R’s Boat

I first heard Robertson read from R’s Boat, or what was then the chapbook, Rousseau’s Boat, at Haverford. Around the time of her visit the Village Voice had referred to her as the “thinking woman’s Anne Carson.” We were reading both Robertson and Carson in both my poetry and fiction workshops. In the “fiction” workshop we were reading the Seven Walks from Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. The morning we were due to discuss her I arrived at my office to find one of my students pacing in the hall. “You have to talk to me about this writing,” he said, “I had no idea writing like this could exist. I have been up all night walking around in it…” The responses are usually variations on this.

Here is some of my email exchange with Robertson.

SQ:  How did R’s Boat come about? I know there was the chapbook with Nomados, and some of the pieces–”Utopia/” for one–were constructed from text you gleaned from your own archive. Is this a process that continued?

LR: All of the poems in the book are built from my archival gleanings. I went over the entire heap of 60-odd notebooks afresh for each poem, each time from a different point of view, or with a different quest in mind, and sometimes with years having passed in the interim. But with each poem I ended up recomposing the gleanings according to very different principles. The first couple were slightly programmatically composed, then less and less so. The poems were written over about 5 or 6 years, so my priorities shifted. But my simple idea was that I wanted to make an autobiographical book that was not self-referential.

SQ: The phrasal gesture, or the signature structure that you have been perfecting over several books now seems to have taken on even greater clarity in this book–if that’s even possible. It’s a way to build a sentence that is propulsive backward and forward, and yet exists utterly independent within a chain of other like-minded phrases. It is densely, intellectually layered and imagistically condensed. And you offer, in pieces such as “A Cuff/,” which begins “It is always the wrong linguistic moment,” and “The Present/” and throughout actually, lines that can be read multiply, but certainly as notes on your process. Did you sense something different click with this text?

LR: I’ve always been completely seduced by sentences, certainly. I think I’m a sentence-lover before I’m a writer. Much of my earlier work has been testing the internal structure of sentences as wildly psycho-sexual-social units. But here I wanted to find a way to include extremely banal, flat, overwrought and bad sentences, by devising a sequencing movement that could include anything. My thought was not to judge, but to float the disparity of the units in a continuum. I think what happens is that the caesura, the space between, becomes extremely active, more active than the sentences themselves are. This has the effect of making any sentence semantically legible in several registers– the meta-textual, as you point out, may be one of them.

SQ: Your texts have been so visually different. Here there is evenness, spaciousness, a quiet command of the page that is heightened by what seems to be a mutual or simultaneous discovery. In “Utopia/” for example, we go from “mercurial botanies” to “muses of women” to:

thI had the body of a woman as far as the hips; below sprang the foreparts of

threthree dogs; my body ended in two curled fish tails.

thI see this from a train.

thI wanted to mould verbs from clancking fragments of justice.

I love how expansive this is, how it is both observer, observed, still and moving, this morphology and jouissance of visual splendour. The cataloging. The image of the boat being, as Zizek notes in Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, an almost necessary mode of being for our fluid, highly changeable times. Is it also a perfect vessel for thought?

LR: Well, I borrowed my boat from Rousseau, who describes, in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, floating aimlessly in a lake observing only the flickering of his consciousness in concert with the various patterns of afternoon–light, water, breeze, foliage. He calls this the pleasurable sensation of existing. There is no longer a foreground and a background, but a cognitive continuum. For me the boat became the figure of this lascivious and boundless perceiving. In terms of composition, this meant an entirely pliable handling of perspective. No subject position, but a distribution of subjectivity as equivalently charged at any point.

SQ: There are wonderful resonances in this text with Lyn Hejinian—particularly Happily—and Juliana Spahr’s work. What do you make of the relationship between the sentence, thinking, and the fact of such an engaged and subversive poetics of the sentence, and of the autobiographical, at this moment in time?

LR: Actually it was Lyn’s My Life that was the starting point for Face/, which next slowly became R’s Boat. Rod Smith is/was editing a special issue of Aerial on Hejinian, and was asking for contributions. Face/ was my response. Then I wanted to keep going. But I’m not so sure about “this moment in time”. For me the polyvalent time of the subversive sentence would “begin” with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and loop everywhichway to include Djuna Barnes, Ruskin, Nicole Brossard, Libanius, Vanessa Place, Montaigne and Rousseau. The autobiographical is always subversive, because the political subject, bios, is subversive, in suspension, always beginning. In terms of the sentence and thinking, I’m with William James’ proposition that there exists a feeling of “if”, a feeling of “by”, a feeling of “when”.

SQ: People assume that Langpo, a camp you are often associated with, knows or cares nothing for line breaks. Marjorie Perloff has questioned the use of them in contemporary poetry as well. I appreciate calling attention to the convention, particularly where it has seemed to be a fact taken for granted, but I see that nowhere in your poetry. Not even when, as in The Weather, the poems are in a block of justified text. How much attention do you pay to line breaks? Or specifically to the fabulous enjambment that occurs in R’s Boat? For example, from near the beginning of A Cuff/:

One’s own places realism in doubt

But now I want only the discretion of realism

I can’t say it any more clearly than this

I can’t say it any more clearly than this

Philosophers taught me a conversion narrative

LR: Sorry, but I don’t see L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as a camp. So I can’t be associated with it. Mine is a different nationality, a different generation, a different politics. I feel more conditioned by the FLQ than by the language poets. I read many of their works and sometimes drink with some of them, but for me, as for those poets themselves I think, poetry is not bound by movements, periodicities and canons. Poetry is a continuity fueled by political passion. The Songs of the King James Bible, the songs of Cheika Rimitti, Donne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Denise Riley, Moure, show us the breach as being the active but submerged tradition of a subversion. The caesura, its turn, as Agamben reminds us, is what distinguishes poetry from prose, not the customs of distribution of words on the page. In the time of the caesura a thinking gathers, dissolves, moves. The immaterial work of the caesura is to subvert the fixing of language by protocols and institutions, to renew a historicity within the subject.

SQ: Do you see a difference between critical writing and poetry? Is this necessarily gendered?

