

Some other friendships I look to, with deep curiosity, sometimes even with a kind of retrospective ficto-jealousy—the one between Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Alexander Pope. (According to Edith Sitwell their friendship ended when Lady Mary borrowed bed sheets (for unexpected guests) from Pope, and returned them unlaundered.) Between Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes. Between Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett. Between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Between Lucy Hutchinson, the 17th C. translator of Lucretius, and her patron, Lord Anglesey. Between Montaigne and Marie le Jars de Gournay. Between Madame de Sevigne and Descartes. And then there is the intimate history of my touch on their texts. That I have a split set of Madame de Sevigne’s collected letters because Erin Moure and I bought them to share, during a car trip to San Francisco the week after I got my drivers license in 1995 or 6. One evening last week I had that strange sensation of being watched while working in my study and I turned around to face an immense green cricket sitting on the browny pink rim of volume three. And so I remembered that I want to read more of her, and I learned the French for cricket—le grillon.

Much of what writing has become for me unfolded from a chance discovery, deep in the footnotes of a scholarly biography of Lady Mary. I learned that while living in the south of France in the early 18th C., Lady Mary wrote a series of letters, in French, to Marguerite of Navarre, the Renaissance writer of the Heptameron. I burned to read these letters, which are I think in some private archive in England, and have never been published. Suddenly one morning in 1990, thinking and desiring was not limited to the era in which I happened to be born. Since then I have experienced passionate friendships with the dead, and they are not less real because of the discrepancy. This causes me to live in libraries. I have no intention of calling this community. Perhaps what we are is a cult.

All of the above has to do with Jane Birkin or doesn’t.

THURSDAY

Jupebeast, manga-boho, relookage: these are today’s words. I was trawling for anything about Tsumori Chisato. She’s a Tokyo- based designer I discovered this May in the glorious archive called le Bon Marche. My Visa card procured one garment.

The strictness of black haberdashery, the slight sheen of the better, sturdy, mannish polished cottons of the last century, the utter frivolity of a very deeply scalloped knee-length hem, a structural use of self-piping, insouciance of a smock, a nudge towards deconstruction (the front button plackets extend to dangle 10 centimetres beneath the hem, slightly tickling the wearer’s upper calves), pearly grey flash of the long row of shirt buttons, a neck deeply vee’ed to expose the curve of a breast or some funky vintage debardeur, a hint of the priest, the suffragette, the middle-aged weekend painter of 1923 in her country retreat, a detourned scholar’s robe of Oxbridge vaguely, a nunnish flirt: I couldn’t name it. I loved it.

Its 13 vertical gores are deeply tucked onto simple shoulder yokes in both front and back, and it swings like a crumpled bell when I walk. Each gore finishes itself as one petal-like, piped scallop of the hem.

It makes me realize that I have never seriously considered the referential potential of a pocket. There is just one, structured into the seam of a left hand front gore. Here Chisato has begun roughly with the idea of a vertically tailored pocket, but she has made five little slashes into the fabric and sewn a little V shaped gusset into each slash, making of the pocket opening an outward-ruffling irregular invitation for the hand. Each gusset is topstitched to stiffen the ruffle. And the pocket is of more than adequate deepness. I keep a black Pacific beach pebble there.

It could be worn with high-tops, espadrilles, riding boots, polka-dot stiletto pumps, petticoats, torn jeans, lots of beads, striped stockings, a high necked blouse, gold sandals, knitted leggings, nothing, or a smoke-toned nylon Comme des Garcons irregularly dangling underskirt from 2001.

More simply put, it’s a knee length black sleeveless tunic or smock that immediately transforms the wearer to a 21st-century Djuna Barnes. On the basis of this single garment, I passionately recommend Tsumori Chisato.

All I could discover is that she worked for Issey Miyake from 1977 til 1990, that she started showing in Paris in 2001, and that she wears her hair long. The saleswoman at Bon Marche told me she’s popular with those wild Japanese manga girls, who do a sort of street cartoon Victorian hi-tech girly goth.

