Buggeryville

So, first: Tomorrow, Sunday, is the 8th annual Richard Foreman Fest, in which artists of various genres are given a text and a set of rules from Richard Foreman's copious notebooks in order to create a short piece. They have ten days to do this. The result is a benefit for Performance Works NW, a terrific rehearsal/performance space in Portland. It's one of my favorite events in Portland, and this year I was asked to set the rules. They are a bit different than the previous seven sets of rules, so I'm curious how it will turn out. Sunday, 5 and 7pm (different line ups!), Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th.

Second: I forgot to mention this! Spare Room hosted a Portland Polyvocal Poetry event a few weeks ago, and I contributed a piece. You can see videos of the event on YouTube. My piece was fairly different from the rest of the poems; instead of the vocal acrobatics typical of polyvocal poetry, I took a social angle. My piece, "Everyone Gets a Poem", consisted of everyone getting a piece of paper with a poem on it. They were to read the poem, and then either keep it (if they were satisfied with it) or give it to someone they thought might be more satisfied with it, perhaps editing it along the way. The audio isn't, perhaps, much to listen to (although the directions to the poem are read aloud, in case you want to try this at home), but it does capture the "sound" I was hoping for: That of the mix of creativity, conviviality, negotiation, and inquiry that I think of when I think of Portland's poetry scene. (And I'm pretty pleased that the poem seems to have resolved/finished by an edit of the instructions themselves.)

It's a scene that, even though I've been gone for two years, still seems to be the site where my creativity functions. I probably won't be there, physically, in 2010, but almost all of my creative output has occurred there. Hm, hm.

1. Ron Silliman, in his recent linkdump, notes: "One of my favorite early poems (i.e. pre-Ketjak) is now available on the web". As if he had no ability to put his poetry on the web, as if getting one's poetry on the web was a hard-won battle. All of Silliman's poetry should be on the web! If it's juvenalia that he's embarrassed by, he doesn't have to publish it; if the poem simply doesn't "translate" into an online format, so be it; if publication rights are controlled by the publisher, oops!; if he simply doesn't have a copy of the journal that this poem was published in, or any archive of the poem -- well, that seems unlikely, and anyway he's in a good position to be able to track such a thing down. If Silliman's poetry isn't available on the web, he has only himself to blame.

2. I read this quote that I disagreed with, and wanted to write a little about it. It reminded me of a piece by David Abel. David is arguably the hardest working poet in Portland, but very little of his work is published, and there is very little online evidence of it. I couldn't remember all the details about the piece, and there was no online (nor offline) archive that I could check. When I lived in Portland, David's work (like the work of all my poety friends in Portland) was there, was present in the air; now that I'm in Toronto, it is not. Being in Portland was being in the David Abel archive, as it was continually being built and rebuilt, organized and reorganized. And now, yes, it's not as if I couldn't e-mail David and ask him for the details of the piece. But also it would be nice to be able to point to it, point others to it, and incorporate it into my thinking here, into my living/archiving in Toronto. And yet at the same time I want to resist the pull to archive everything, and I want to encourage living where you are, when you are, allowing the past to be past without dragging it to the present, allowing elsewhere to remain elsewhere, allowing becoming who you are rather than being who you have been. And yet it would be nice to have access to all this. And yet, and yet, and yet.

3. Which is to say: Is poetry a gift economy? Is memory a gift economy?

Update: I have since written a little bit about David's piece.

This weekend is the sixth annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival over at Performance Works Northwest in Portland. Each year they gather up a dozen or so "experimental" artists in various genres and, about two weeks before the show, send them a chunk of (NYC-based experimental theater writer/director) Richard Foreman's notebooks and a few rules with which they create a new work (about 5-10 minutes long). The results are diverse -- ranging from silly to somber (to, ideally, both!) -- and encourage people to play around with a more Foreman-esque presentation, or to bring Foreman's ideas into their own practice.