LR: I have often tried to blur the distinction, but maybe I have done this out of an insistence on the primacy of pleasure. Right now there is a particular body of critique that I am working on, a political reading of prosody, in the work of Meschonnic primarily, but also in Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, and early linguistics, that I simply want to communicate quite clearly, to represent to others hopefully for their excitement. But in the past I have had a certain comfort in approaching critical writing extremely variously. This comfort may come from a lack of stakes in dominant discourse formation, which certainly could be interpreted in terms of gender. It could also come from my long work in Vancouver, where cross-genre and cross-media work has established its own counter-tradition. But I think that none of the possible identity positions in themselves, whether regional, sexual, racial or class based, no matter how non-normative they could seem in terms of centrist positions and their programmatic exclusion from those centres, is any guarantee of a particular subversion of genre. I think that where poetry and criticism may meet is at critique–the active critique of the duality of the sign and its various governances and institutions. Either poetry or criticism may fall short of such a critique.

SQ: What are you reading?

LR: Hannah Arendt, Barbara Duden, Angela Carr, Ivan Illich, Henri Meschonnic, Etel Adnan, Emile Benveniste, Stacy Doris, Goethe.

SQ: What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

LR: Yoga.

SQ: Can we end with a poem from R’s Boat?

________

from Palinode/

/
Though my object is history, not neutrality
I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme

That which can no longer be assumed in consciousness becomes insolvent
Because it doesn’t finish I can be present

So I decide to speak of myself, having witnessed sound go out
Fear is not harmful, but illuminates the mouth

I am not qualified to comment on the origins of the shapes
The archive pivots on a complicity neither denial nor analysis can efface

It is not true, it shines from your face
Against the hot sun that hits us, nothing’s peace

And pairs that cannot absorb one another in meaning effects
Go backward and forward and there is no place

This is the border—nothing further must happen
The spurious clacking of grass is a dry spell in thought, but not abstract

Just as in dreams there is no limit to further over-determination
I do not wish to enter into that discussion

Memory’s not praise or doubt
It is not a substitution, since there is no prior point

There is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not create
I do not in any way wish to escape.

a few years ago, achiote press (the press i co-founded) published a chapbook that included new poetry by Padcha Tuntha-obas and an essay by Alysha Wood titled “Translation as strategy within the work of Padcha Tuntha-obas and other poly-lingual texts.”

Since then, “Alysha Wood” has transformed into Jai Arun Ravine, a “trans-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed race who has previously published and presented work under the names Alysha Wood and Woo Wood. Jai received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Hollins University. Jai is a proud Kundiman Fellow.” Jai is working on a new project that I am very excited about…

The Spiderboi Files. Here’s Jai’s description of the project:

The Spiderboi Files began in August 2007 after I moved to San Francisco. Having completed an intensive, long serial work that took up the greater part of that year, I was eager to begin writing within the parameters of a radically different practice.

I started by cutting up kari edwards’ a day in the life of p. with old journal entries and mashing them with that particular day’s experience of being a gender-variant queer stuck in a random mall job in the middle of suburban California. I shoplifted structures from that environment and stole overheard text. I was inspired by the idea of “files” or case studies as segments of a larger whole (The X-Files and Max Wolf Valerio’s The Testosterone Files), as well as by the idea of documenting my ongoing confrontations with gender assumption. I also wanted to expose and confuse my own trans-identification with consumer culture’s promise of providing the power to choose and create identity.

I decided to write and complete one poem per day in a rather rough and imperfect manner. After several months I had collected about 50 some pages of Spiderboi’s journey, a character that draws from the power of the Spider and the Web as well as the popular Spiderman, a young man bitten by a Spider (a symbol of creative, feminine energy) and thus transformed. The super-hero archetype became a way to explore gender transition and gender transformation in relation to the desire to be fully embodied.

In late 2007 and early 2008 I began the process of inking the poems out into panels. I was further intrigued by the idea of a graphic poem-novel and the “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” novels I remember reading as a kid. I wanted to explore the idea of “choice” in relation to gender (versus sexuality) by placing that choice in the hands of the reader in the exact places in which those choices were difficult for me.

The result is a living document of my first year living in San Francisco and identifying as trans. Through poetry, spoken word, graphic novel, web comic, and hand-sewn chapbook, the web of Spiderboi is the force-field a gender-variant person must build to envelop themselves in the strength that allows for change, individuation and transformation.

there are a number of things i love about this project: it’s artful handbound packaging, the act of unfolding the panel/poems, the engagement between the visual and the textual, the exploration of race, gender, and sexuality. volume 1 includes 5 panel poems, and can be ordered here for $7.

But I do feel a sense of responsibility to discuss the realities of the writing world as a career choice. Though admittedly, when I decided, way back when, to apply to do a BFA in Creative Writing the chair of the department advised me strongly against it. I can’t recall what he said exactly, but it made my blood boil, and I said something like, “I’m going to write with or without your program.” Which is to say, I make my own decisions thank you very much…

It’s a cliché by now to quote Rilke on the matter, and I wonder if it’s still relevant. On the one hand, yes, write only if you must. If you can’t do anything else. But that’s not quite it, is it? I believe everyone can and should write in some way. The problem is the ever-shrinking space between writing and publication. The one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other does it? Should it?

To write, we seem to believe, is to publish. Okay, fair enough, particularly in our age when to publish is to click, but then to write, is to publish, is to have a career. Was it always the case? What happens to the way one approaches apprenticeship if one is not expected to have an apprenticeship? Worse, what happens to the writing when what is on one’s mind is a certain trajectory?

Maybe I’m just reacting to the overwhelming sense of frustration I get from so many writers who don’t feel they have achieved enough, or need some external marker of having arrived some place else. What is it that creates such a sense of unease? Of not having achieved enough? Or the right markers? Maybe it’s more a matter of simply shutting out the noise, but many of us, particularly those of us who do teach, who are in contact with many poets all the time, must engage with these questions, and these desires.

The reality of the writing world is few writers—even those who write more popular forms such as fiction—actually make a living from writing let alone find readers. So the question is how can one find a way to sustain oneself as a writer. It’s a big question, and it doesn’t only include financial concerns. The reality of time to write is a big reality, and the matter of how one uses one’s time, and one’s brain, impacts the quality of thought and the level of resources one brings to poetry. I’m not really arguing for much more than a little space around some of these formulas and assumptions. There is no perfect poet’s life. Why all this anxiety in search of it? And what does it look like? A major prize, a plush teaching job, perfectly intelligent students, half the year off?

What about the ability to live as a poet? That is one thing that makes me shake my head every time I say it. Who knew? One can be a poet. I have never come down from the high of that simple fact. The technician who came to give an estimate yesterday was fascinated too. I was the first poet he had ever met. What is it like?  What does the life of a poet consist of?