What would Deleuze have to say about it? Perhaps nothing, since her seams achieve an almost strict Nordic articulateness previously unimaginable among such baroque surplus of folds. Entirely unnecessary and useful, it hangs on its wooden hanger from a bookshelf, the shelf containing Ashbery, Bryher, Armantrout, and Bowles. The garment twists slightly to the right, as if in mid stride, and the left ruffled pocket splays out lasciviously.

FRIDAY

Now, all art is impossible. That is its special function.

The perfume dispensing machine in the Women’s toilet at the Owen Sound bus station is called the Resemblance Distributor. A one dollar coin could procure a simulacrum of Opium, Obsession or Poison.

“If there had been no repressions, no stake, truth would have cast off the clown’s attire; it could have spoken.” Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World

It is the important function of money to use all available vital power first.

To keep our appetites in play, I climbed a tree and tossed you cherries. If only my lips were cherries. I’d drop down some cherries. My lips should be cherries. Are these lips cherries. Why are not my lips cherries. My mouth bent as heavy cherries. Among her breasts, cherries. Tasting pleasures such as cherries. With a hot heart I’d toss you cherries.

“The mere consciousness of our bodily organs is enough to prevent them from functioning properly.” Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

She had perhaps escaped from the political economy of the future.

Fruit-flies were everywhere.

I don’t think the will is beautiful, or hardly ever.

What wouldn’t feel false. To bite into a lucid pigment.

Just Another Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant.

I’d take some food from my tree-so-sweet.

On a warm afternoon after rain, one’s shoulder-basket ready, everything is an apple—Persian apple, sour apple, spiny apple, love apple, golden apple, Pomona—there’s something sad about it.

She was fiercely monogamous and a libertine.

Water becomes leaves. At the core of this a dissidence.

How does style suffer?

– Lisa Robertson: 06.26.06-06.30.06

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry.  And yet…This ignores the fact that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.”  In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.”  So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

“Poetry, that is, survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings?  Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself?  In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now.  But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.  The question of hope and vision remains timely.  There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world each day as I write this.  And this very week we note such landmarks as the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency – and the passing (at the age of 100) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote, in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

Shout out to a poet whose poems – like X-rays – are quick, high-voltage and penetrating… like this one, called, well, “The X-Ray” –

Mornings, the body’s old
winter monochrome gives
its image of extraordinary cold
to a million hives—

I could imagine a lanthorn
as it swallows its strange light and gleams
from within as if reborn
when the bees come.

And here’s “Fowling Piece,” which is the title poem of her first book manuscript:

The pull of guns I understand,
my father taught me hand on hand
how death is. Life asserts.
(Best take it like a man.)

I shot a dove, the common sort
and mourned not life but life so short
that gazed from death as if unhurt.
And I had nothing to report.

Well, we have something to report!

Poetry magazine contributor Heidy Steidlmayer (who also received our own 2007 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize) will receive a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. It’s a prize given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Congrats, Heidy!

You can read more of Heidy’s work from our pages by clicking here.

“I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants…”

So wrote Yvor Winters, who knew a tedious pedant when he saw one, to the father of an aspiring poet way back in 1954; he continued:

“[English departments] are rather carefully selected groups of historical scholars who work in fairly close collaboration with each other. Such a group, in two or three years of instruction, can save a student like [your son] (no matter what his genius) fifteen years of labor, simply by giving him a succinct outline of their own work in background materials and in historical outlines. And without these background materials and historical outlines, he will misunderstand at least in some measure, and often in a large measure, almost anything he may read; and if he is a poet, his development may be irremediably retarded… One’s scholarship improves one’s poetry; one’s poetry improves one’s scholarship. It is a unified life. Furthermore, like life in a law office, it is life; it is not an ivory tower. I have never really encountered an ivory tower, any more than I have encountered a unicorn or a sea serpent. And my acquaintance has not been limited: in my time, I have known Stock Exchange brokers (my father was one), Board of Trade brokers (my father was one), prize fighters (Leach Cross, for example), actors (Otis Skinner and a few others), coal miners (for two years I lived in a couple of coal camps in northern New Mexico), and so on. All of these people in retrospect impress me as having been more isolated from Real Life than I am. In fact they impress me as having been very severely isolated; I have seen a lot, and I talk daily with learned and brilliant men, most of whom have seen a lot. The only penalty one pays for this life is that one has to teach; but if one likes to teach—and I confess that teaching amuses me infinitely—it is no penalty. I find myself charmed by the intelligent young, just as I am charmed by beautiful puppies.”