This is the first year I am not taking part (as either a creator or performer). Even last year, when I was in NYC all summer, I managed to contribute a video. I have no particular feelings one way or another for Foreman's work, but it is very usable and reusable to foster this type of event, and it is always a highlight of summer in Portland.

Since I can't be there (sigh!), if you're anywhere near Portland, you should go for me and report back. (In particular, I think Rodney should participate next year.)

Sixth Annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival, August 15 and 16, 8:30 pm. Tickets $15-$50 for one night; $25-$75 for both nights, sliding scale. Reservations: 503-777-1907 or brownpapertickets.com

1. A short documentary on Jordan Scott, stuttering, and poetics thereof. (Part 2. I'm not clear on whether this is the documentary that aired on Bravo or just connected to it.)
2. Oh sure, now that I've moved away, there's a contest for writing five words about Portland's transit system! (via Silliman)
3. Dystopian lexicography.
4. Craig Conley's take on "for Gale Czerski" continues its spread across the internet.
5. On a well-annotated reviewer's copy.

(Written for my recent reading. Not read exactly as written. See also The alphabet: An introduction, which was read earlier in the reading, and which this piece references.)

I wanted to write an alphabet of the poets we know here in Portland, in the Spare Room part of Portland. David would be D, and Maryrose would be M, and Mark would be M, and… but Maryrose isn’t Mark, and Mark isn’t Maryrose, but M is M, so… but Lindsay could be L, and Rodney could be R, and they could be left and right, and Robbie could be R, although Rodney isn’t Robbie, and Robbie isn’t Rodney, but R is R, but also Robbie’s already gone to Buffalo, so… and Jules could be J, and Kaia could be K, and together they could be just kidding, and margareta could be M, but, Maryrose isn’t margareta and Mark isn’t margareta and margareta isn’t Maryrose or Mark… but margareta is a lowercase m! but then again, so is mARK, sometimes… and do we want an alphabet where lowercase m and uppercase M count as different letters? and Dan is D but isn’t David, and Joel is J but isn’t Jules, and Jared is also J but Jared isn’t Jules and Jules isn’t Joel and Joel isn’t Jared and I’m not even sure Jared’s Jared and now Joseph’s back in town which is great but you can’t all be J! At least Bethany is B and I can’t think of another B, but I bet Bethany wishes she were Œ. Gale is safely G and Cynthia might soon have C to herself, oh except Cat and the other Cynthia are also Cs… Tony and Tom can tussle for T. Patrick might be the only P, Endi is a cinch for E, Sam can be S, but Ashley and Alicia are both As, and Lisa and Laura have been Ls in this town longer than Lindsay has… and maybe Maryrose could be MR but she is no mister and she’s certainly not mentally retarded. And this is hardly everyone! If this is supposed to be the alphabet, it’s not an exhaustive list, it’s in no particular order, and it has left off important letters like O and Y and certainly hasn’t considered any Æs or &s… This is not the alphabet marching in rank and file atop the chalkboard in an elementary school classroom, it’s a bundle of signboard letters found in a decaying briefcase in the basement of a long-abandoned church, the sort of thing that would get snapped up at a garage sale in this town.

(This should automatically post right around when my flight leaves to Toronto. Thank you all, again and again, those mentioned in this piece and those not, for being my alphabet.)

After over 13 years of providing a venue for poetry of all stripes in Portland, Dan Raphael's "I Love Mondays!" series at Borders has unexpectedly ended.

For budgetary reasons, Borders let their events coordinator go, and cancelled all future events, including Dan's series.

I was one of about 270 poets who read in the series; I read there twice. They were some of my favorite readings to give. Dan had catholic booking tastes; the three poets at a typical reading would come from very different scenes. They were almost always Portland-area poets. Dan has a strong interest in getting people from different communities talking to one another; you can see clear evidence for this (if you know your Portland poets) in the scheduling for Poetland, the 80-poets-in-8-hours event that he organized a few years ago.

Borders readings also had a lot of people in the audience who didn't go to many poetry readings, or who were just wandering through the store and checking out what was going on.