It’s easy to forget what a privilege being a poet is. We get to organize our lives around poetry? For real? To partake in readings, conferences, have publications, reading groups. We share a network of colleagues having read similarly. Now if we could just loosen up our thinking about the ways in which we can build our lives around that, about what constitutes “success.”

What configurations best suit the poet? The academy is one track, but surely there are other workable trajectories that might excite young poets? In an ongoing thread on Facebook I have heard from poet-librarians, poet-editors, a poet who is also the head of an NGO, poet college teachers, poet high school teachers, poet-arts administrators, poet-techies. Here are a few in more detail.

RON SILLIMAN says for the past decade he has “been a market analyst specializing on the hardware support marketplace in North America. The decade before that I worked in various organizations that sold & delivered PC support services in a variety of marketing positions. The decade before that I was the executive editor of The Socialist Review, a college administrator & briefly taught literature at the college level. The decade before that I worked in the prison and inner-city tenant movements as an organizer. The decade before that I was a kid.”

It was practical concerns that made him “shift from non-profit to for-profit labor.”  He “needed to pay for the mortgage on my house & my wife & I were trying to have children. The computer industry was (a)  local & (b) growing rapidly, absorbing the over-educated under-employed very rapidly.” Does his work feed his writing?  “I enjoy the analytical side of my work, the writing, the cross-sections of the world I get insight into. My work has brought me into contact with everyone from Charles Manson to the solicitor general of the United States. From my perspective, one real advantage of working in the technology sector has been that it changes quite rapidly. It’s hard to get stale in an industry that is completely different every four years.”

A role model? “Walter Benjamin without the whining, perhaps. I feel like I’m just getting started.”

Silliman studied creative writing at SF State in the late 1960s “because it put me in touch with other writers–it was never about a job.” He learned his craft “by reading voluminously & writing every day” and he means voluminously:

My first year at SF State, I was unable to get all the courses I wanted, so I used the extra time to read the entire library collection of American poetry, A through Z. Robin Blaser had just left his position as the poetry buyer for the library, so it was a terrific collection at that point. When I finished the collection, I started in on the hard-to-get magazines in the rare book room. SF State did not have the Black Mountain Review, but it did have the early series’ of Origin.

Is an MFA useful? “About as useful as polio, and about as crippling. Other than access to other writers at roughly the same level of development, it is mostly something that has to be overcome if one is to write seriously. I’m always impressed at how many do seem able to set that aside & become real writers.

The idea that the MFA will lead to a job is mostly a fraud.”

On the matter of being satisfied? “I don’t think I’m ever satisfied, and I think that’s inherently harder the older one gets. I do have a daily writing practice, but it evolves over time and turns out to be very different from one year to the next. I don’t have book currently scheduled, but am working on several projects. Right now the conclusion of the tenth & final volume of The Grand Piano, the collective autobiography I’ve been working on for over a decade with several other poets, is my darling.”

What is satisfying though, is community. On that score he is “absolutely” satisfied. “I have felt that way since I was 18 years old in 1964.”  What makes for a vital life as a poet?  “Pay attention. All the time.” Is all of this simply biding time until that teaching job comes along? “It would be interesting to teach again just for the students–they have so much to teach us.”

DON SHARE edits, but notes that in “ the past, that is to say, as an adult, I have worked as a van driver, busboy, library worker, curator, and Internet trainer for people from third-world countries.” He has a PhD (not in English), but no MFA:

You’re gonna thank I’m nuts, but until I saw it at first hand, I simply had no idea that people got MFAs in order to teach.  I learned my craft (if that’s the right word for it) from books, two mentors, shooting the shit with other people, and sorry-assed soul searching.  I don’t think that poets in academia are more ‘professional’ than those who aren’t, but that’s only because I don’t look at poetry as a profession.

Share does not have a “daily writing practice,” per se: “I write whilst taking public transportation to work and back; and I have a manuscript that I doubt anybody will undertake to publish.  It’s called In a Station of the Metro because Ray DiPalma convinced me not to use the more accurate title, In a Station of the Metra – a rail service I spend many hours of my life using when I’m not on Chicago’s famous El.”

Does he feel part of a community? “I do.  I feel that I ‘know’ lots of people I’ve never even met in person – you, for instance, and that’s a kind of community.”

What makes for a vital life as a poet? “I’m not sure that vitality has a lot to do with it.  I’m pretty enervated myself.”

Is he waiting for that perfect teaching job to come along? “What’s a perfect teaching job?!?  Look, teaching is an honorable thing to do; and you can’t blame anyone who’d dream of having the perks of a tenured position.  Maybe this is too Platonic a view (literally), but if people are good at teaching, then they should teach.  If they are not, on the other hand, then they shouldn’t. Some of the smartest people I’ve known, and some of the best poets, too, have no business teaching; and some of the best teacherly types I know can’t get a teaching job for anything in the world.

The key thing is: what are the credentials for being a poet?  There aren’t any.”

VANESSA PLACE represents indigent sex offenders and sexually violent predators on appeal. Does she find it feeds her? “Yes, incessantly.” Why did she become a lawyer? “I was good at it.” Were there poet role models?  “I don’t think there really are role models for me, save Pound’s radio broadcasts.” She did an MFA program to “meet other writers” and notes “a level of professionalism with poets as ballplayers.” She is “reasonably satisfied; writes daily, if not more” and publishes regularly.

In response to the question of what makes for a vital life as a poet in your mind, Place said, “yes.”

And on the matter of whether or not she is waiting for the perfect job?

JACOB McARTHUR MOONEY is a client-support manager for an online adult entertainment firm. “If that sounds sexy and/or devious, it’s really neither. Basically, I do math all day. In the service of things that may be sexy or devious.” His employment definitely feeds his poetic practice, though not in any direct way. “I like working with people who don’t know I’m a poet, and wouldn’t care if I told them. That knowledge shrinks you, in a really positive way. It gives context.”

Mooney did an MFA at the University of Guelph so he would “have an excuse to centre my life around poetry for a couple years, and as a means of working with people who cared about it as much as I did.” He says he didn’t consider teaching at the time, though “most people who did that program with me are now teachers.”

He would “argue that non-MFAers, if they are serious enough about their work, possess a greater professionalism than us coddled factory-produced poets. They’ve done the DIY thing, through self-made chapbooks and shows and whatever. Happily, my program had something of that spirit, perhaps because I came in with the first cohort and it was sort of developing around me as I progressed.”

On the other hand, he “fell into” his “first book deal by accident. A teacher told an editor who told a publisher, who called me to ask if I had a manuscript. Lucky boy.” His second collection is coming out in Spring 2011, from McClelland & Stewart. “It’ll be called Folk. It’s a book about communities and airplanes.”