You can read the whole remarkable letter, and another one as well, by clicking here.

Well, it’s August… almost back-to-school time, which causes me to reflect on the whole schools for (and schools of) poetry thing. There’s something quaint about the spectacle of Winters coaching would-be poets; and yet in some ways these fifty years later it seems as if not much has changed, beyond the sheer numbers of aspiring poets. Even so, I was surprised and fascinated to learn this weekend that Seth Abramson, a poet who has documented the phenomenon of writing programs in more depth than anybody around, has helped start up a consulting group – which you can read about here – to guide writing students to their educations. As he explains on his own blog:

“In making the decision to start ALC, I thought about all the poets I knew who did one-on-one tutorials and private workshops as side-jobs (for money). I thought of all the undergrads who pay thousands of dollars to take poetry courses during which their one-on-one time with the professor is limited to 2-3 hour-long meetings a semester. I thought of Kaplan. I thought of Sylvan. I thought of Princeton Review and BarBri, and the $1,000 I happily paid the latter (and would gladly pay again). I thought, too, of the exorbitant rates that educational consultants generally charge–$150/hour is a pretty typical figure–and how no one can afford to pay that much unless their parents are rich, given that most consultations span ten billable hours or more. I thought of all the doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, and journalists who’ve e-mailed me over the past few years saying–in so many words–that they don’t know any poets, that they write privately on their own time, and that they want to make a commitment to themselves as writers by applying to an MFA program (for the time to write, that is) but they don’t know the first steps to take toward that goal. I thought of the fact that MFA acceptance rates–which most programs had intentionally and systematically concealed from their applicants for nearly seventy years–had now been revealed, as a result of research, and that they indicated that (unbeknownst to applicants all these years) MFA programs were harder admits than medical schools…”

Wow.

My own early education in poetry was pretty naive, by comparison. The first living poet I ever saw was Allen Ginsberg, when he came to Tennessee for a reading. He opened by chanting for a good long while; then he played the harmonium while singing Blake’s poems; then he read his own. In preparation for the reading, I’d bought a copy of Howl and Other Poems – no easy thing to do in a Southern town with about two bookstores in it at the time, and before Amazon was a gleam in its founder’s eye. The only poetry I’d ever known was the stuff you’re taught – and taught to ignore – in high school: harmless, syrupy anthology stuff, although even “Howl” is in anthologies for schoolkids these days. It took me a while to realize that there even were living poets, because I’d only been told of the dead ones! And once I smacked myself on the forehead and figured out that of course there were living poets, I imagined that they were all ghostly gray-bearded men, 3D images of, say, Whitman or John Greenleaf Whittier (I was not to meet a female poet until I was out of college). Well, Ginsberg had a beard, alright, but he was the liveliest most exciting man e’re I laid eyes upon. I fell in love with him like almost everybody else did in those days, and resolved to escape the South and go to New York – which I did, in due course, at the age of 17, partly at his invitation (literally: scrawled on a scrap of paper).

Long story short: libraries. I learned about poetry by reading my way through two small libraries while holding down shit jobs, which come to think of it, didn’t suck so bad if they afforded me access to books and time to sneak in the reading of poetry. I read widely and recklessly; it was fun. And because nobody ever checked out the poetry books, and as libraries used to get actual funding to buy them, I had some mighty fine resources at my disposal. When library funding was flush and books were cheap, man, those libraries bought everything! Full runs of Kayak! Lovely small press titles! Collected poems of everybody! After a while, I added books of criticism to my diet, and those turned out – again, by chance – to be by the likes of Winters – who shocked me as he turned against Hart Crane!, Hugh Kenner on the “Pound era,” and Donald Davie, on everybody. Davie appealed to me most, and so as a young sprout I imbibed his notions of modern poetry, which leaned toward poets I immediately came to treasure – and still do: Bunting, Niedecker, in particular were revelations. His qualified approval of Olson coincided with my inevitable discovery of Eliot, Pound, and Williams; it was a short leap from Ginsberg to O’Hara, Koch, and all the folks in The New American Poetry. For a while, I couldn’t get Paul Blackburn outta my thick head, and wrote poems with too many indents in them; I still get misty-eyed reading him.  What was clearly missing from this diet was work by Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Larkin, Lowell – you know, the non open-ended guys. But it so happened that I’d stumbled upon the goofy 1945 edition of Auden’s collected poems, in which the poems were arranged alphabetically by title (some of the titles concocted only for this purpose). A library had withdrawn it in favor of a later version, so I got it for a handful of change at a book sale. It was the oldest book I’d ever owned, and with its faded blue boards and whiffy odor, it was a treasure. Nothing opens the young poet’s eyes like pre-fifties W.H.A.! Then… oh, snap – Byron & Keats & Hardy entered the picture bigtime. From then on, my two favorite poets were Auden and O’Hara, and I carried their books with me everywhere – earning me some funny looks, because poetry simply did… not… exist… among the people I encountered in my hometown, which brings me back full circle, to Seth’s description of hooking people up with educations.

Not having been an English major myself, I neither benefited from nor was harmed by a curriculum in poetry. Nobody encouraged me, but then no one told me what to read or like, or tried to convince me that there were “schools” or “kinds” of poetry; if anybody had, I’d probably have found the whole thing a torment, and I’d have gone (as was my plan) to broadcasting school as did my best friend, Mountain, who quit high-school to work in radio. Instead, a kink was put in me by verse, as Kavanagh calls it.

Yet people don’t want kinks, they want credentials and mentoring, which is understandable. So…

From whom do we do our learning? What is it we hope to learn??

Vera Pavlova (left)

I recently attended the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam – one of the best poetry-related events I’ve ever been to – meeting day and night with poets from countries other than the USA, and heard – literally – not a single word about writing programs, nor about avant-gardes, post-avant gardes, flarf, or conceptual writing .

Imagine that!  Well, I know that writing programs exist outside of the US (particularly in the UK now), and yet… we sure seem to do things very differently over here. The relative lack of toadying and jockeying for position I found among poets from other countries – and I know that a single week is nothing conclusive – leads me to wonder how and why things seemed so different. I have no answer. But among all the poets, editors, and attendees of poetry events I met or saw … most very keenly wanted to read and learn about everybody they could. There was an impressive urgency among poets to encounter the work of people who were different. Sure, we had a few passionate and even heated discussions – but never about the kind of pecking-order stuff one must take for granted day in and day out over here. We’re a big country, but our literary culture seemed quite small over there.

Two poets in particular opened my eyes in many ways; they are not completely unfamiliar to American readers. Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi poet now living in the US, with books published by New Directions; Vera Pavlova lives partly in Alaska, partly in her native Russia with her husband and translator Steven Seymour (whom you’ll hear in this recording), and her poems have appeared in places like Tin House and The New Yorker.

Click here to listen to my interview with them, which includes questions about exile, women poets, translation – and getting pigeonholed!

Not infrequently, we get letters or blog-responses to individual poems published in Poetry that cite particular phrases or lines in order to prove somehow that a poem or poet (and, by implication, our taste) is lousy.  It’s an invidious tactic, and it occurs to me that one can make any poem in the world look bad by pulling a line or so out of context.  Summer’s here and the time is right for fun and games, so… shall we give it a try?  Are there any foolproof poets or poems?   Care to dissect a few?  So far, the only poem I can think of that seems immune is Blake’s “The Tyger.”  Or am I wrong about all this?

Pictured above: not quite a dead horse, but one that looks a little flogged. Randall Jarrell said: “When we read the criticism of any past age, we see immediately that the main thing wrong with it is an astonishing amount of what Eliot calls ‘fools’ approval’; most of the thousands of poets were bad, most of the thousands of critics were bad, and they loved each other.” I know this because William Logan quoted it in an essay republished in his book, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, reviewed in the June issue of Poetry by Joel Brouwer. Civil tongue, you ask? There’s plenty of hating on and in reviews and criticism these days, as Harriet readers well know. Brouwer is, if I read him right, not happy with the controversy. Looking at the kerfuffle that ensued upon Logan’s dismissal(s) of Hart Crane, for example, he laments that

“not a single fresh thought has come of it. This is because everyone involved has done nothing but reiterate that which they already believed to be true before it began. It is Logan’s utter self-assurance as a critic that makes this kind of stagnation inevitable. A critic must be confident. But when his confidence hardens into certainty, he begins to constrict thought—his own and ours—rather than expand it, which is his job.”