Is he content? “I live in Parkdale, Toronto, which is one of the great writer-infested neighbourhoods in North America. I have a blog that keeps me in dialogue with poets from other cities. Basically, I want for nothing, I’m happy.”

Is he waiting for that teaching job?

Well….maybe. Though it’d have to be perfect. I’d take 60k a year to teach eager, well-read youngsters about writing poetry, sure. But I wouldn’t take 30k a year to teach their uninspired siblings about the basics of grammar, or how to write a paragraph. And there’s a lot more positions available for the latter than the former. I’d much rather stay where I am, for now, thanks.

In the interest of time I’m posting this now, but there are several more interviews to be added on here…and of course I’m hoping to hear from you. So, what about poet architects? Organic gardeners? Wind farm developers? How do you maintain yourself as a poet?

Where did the idea that to write poetry is to teach poetry arise?

Is a poet critic a hermetically sealed role or is there room for change?

What was TS Eliot’s relationship to the Academy? Or rather, the academies, because apparently his relationship to Cambridge was much different than his relationship to Oxford. Why did he not take that, by now mythical and much coveted teaching job? What difference would it have made in his career, to his poetry? To the poets of the early 20th century, and so on?

Is there a critic outside of poetry? Why do so many “innovative” women writers seem to have criticism embedded in their poetry? (Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Anne Carson…). Where are the critical women writers? Why are there so many non-poet women critical writers and so few women who are poets and critical writers? Or, is that a myth?

What do Wittgenstein, William Carlos Williams, Cotton Mather, Charlotte Mew, Fredric Jameson, French Theory, Fred Moten, Thylias Moss, and James Sherry have to do with each other, let alone the question of poet critic?

Greetings from Santa Cruz where I am attending a conference titled Re-imagining the Poet-Critic. Yesterday I listened to a dozen or more papers, several respondents, a lunch hour reading, responded to two papers myself, and then after a fabulous dinner listened to three poets, Kasey Mohammad, Craig Dworkin and Vanessa Place, read in the Felix Culpa gallery.

Kasey read some of his Shakespeare anagrams. He is making his way through the sonnets, using the jumbled letters of each to construct new poems. The remaining letters are used to make the titles which, as he notes, are usually the silliest part. Humour is the main note in Mohammed’s workings and later, over drinks, we found ourselves wondering what would happen if he explored different registers–he is a flarf poet so the dominant response is flarf. Here, by the way, is Virginia Woolf’s reading of flarf.

Dworkin read a write through of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty that was brilliant (you can find a review of that here). First time hearing him read, knowing his critical and editorial work more than his poetry. He also read a very funny and quite imaginative “translation” of Beowulf  that I would love to read.

Vanessa Place went last because as her introducer said, she tends to disturb. She read a reworking of Valerie Solinas SCUM Manifesto, her long piece comprised of the names for that place, you know, down there…and read a piece from her ongoing Statement of Facts project that did indeed disturb.

Today another dozen or so papers and respondents and tonight yours truly reads with David Lau and Juliana Spahr. I will try to add to this post tomorrow at some point when I can catch wireless in between San Francisco and Montreal. Until then, I’ll take notes…

That said, I cannot help but see the situation from a different perspective than Behrle (or at least the Behrle of “24/7 Relentless Careerism”; Behrle is, after all, a poet, as well a tireless community organizer and activist for poetry within the community around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project). Often, I feel frustrated by all that one cannot do as a poet, what one seemingly gives up through one’s devotion to poetry. And how far short of reality—of exigent political and social conditions—poetry would often seem to fall. Likewise, it is frustrating to feel as though one is at the mercy of an apparatus of contests, and editors, and prestigious academic appointments in order to be appreciated for one’s work. What Behrle expresses eloquently is a cynical perspective I have no doubt is shared by many. That one can only follow one road now, and that that road is paved by mediocrity and meticulous calculation.

When I went to Buffalo for graduate school in 2000, I was fresh out of college (I deferred for a year between college and graduate school). When I applied to Buffalo, I didn’t apply anywhere else. It was Buffalo or bust. I wanted to go because I admired Charles Bernstein’s and Susan Howe’s work and had grown up on the poetry of Robert Creeley and the poets of Creeley’s generation. Having met Howe when I was a college freshman, I had no doubt that Buffalo was a place where I could learn to be a poet. That’s all I wanted. And, if nothing else, that’s what I got from Buffalo. A practice as a poet. Common ground among other poets whose work I admired.

I am still grateful for this. Looking back on my time at Buffalo (Bernstein had three years left, Creeley would pass away in four, Howe was preparing to retire), it seems like a miracle I got there when I did. To work with Howe and Bernstein, and also with Myung Mi Kim and Tony Conrad at Buffalo has instilled me with an enormous sense of good fortune.

My decision to apply to Buffalo was a fairly hapless one. It was motivated by eagerness, and interest, and desire. When I attended Creeley’s memorial service at Buffalo I remember Robert J. Bertholf (at the time the curator of Poetry / Rare books at the university) thanking Creeley for inviting him to “come along for the ride.” When I get to host a reading, or correspond with a contemporary, or I am invited to give a reading I have a similar feeling of gratitude to simply be part of the conversation. If I become critical of something, I think it is in relation to and out of respect for this sense of conversation. Many of the poets who I feel closest to feel burdened by a sense of privilege and would try to conduct themselves counter to this privilege. Among these poets there is an ethical commitment to poetry—the writing of poetry as not just counter to “official verse culture” (which it is obviously always in relation to), but as the principal expression of the poet’s desire to be and act in specific ways within the world.

At its best, I think that poetry can make things seem possible again. Possible worlds, possible sensations, possible ideas, possible ways of being, possible relationships. I also think that poetry has its limits, and that a major limit of poetry (or most modes of aesthetic production for that matter) lies in its inability to effect immediately practical changes in reality. As Tillie Olsen reveals through her book Silences, there are “natural” hiatuses which occur throughout a writer’s life, and then, more often than not, there are hiatuses which occur as a result of economic and/or socio-political violence. For women and minorities such imposed hiatuses have obviously occurred more frequently than for any one else. There is also a hiatus that I believe occurs out of a sense that poetry does not suffice in the face of strife or emergency occurring in the world. George Oppen’s twenty-five year hiatus during which time the poet fought in World War II and organized for the Communist Party is a famous example of such a hiatus. Similarly, there is Robert Duncan’s hiatus during the 1970s during which time the poet did not write or publish. Laura Riding Jackson gave up poetry because she did not feel that it could represent “the real,” and spent the rest of her life writing text books which, in prose, extend many of the preoccupations of her renounced poetic practice. There is also the legendary case of Rimbaud, who became an arms trader; an act which Mallarmé likened to amputating one’s arm while still conscious.