Brouwer’s remarks are well-tempered, so to speak; he is even-handed. So is Steve Burt’s view, from which I dissent, that “it’s not worth writing a negative review of a book that will sink without a trace, which most poetry books do;” another formulation is that “If a review is going to be wholly negative, why give it the journal space? Why not use it for a book that deserves recognition?“  For me, though, this is like saying that doctors should only see healthy patients, and not waste time on sick people. I blogged elsewhere that I think the well-being of poetry, if there can even be such a thing, depends on a critical comprehension of pathology, and not just good health: each state is a function of the other. As it happened, Brouwer commented on the blog thusly:

“I find the medical analogy creepy, Don; it has the potential to lead to a conception of criticism as a form of eugenics. I prefer the idea of criticism as jury duty. Everyone who publishes a book in a given year should be required to review five others published that year. And, as with jury duty, they should hate having to do it. Doing loathsome scut work for the greater good is just another way of saying civil society.

The whole negative/positive reviews conversation is so played. Orwell said everything that needed saying in ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ more than half a century ago. It’s funny how everyone needs to re-agonize over it for themselves; I suspect people are just trying to avoid doing the dishes. Because we all already know the answer(s): Some reviews are useful and some aren’t, and so shall it always be. No one with any sense would wish for all negative reviews, or all positive, or all ‘fair and balanced,’ [Fox News's slogan] or all partisan, or all highbrow or lowbrow or professional or amateur or etc. The usefulness/lessness is in the scrum. Anyone taking the time to say that reviews oughta x or or reviews oughta y is wasting time that could be spent writing one, or, perhaps even better, not.”

That’s reasonable; well, here’s Orwell’s conclusion:

“The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews–1,000 words is a bare minimum–to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it. Normally he doesn’t want to write it, and the week-in, week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in a dressing-gown whom I described at the beginning of this article. However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.”

I responded to Joel that “eugenics” is a loaded word – I’m not advocating weeding out the bad from the good in poetry or in anything else; my good is your bad, and vice versa. But one has to know the physiology nonetheless. That’s my point, and in fact I’ve argued elsewhere for the great and enduring value of very bad poetry (which I read in enormous quantities). But I think there’s much to assent to in Joel’s remarks, particularly with regard to “civil society,” which does seem to be vanishing (like sherry-drinking and dressing gowns)… assuming it ever existed, that is.

Joel replied:

“I don’t think, by the way, that Orwell means for his essay to be read entirely seriously, either. He paints a picture of the reviewer as a soulless hack, but don’t you think we’re also supposed to understand that there’s a kind of nobility in the reviewer’s Quixotic quest to find the one or three good books in the heap? If we keep in mind that Orwell himself wrote hundreds of book reviews in his time, we might read this essay not as a condemnation — or not *only* a condemnation — of the reviewer’s trade, but as a kind of grim celebration of it. Even executioners and plastic surgeons have to be allowed to take *some* kind of pride in their work, no?”

Just so.

Comment boxes don’t bring out the best in people, and our dialogue was interrupted by the usual vandalism, which I hope (against hope?) will be avoided here. But Brouwer gives us much to think on; as he concludes in his Poetry piece,

“Poetry changes. (It doesn’t evolve, by the way, like a monkey discovering a better way to peel bananas; it changes, like a monkey discovering that bananas are delicious.) You may think that fact happy or sad, but it’s a fact either way. In the face of it, the critic can elect to live in the past, or take up the task of creating the taste by which the present is to be enjoyed.”

Another completely reasonable and useful way to look at it comes from Poetry contributor George Szirtes; I’ll leave you with his remarks from the Magma blog in the UK, which has a thread called, “What Kind of Poetry Reviews Do You Want?“:

“It is relatively easy and cheap today to produce a book as object. The chief problems are distribution and notice. On most occasions I have been asked to review specific books, on some rarer occasions I have asked to do a book because I feared it would be overlooked otherwise and that it deserved serious attention. Very occasionally it may be worth doing a book that seems to the reviewer to be grotesquely overrated elsewhere.

What I want from a poetry review is intelligence and an attempt on the reviewer’s part to understand the work discussed, sympathetically if possible, but critically too. I want the review to be honest, to declare its hand if it has a hand to declare. Quotation is vital, if always inadequate, but it should illustrate some point being made. I want the review to be good, informed personal but considered writing, a literate serious conversation of which the reviewed book and the questions it raises is the subject. I want to take pleasure in the reading of it but not at the expense of honesty, generosity and intelligence.

I don’t want to be talked down to by a review. I don’t want cosy chat. I don’t want sheer territorialism and bullying. The occasional dash of fury is fine providing it is understood why there is fury. Passion can be honest even when wrong.

And in the end, a review is not the be all and end all. Byron thought Keats had been killed by a bad review. Later he found out he was wrong.”

Not a dead horse in sight, there…

Is there any reason to believe that this is true?

So asks Brian Philips in the May issue of Poetry. He examines work by a few recent poets who’ve criss-crossed the border between poetry and fiction – Laura Kasischke, Forrest Gander, Carol Muske-Dukes, and Mary Ruefle – and looks at the larger picture:

“Why do we go on thinking that poetry and fiction require different temperaments? The answer probably has something to do with recent literary history. In English, the list of writers who have attained real prominence in both forms is brief, barely extending beyond Poe, Hardy, and perhaps D.H. Lawrence in 170 years. To these we might add a number of writers who vibrantly supplemented their major work with work in a different form (Melville, Robert Creeley, possibly Randall Jarrell) as well as a few contemporaries (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje) who have managed something like parallel careers, though in most cases – Paul Auster is another example – they are better known for their fiction. The list of failures (Yeats’s novels, Joyce’s poems, Hemingway’s poems) is of course considerable. Partly as a result of this, and partly as a result of the greater commercial prospects of fiction over the last century, poetry and fiction have evolved divergent professional structures that tacitly encourage writers to specialize.

It’s also the case, however, that the period of time since the emergence of the novel as a reliably popular form – barely 200 years – is a relative trifle, a sliver, in the history of poetry. It coincides almost exactly with the rise of lyric as the predominant poetic form. (Jane Austen was at work on a draft of Sense and Sensibility in 1798, the year Lyrical Ballads was published.) Before that dual occurrence, poetry was a vital receptacle of narrative art, of storytelling – literally so in early oral cultures, where one of poetry’s functions was to serve as a kind of jar for carrying stories around in. The novel, which extended and revised fictional narrative, nevertheless began by inheriting a narrative grammar that had been developed in the epic, the romance, the ballad, and the verse drama, among other sources, in the hundreds of years when linear imaginative storytelling was seen as belonging to the poet’s powers, not departing from them.

By the early twentieth century, the embouchure of poetry had contracted, and its sense of itself had shifted, in a way that turned narrative storytelling largely over to prose. Narrative poetry is still written, of course, but culturally it’s an adjunct phenomenon; adjunct to lyric, adjunct to the novel. The mainstream conception of a poem, which certainly affects the way poems are written and read, is of a brief personal effluence, an icon of experience rather than a brocade of events.”

I’d say that among recent storytellers in the two genres, Janet Frame could successfully wear both hats (and perhaps I should be careful using that expression: after years in a New Zealand mental hospital she only avoided being forced to have a lobotomy because her first book was awarded a literary prize). She engaged in what we might now call slow poetry – she was in no hurry to publish poems, and filed hers away in an outdoor goose bath when she finished writing them; yet she did publish eleven good novels, not to mention several memoirs (filmed as An Angel at My Table) and collections of stories.