Mainly, I want to suggest that there are counter-actions to the kind of careerism Behrle skillfully describes in his essay. And one is to imagine the poet acting beyond the boundaries of poetry both as a literary genre/medium and as it is embedded within a set of institutional practices and cultural locations. What happens when a poet works without words, in mediums not their ‘own’ (as so many poets have done)? What happens when a practicing poet produces something outside a culture or context of poets/poetry (as so many poets also have done)?

Thinking about poetry as a labor and a field of production is crucial here. Because I believe that part of the difficulty with contemporary poetry is that poetry, for many, has seemingly ossified as a field of production and now seeks its revivification in other cultural activities. Off-page poetries—performance and somatic poetry, conceptualist poetries, ecopoetries, and other poetries which redistribute themselves across multiple fields of production—are therefore of the hour. While many poets obviously still do write poetry for the page (and I am someone who personally believes in the power and potential of page poetry, not to mention poetries traditionally identified as ‘lyrical’ ones) many others are writing across disciplines, genres, and modes/fields of production. So while many of us are still wrapping our heads around late-modernist appropriation practices, we also have yet to adequately address the more complex problem of how off-page poetries redistribute poetic effort within a more expansive and extended field of cultural production.

Following Paolo Virno’s book, A Grammar of the Multitude, I would also like to take poetry, at bottom, as a labor. While this labor may not be easily quantifiable, there is nevertheless a finite energy that one can put towards the generation, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry (what, traditionally, has been considered the ‘work’ of poets to a large extent). What, I often wonder, if this effort was to be radically redistributed? If the poet is also defined by their having a practice of using language in ways considered to be poetic, what would it mean for those practices to be displaced and put to uses other than they were intended? What, in other words, if one was to voluntarily and tactically use the labor power they would normally afford to the writing, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry towards another kind of labor? What if such a hiatus were organized? What would this experiment result in?….

so some say that poetry is dead because it stays within the academic classroom, overlooking how important the classroom is to creating lifelong poetry readers / writers, as well as how important course adoption is to keeping books alive and relevant and in print.

when i design a syllabus, i try to choose books that i think will engage and challenge my students. while at the native american literature symposium this past weekend, i began to think about this process more because i kept hearing an interesting word at many of the panels. this word was….

“teachable.” so my question to all the educators out there: what makes a book “teachable”? does this idea of “teachability” change whether you are teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, or graduate students? how do you choose texts for your courses?

my first book was published in 2008, and since then it has been taught in about 20 courses that i know of in universities throughout the pacific and the u.s. i’ve had the pleasure of visiting some of these classes in person, blogging with them, skyping, and engaging with students via email & facebook. (the pic above is a Native American Studies course at UC Berkeley that read my first book last fall; as you can see, only the two over-acheivers in the front row managed to stay awake during my class visit).

what’s been surprising to me is how many different contexts there are for poetry. so my first book has been taught in courses called “Literatures of Oceania,” “Asian American Studies,” “Native American Studies,” “Poetry and Politics,” “Writing in Place, Writing as Place,” and “Ecology and Poetry,” to name a few.

two really interesting courses teaching my first book this year are called “Decolonizing Narratives: Indigenous Literature and Culture in the Age of Sovereignty” (Kansas University) and “Discontiguous States of America” (St. Thomas University). Here are the descriptions of the courses:

1) Course Description: This course takes as its premise the decolonizing potential of indigenous literary and cultural productions. It seeks to both answer and explore such questions as: How can literary and cultural texts such as novels, poetry, music, and film from world indigenous communities function as decolonizing tools? Can decolonizing methodologies be applied to such texts?  How do such texts contribute to and strengthen indigenous political, intellectual, cultural, visual and rhetorical sovereignty?  These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer throughout the semester as we read indigenous literature and view films and documentaries from North America, the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand.

2) Course Description: This course examines ideas and examples of American literature in light of territories outside the forty-eight contiguous states. We will begin by considering more typical accounts of American literary history that rely on the relationships between geography, region, and cultural contact in creating a sense of American identity and literary production. Moving from historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of American character through westward continental expansion, we will consider writing by authors such as Willa Cather and Zitkala Sa that sketch out visions of an expanding America from the perspective of settlers as well as displaced indigenous peoples. We will then turn to explorations of American imperialism that leads to the incorporation of Alaska, Hawai’i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico through the literary imaginations of writers like Jack London, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Nuyorican Cafe poets.

In addition to reading literature about and from these spaces that lie outside the contiguous United States, we will study legal and cultural claims to the peculiar status of these lands and peoples to the American landscape and body politic. While these places are often effaced and the inhabitants forgotten in the national imaginary, their incorporation into the country has led the US Supreme Court to define some of these areas in a series of early twentieth-century rulings called the “Insular Cases” that turn on the question of whether citizenship and the protections of the Constitution necessarily follow the reach of American military might. We will read these legal discussions along with literary renderings of the complicated status of such people and places. This course fulfills the Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors.

this current semester is a bit strange as seven courses that i know of are teaching my first book and three courses are teaching my recently released second book. for my second book, those three courses are “Native American Studies: Reading and Composition” (UC Berkeley) “Pacific islander Studies” (San Francisco City College), and “Poets in Conversation” (UC Berkeley Extension)

i had the pleasure of visiting the creative writing course last week at UC berkeley extension (special thanks to laura walker). here’s the class reading my book:

the weekend before this past weekend, i was at UC Santa Cruz, where a course called “Visual Cultures of Africa, Oceania, and Native America” read my first book. i gave a lecture to the class titled “A Brilliant Lecture on the Themes of Mapping and Navigation in the Wondrous Poetry of Craig Santos Perez, whom is I.” Here is a picture of the class (note it was a friday 8 am course so i wasnt mad that all the students were sleeping:

that night, i also conducted a writing workshop with some of the graduate and an undergrad–but i forgot to take a picture. the next day (yes they worked my butt off at santa cruz)–i gave a poetry reading at a conference being held that weekend called “Spatial Imaginaries and Critical Geographies” sponsored by the Asia Pacific Americas Research Cluster. here is a pic of the rowdy academic crowd:

i must admit too that i was a bit starstruck because rob wilson, karen tei yamashita, and hsuan hsu were in the audience! eek. here was the flier for the events (with special thanks to stacy kamehiro & dina el dessouky):

*

p.s. if you live in NYC, come to this exciting event:

2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (Between 124th and 125th Streets)

Recently Geist Magazine, one of the great Canadian magazines, announced a contest for the best “Jackpine Sonnet.” The Jackpine sonnet was named by Canadian poet Milton Acorn. It’s a fairly regular sonnet that aims for the traditional 14 lines, each line con­tain­ing 7 to 13 syl­la­bles, but, in Acorn’s words, “If your son­net cuts itself off—click!—at, say line 12, 18 or 20, leave it at that.” As for rhyme, “Acorn advised writ­ers to write inter­nal rhymes (rhymes within a line) or exter­nal rhymes (rhymes at the end of con­sec­u­tive lines) ‘to keep the flow.’ In the absence of rhyme, use asso­nance (the rep­e­ti­tion of vowel sounds), ‘to keep the rhyme alive in order to come up with a true rhyme fur­ther on’…”

I love the sonnet, and the many ways in which poets have handled the form and continue to handle the form. It’s a challenge to make it lively, to not feel you’ve handed yourself over and let its history have its way with you: are you writing the sonnet, or is the sonnet writing you? So many feel like ghosts of other sonnets, barely breathing, barely able to stand on their own two feet. Others snap, insist. Demand attention.

The sonnet can be overwhelming and liberating. A necessary exercise for a poet I think, at least at one point in one’s development. The form is pliable. Back before I realized that the sonnet could be so pliable I recall encountering Vikram Seth’s novel The Golden Gate, which, while impressive, I didn’t find particularly compelling (It’s hard to pull off so many…Shakespeare only did 154). Then I discovered Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons and was quite taken by the energy she captures in those sequences. Hacker’s book isn’t only sonnets, but there are many, and Hacker certainly can claim to be both a master of the form, and a great reader of the form. Here she is on Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Rites for Cousin Vit” which reminds me a little of the luge track in Vancouver the way she handles the corners and slides into the gold stretch.

When we discuss the form in an introductory setting we do so in several ways: from traditional to radically experimental. Recently a poem from Ken Babstock (more on him to come) and a crown of sonnets by Anne Simpson—both found in Open Field. Babstock’s handling of the form is full of swagger and precision. Here’s the beginning of “First Lesson in Unpopular Mechanics”:

As a boy, it was a scale-model Messerschmitt
pitched at the wall in a boy-scale rage–
Now? These grown-up middletones, wafflings, shit
flung deliberately wide of the fan. I remember the age
I began to ease off–thirteen, fourteen–
when busting one’s stick meant a five-minute major,
and there, in the sin bin, thinking, what did I mean
by two-handing the crossbar?

Simpson’s crown takes on ekphrastic poetry and mixes in a post 9/11 narrative with great condensed and moving language.

“Are you still there? Are you?” A voice falls. Stone,
Unbearable stone. It grinds. It tastes of grief.
Don’t watch. Go blind. Oh Lord, those moans
will haunt us. This one. That one there. Brief
lives…

There are many poets in North America working with the sonnet, and many in Canada. George Murray published a collection of sonnets not long ago. Here’s a couplet from “Collusion”

The crushed grass evidence of collusion:
the animals fuck themselves to bleeding.

And from The Corner:”

The child’s conception like a struck match,
an axe ringing off knots in trunk wood,
cloudy brains forming in the sky. The twin
of today is yesterday, or will

be tomorrow, yet each continues/follows,
different from the last/next. Like obstinate
math problems we line up, waiting, in effect,
for a dark age to pass; to be made public, fixed.

In Murray’s hands the sonnet becomes a comfortable vessel in which he offers playful, and often very insightful, knotty, stubborn, surprising, ruminations: “I’ve met my match in my son, the mirror/image of his face constantly separating/from mine…”

There are more unconventional turns—such as Mr. Acorn with his cut it at 12 if it wants. West coast poet Alfred Noyes, also known as Stephen Collis and author, most recently of The Commons, has also published poems called Compression Sonnets. Wee sonnets that consist of fourteen words:

What shall a
Book undo measure
And consign the
First act of
Alienation together

Or

Dear anything with
Ears we are
Imbedded displeasures who
War as reporters
Shell images

*

A poem appearing
After Auschwitz dear
Unflappable ghost we
Must address a
Torn fragment

Noyes is interested in condensation. In his introduction he asks, “what might come of only fourteen words? What of the ‘sonnet’ remains? A turn after the eighth word? At the  thirteenth (a concluding ‘couplet’ of words)?”What remains is a good question, and one that poetics of erasure takes up (The Capilano Review did a brilliant job with this).

One can’t think of the sonnet without considering Shakespeare, and all of the textual interventions and engagements his sonnets have evoked. Jen Bervin’s exquisite book Nets, for example. If you haven’t seen Nets, you must. For a little movie about Bervin’s book check out this link from Webdelsol and you can find an essay on Bervin here. What Bervin does can be compared to heightening or rubbing away. It’s a technique that I used in Teeth Marks—but with my own work. Chiseling away the dull bits from a conventional narrative poem to allow for a fragmented version of same poem to emerge. In Nets Bervin takes several dozen of Shakespeare’s sonnets and rubs away at them revealing her own poems. The result is exquisite. Here is one of my favourites:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

It’s one of the best uses of erasure/intervention I have found, and partly because it actually builds to something, becomes more than the constraint though arguably no longer a sonnet?

There are many, many interventions. Chris Piuma’s Constellated Sonnets, Raymond Queneau’s “100,000,000,000 Poems,” Mr. Bok reminds us “a book of 10 sonnets, whose cognate lines can be permuted to create more sonnets than aspeedreading immortal can read in 3.5 million years…” Paul Hoover, in Sonnet 56, Les Figues 2009, takes up one of the homely sonnets–and rewrites/revisions in all the hip ways, from N+7 to digression, villanelle to ghazal, haibun to haiku, flarf to homophonic–translation that is.

In a similar turn, Gregory Betts, the author of the essay Plunderverse, recently published The Others Raisd in me, a little book that takes sonnet 154 and creates 154 poems by erasing, sort of as Jen Bervin did with Nets except he doesn’t leave the original poem in the background. Rather he takes words over and over again from the same sonnet, arranging them to create the different poems.