Here’s a poem recently retrieved from the goose bath:

The Sick Pawpaw

Hideole old cripple pestered
with crime-fibres of thirst and fever
winding strangling your infertile body
your stem, your sick backbone their spool
to weave your envy of monkey-apple, snowberry,
seven-storey beanflower with bees and sun
early sweeping the white carpet, drift
and pile of pollen on the black stairway;
of soldering bolt of orange and lemon fruit
melting, moulding the dark
poured like winterfall to fit your shape
alone, rocking hopeless helpless in Eden
snake-bitten Hideole old cripple
knowing malice, death, weaving the sack
to steal your fuel from orange and lemon, burn
the snowberry and the beautiful tall stairway.

And here’s a bit of her fiction, from the posthumously published novel (her twelfth), Towards Last Summer:

“In the centre of the attic, piled high, were months and years of literary weeklies and other magazines already brown at the edges, with brown stains on the covers as if Damp (here they talk of him with dread: Damp has got into the house) had come to life and leaned his wet hand upon the paper.

- Now I know where literary weeklies go, Grace thought, with the interest of someone who has solved the problem of flies in winter, pins from a packet, and other such mysteries. A bookshelf near the magazines held Anne’s Training College and University books and miscellaneous books belonging to Philip. In this house books had no boundaries; they over flowed, flooded; you had to stand on the roof waving for help, thinking regretfully of your best cherished furniture already ruined by the rising, seeping ideas . . .”

Standing and waving among the ideas: a good place for poet and fiction-writer alike? As Philips concludes:

“In children, the impulse to tell stories and the impulse to play with words often seem to coincide, seem, indeed, to be part of the same impulse. The differences between poetry and fiction, between poets and fiction writers, may now be too well understood, may be understood with an artificial certainty. It may be more useful at the moment to think about their similarities.”

Pictured: Charles Dickens on a reading tour… standing and waving!

Via Find Craig Arnold:

Our dear friends and family,

Though Craig himself has not been recovered, the amazing expert trackers of 1SRG have been able to make themselves and us certain of what has become of Craig. His trail indicates that after sustaining a leg injury, Craig fell from a very high and very dangerous cliff and there is virtually no possibility that Craig could have survived that fall. Chris will pursue what he can about getting specialists to go down into the place we know Craig is so we can bring him home, but it is very, very dangerous and we are not yet completely certain what that will require. The only relief in this news is that we do know exactly what befell Craig, and we can be fairly certain that it was very quick, and that he did not wait or wonder or suffer.

I cannot express again the profound gratitude I feel to everyone who has loved and honored Craig with their goodwill, their immense efforts and energy, and their overwhelming generosity. I believe that where he is, Craig knows.

There will be further occasion to celebrate Craig, and when I know more I will post it.

For my part, I love Craig beyond the telling of it and will always love him as immeasurably, as enduringly, as steadfastly and as unconditionally as I do now and have done these past six years. In leaving our family Craig, in a manner absolutely characteristic of his own vast generosity and capacity to inspire, brought us all closer together than we perhaps have ever been. I feel his presence, loving and understanding and funny and deeply feeling, at all times. I hope you do, too.

With love,

Rebecca Lindenberg

Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, “It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day.” I suppose poets these days aren’t supposed to put their minds to grand tasks – you know, it’s more like write a poem every day for a month. But since it’s not only National Poetry Month but National Uh-Huh month, I thought I’d post something, you know, deep.

Montaigne, whom Shklar mentions in that introduction, was famous for his skeptical remark ‘Que sais-je?” (’What do I know?’). He wasn’t a poet (though his best friend Étienne de la Boétie was), but like a poet, he was quite good at making big pronouncements. Take these, all nicely applicable to poets:

* Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
* Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
* If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
* No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
* Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.
* Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

What is it about the French that makes them able to come up with this stuff? In the April 2009 issue of Poetry – which is our annual translation issue - we’ve got a poem that seems to take up where Montaigne left off. It’s called “What I Know,” by Patrick Dubost, who has published more than twenty collections (including under the alias Armand Le Poete, a trickster alter ego) and several CDs. Trained as a musicologist and mathematician, he’s collaborated extensively with musicians, theater ensembles, and puppet theaters, and performs his sound poetry internationally. Here’s the poem in Fiona Sampson’s translation:

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

-

As number three says, “Toute pensée, pour prendre corps, doit ménager sa part de flou.” Hey, good advice for poets!