Along the same vein there are the anagrams from  K. Silem Mohammed. Elizabeth Bachinksy takes a close look at Mohammed’s sonnet 44, which begins:

Unwholesome leather flagpoles gross me out;
I never may endure their bulging mass.
Abjection hatches random nests of doubt
When I am reading Newsweek in the grass.

Bachinsky compares the Mohammed’s results with her own reworking of Milton’s “On His Blindness,” which turns into “She is Blond Sin” which I offer the first four lines as well, just for a teaser:

Dim, nephritic, yet single (whoosh!)
She’s a dandy kid. Why film her drear wilt and
Tease the wanton hidden clit? Oh had I that
Molten loadstone rebel—gum my thighs. She is down…

Bachinksy is one of the few poets who roam from conceptual and procedural into more formal realms, which has lead reviewers to ask will the real Bachinsky please stand up? I think she did stand up, in several fields, and with equal prowess.

There are also visual sonnets. Christian Bok blogged here on the Poetry Foundation about Darren Wershler’s “Sonnet for Bonnie” pictured above, a few years back.

Sonnet for Bonnie” is a provocative brand of occasional verse—a love-poem that comments upon the vaunted history of the love-poem itself. Wershler-Henry has written a kind of encoded message to a girlfriend named Bonnie, but he has revealed his feelings without resorting to the tropes of standard lyricism because, for him, the act of writing a sonnet in our contemporary, technological milieu must seem all too sentimentally anachronistic. His poem often causes my students much bewilderment when they first encounter it, and I go on to tell them that I always enjoy teaching this poem because, in my opinion, it represents one of the great limit-cases of sonnetry, since the poem is almost a miracle of concision, distilling all the traits of Petrarchan expression into a hieroglyph of four symbols.

“Sonnet (for Bonnie),” Bok points out, is a Petrarchan sonnet using only four characters (probably the shortest possible sonnet so far created). Of his sonnet Wershler says, “If I remember correctly, my thinking was that the basic definition for a love poem of any sort was a question to which the answer was inevitably “you.” The sonnet diagrams that relationship (octave and sestet) in the most efficient way I could imagine at the time. In that respect, it’s more conceptual than visual — almost an algorithm that you could use to generate other work.”

Indeed. The form is generative on many levels: the constraint itself, the conventions, the history, the body of work…it’s probably our most durable and flexible form. The sonnet is a great tool, as Collis says, “so portable, and yet so conservative/constrained in origins.”

So yes, the Jackpine Sonnet. “The fiddle’s incomplete without the dance,” Acorn writes, “Let’s hook fingers to complete.” Without some kind of constraint, verse Acorn suggests lacks luster, and in general, I would agree. There is little sign of a struggle, perhaps. Form or constraint puts pressure on the idea behind the poem, on the original gesture. The sonnet form, Acorn argues, is “realisant.” It’s an organic, not fixed form. “It grows to any shape that suits the light, suits the winds, suits itself.” The Jackpine is a tree that grows in all sorts of conditions. It is resilient and as Acorn appreciates, each tree grows and looks very differently.

Of course each is a member of the same order of tree too, which might be problematic. In 2010 we might see a hybrid Jackpine, part cedar or with strands of tomato for fun. I am being facetious, but not only. I want to think Acorn’s enthusiasm for the form would include all of the above and interpretations we have not yet imagined.

But perhaps that is not so? I’ll end with a provocative little poem from Acorn, poet of the people, but also, it turns out, a poet quite savvy about the poetry biz.

The Craft of Poetry’s the Art of War

Attack! Don’t think yehr poetry aint war.
Them warbling noises be no kind of birds.
They zing—they fly—they smack. They’re bullets
And any minute one of them or something
Even rougher on your balls might score.
Put on your hardhat of proletarian scorn;
And when you throw roses—never mind how sweet;
For sweet life’s sake don’t omit the thorns.

Attack! Those clutching fingers of dawn
Will bundle themselves, soon enough into fists;
Punch you into gargage, put a lid on the can.
You’ll get dropped from this or that love-list
By reason of hate—by reason of fear…or another
But if you think this aint war you’re dead brother.

just returned from a weekend in albuquerque where i attended the Native American Literature Symposium (NALS), which is “organized by an independent group of indigenous scholars committed to making a place where Native voices can be heard.” the symposium was held at the Isleta Casino & Resort (apparently, this symposium has been held at various native owned venues throughout the years).

this year’s theme was “Many Voices, One Center,” and featured…

some amazing keynote performances by Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nalani McDougall, a performance by the Spoken Word Team of Santa Fe Indian School, a talk by Comanche playwright Terry Gomez, and an evening with Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyres (of famed Smoke Signals). in addition, there was a wide array of engaging panels on native fiction, poetry, song, film, performance, philosophy, activism, feminism, and more (read the entire schedule here).

this was my first time at NALS, and i loved how intimate it felt. it was small enough so that there were only 3 panels per session (so each panel had a good number of people), and it seemed that many of the scholars & writers in attendance were “regulars” (or more like family members–perhaps apt since the organizers were referred to as “clan mothers” and “clan fathers”). it was also nice for me personally that there were a handful of Native Hawaiians in attendance.

my favorite panel was “Blood Run, Repatriation, and Native American Literary Activism,” which featured three panelists: Cari Carpenter (”Blood Run, NAGPRA, and the Buffalo Village Case”), Penny Kelsey (”NAGPRA, Blood Run, and Dickson Mounds: Gendered Narratives of Activism”), and Chadwick Allen (”Citing the Serpent Mound in Blood Run”).

Blood Run (Salt Publishing, 2007), by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, was published through Salt’s Native American writing imprint Earthworks (edited by one of the coolest editors out there: Janet McAdams). If you havent read this book, you must. Here’s the description of the book from Salt’s Website:

This volume testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Blood Run was once a great mound city. About eighty remnants of its original four-hundred mounds still stand in testament to the 10,000 people who made their home here time ago and prove a terrific tribute of world history for their descendants living just down the road today. Yet, Blood Run is still in great danger of being forever destroyed by looters, developers, and the plow. This volume stands to persuade others to protect her and the sacred remains she guards in mounded tombs. The verse play of persona poems herein emanate its character of architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Previous to European colonization and conquest efforts, trade flourished between Indigenous peoples of the Americas for perhaps as long as time earmarked humankind. Evidence of continual vast trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, including art, symbolic items, and practical tools, was well cached in the multitude of mound cities puckering vast portions of the continent, some still incredibly existing after decades of continual and intentional desecration, disfigurement, and dismantling by grave robbers and Manifest Destiny driven anti-eco agriculturalists. Though surely there were times of dilemma for Indigenous Americans, these long-developed relations ensured survival during eras of doubt. Thus the likelihood of peace prevailed and most nations enjoyed the security of blanket protection, aid, and assistance from related tribes; whether by blood or adoption. In so much, tribes that enjoyed helping one another sustain themselves engaged in trade relationships with numerous additional nations outside these pacts; building cities of ceremonial, burial, effigy, and civic mounds, wherein which they flourished.

so the papers given on Blood Run were amazing (Cari & Penny connected the book to NAGPRA–Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act–while Chad read into the book’s deep aesthetic structure based on the “indigenous technology” of the mounds). as a bonus, the author herself gave a reading after the presentations.

besides drinking & eating & socializing & losing my shirt (”nice abs” everyone kept saying) at the casino, on the last day at the last session i presented a paper titled “Indigenizing Poetics, Written ‘Olelo: Brandy Nalani McDougall’s The Salt Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai.” i must admit i was kinda nervous because brandy (remember she was one of the keynote readers) actually attended the panel! eek. throughout my paper she kept interrupting me, saying “that’s not what i intended! are you dumb or something!” since my paper is too long and brilliant to post here, here’s a description of her book The Salt Wind / Ka Makani Pa’akai (click to purchase) (the book is published by Kuleana Oiwi Press, a press dedicated to Native Hawaiian literature):

This postcolonial collection of poetry is the first by Native Hawaiian poet, Brandy Nalani McDougall. Of the collection, Samoan novelist Albert Wendt writes: “Once in a while a collection of poetry comes along and grabs your eyes, heart, and na’au and makes you see and feel more deeply than you’ve done in a long, long time. For me, Brandy Nalani McDougall’s collection is one of those. And I keep rereading it. Her poems have a unique and hugely inviting surface simplicity and elegance that immediately hook you into them, into their profound and complex depths of imagery, lyricism, political and historical savvy, feeling, thought and vision. These are woven together with unusual wisdom, perception, control of language, and intense aloha for her people and islands. You have to read this collection. It will lift you and make you feel you are more.”

special thanks to Gwen Westerman, to the Isleta people and to everyone who made this symposium happen. i will definitely be attending next year (please accept whatever abstract i may submit!).

Sprague’s The Port of Los Angeles, published this past fall by Chax Press, addresses the dire through its insistence on relation. That we are utterly screwed without an approach to the world (and ourselves within the world) through relationship is an understatement given the exigencies of our current environmental situation. Sprague’s book is painfully aware of this reality, and moreover of language’s culpability for producing this reality. How to assert relationship within autobiographical-‘lyric’ modes of writing? If relationship could speak—the relationship between ourselves and the things we produce, between ourselves and those things and more expansive cultural processes—what would it say?

“the goods awaited swift transport through many states and witnessed
many things” (8)

“the things saw this and held the memory of what they were into” (9)

“because the things knew of a use beyond the sound of their names” (10)

In the first part of Sprague’s book she tells a story. She sings herself, “Citizen Jane,” in conveyance (her family’s move from Upstate New York to Southern California), and in doing so speaks both of personal loss—a loss of feeling rooted in a place—and about conveyances far exceeding herself—“ourselves perfectly pitched at the edge of globalism.” (23) Global or international economic exchange is represented by the ports of which Sprague also sings (“container / as the staple / vessel of modernity” [28]). The ports encompass a local ecology of dockworkers and natural phenomena, drug and sexual trafficking, goods transported via shipping containers and other modes of transport. They are also the backdrop for the United States’ over-consumption; its consumption of world products and commodities at the expense of others within an international community—their labor power, their health/wealth, the security of their families and communities. “ownership or loss / and ‘no bordered sense of that’ / I do not know how we were to be (we) unbordered.” (32) Irresponsible consumption and waste as a result of exception.

I cannot help but think of Whitman reading Sprague’s long, anaphoric lines. Such lines form one of the principal shapes of her book. Yet whereas Whitman attempted to dissolve himself in cosmic multiplicity, Sprague would seem to dissolve herself into cultural processes. How something gets to be something else? How this transformation affects something or someone beyond itself? (“we became all over” [67])

The most moving section of the book to take up anaphora is the book’s final, boldly titled poem, “Fuck Your Pastoral.” Fuck your pastoral: as in, fuck your pastoral poem; or, the pastoral tradition of poetry just isn’t cutting it anymore. There is a tension in Sprague’s writing between working within a pastoral tradition, calling it into question (critiquing it), and transcending it (doing something else entirely). Foregrounding relationships between natural phenomena and cultural production—attending to these relationships both epistemologically and phenomenologically—enables Sprague to surpass a merely epiphanic or ecstatic encounter with ‘nature’.

The title “Fuck Your Pastoral” belies the poem’s tenderness, which translates subjects, objects, and pronouns effectively to arrive at an “I” subtracted from its identification with multiplicity (a manyness of beings and experiences). The biographical fact of moving from West to East coast (the scene of the poem is the reverse of the first poem of the book, “The Port of Los Angeles”) is allegorical. Seemingly a return to a more ‘natural’ lifestyle (a rural environment; a family farm), the speaker’s/I’s return to the East is in fact a return through processes of “unmaking.” The prefix “un” appears repeatedly throughout the book, but especially in “Fuck Your Pastoral,” where it indicates a desire to reverse a process of making. Not just ‘deengineering,’ but actively unmaking the world that one would refuse. Dismantling it. Removing from it our veiled awareness of how it came to be. “I” is in between things and beings in the world. “I” is also what stands between their having been made and their unmaking, undergoing both.

“I was undoing all of this as I undid the spool
the radio’s wheel unmagnetizing tape
zipping the case
I emptying notebook erasing the names
unwriting the manifest
unnaming the ship.” (59)

The Port of Los Angeles marks an ecopoetry as much committed to questions of human injustice as to human-animal interaction and interference with non-human natural phenomena. If the problem with “nature” poetry has long been that it exalted phenomena perceived as separate from ourselves, therefore keeping those phenomena at a remove from what we are doing, ecopoetry can counter “nature” poetries by foregrounding how perceived ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ mediate one another and how language (the language we give to nature) is instrumental in this mediation. How can poetic language investigate and transform languages inherited by science? How does poetry provide a toolbox for understanding ecology, for possibly changing our place within it? To what extent can poetry/poetics be a subtle tool for ecologically responsible behavior? Sprague’s work as a poet, essayist, and educator have for me long been at the forefront of these questions.