Now, reading with people who aren't your peers for an audience who aren't immediately interested in what you're doing is, perhaps, a bit offputting for most poets. But I agreed with Dan's take, that this sort of outreach is important, exciting, and should serve as a challenge to poets. I went into these readings determined to make some sort of connection, even if a tentative one, to that haphazard audience, and to try to do it without completely pandering. It pushed me as a writer and stimulated my thinking about a poet's role in relationship to the community -- both the poet's obvious community of likeminded poets and readers, but also the greater community of potential readers, or of people who, haphazardly, could be exposed to a poetry reading.

Portland's poetry scene will be missing a vital and quietly characteristic element without Dan's Borders reading series, and it's a damn shame it's over. Thanks, Dan, for so many years of poetry and community organizing.

Dan's hoping to do a final event or two, and I'm sure you'll find word of it here (even though I won't be in town for it) or over at the Spare Room website.

Meanwhile, here's an article the Willamette Week did on Dan nearly a decade ago. Hopefully they'll do a follow-up now.

No, not a werewolf. I was a person who attended poetry readings.

Maryrose alerted me to a very nice post on Mark Wallace's blog about how nice poetry readings are, how they allow poetry communities and poetry-based relationships to flourish, and how keen this whole world is.

Curtis Faville responded in the comments with some concerns about such "poetry communities" and how the performative nature of a poetry reading says nothing about the quality of poetry on the page, which he seems to equate with the quality of poetry.

Now, resigning myself to the role of poetry blogger, I'm going to use this opportunity to reply to both of them, first to suggest that Faville is a bit off in his sense that the page is the proper home of poetry, and to bear witness to my own experiences with poetry communities.

1. The page is not the ultimate arbiter of poeminess. That is limiting and ahistorical. It denies the poemy effectiveness of language when spoken. It is a giant "fuck you" to sound poetry. It insists that poetry is not for now but for the ages. But, as someone who lives now and not in the ages, I could hardly care what the ages or those who live in the ages think. Their poemic concerns are, by and large, none of my business. They are a wildly unpredictable bunch, who never return my e-mails. I'll let them work out poeminess on their own; they won't decide what I get poemy goodness from.

2. The performative nature of the page is indeed different from the performative nature of the reading, and one doesn't necessarily translate into the other. I think I just mentioned this.

Now, on to my experience as a teenager who, unlike Wallace, had access to poetry readings. Then we'll get back to this. (We will, today, ignore the role of the internet.)

When I was 19ish and growing up in New York City I started going to poetry readings. For a while I went fairly regularly to readings at the Ear Inn. Perhaps some of you reading this also were going to readings there then. Do you remember me? At the time I looked something like the guy on the left, the taller one:



No, you probably don't remember me. I found going to these poetry readings mostly an alienating experience, mostly (with a few exceptions) filled with endless encounters with unwelcoming careerists, whom I had nothing to offer. I was a quiet, awkward teenager. I had little to offer for a careerist poem. Even the poetry zine I was publishing was more interested in what people who didn't consider themselves poets wrote than "real" poets. I was largely superfluous to the scene. No one seemed to be talking about things I was interested in talking about anyways -- no one was talking shop, certainly, and if they had it probably would have been a very different type of shop than what I was interested in.

So I had access to a poetry scene as a teenager, and found it to be fairly disgusting and off-putting. It was nice to see some of the poets whose work I enjoyed read, and it made me feel connected to moderately famous people, but these connections were fairly ephemeral and certainly were nothing like what Mark Wallace is talking about.

And then I moved to Portland, where there wasn't a poetry scene (of the sort of poetry I was interested in, anyways). A handful of (generally non-careerist) poets got together (read: were organized by David Abel) and started up a scene, and it's doing well now, and now I finding myself agreeing with Wallace's assessment, that the interaction of interesting people is one of the main draws of "being a poet". I'd even go further, and suggest that some of the most interesting poetic moments happen in those or out of those interactions -- or, at least, it's been important to me. (See: Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw, and eventually there will be a link to a pdf for The Redundancies here.)

So now I've lived in a place with a dysfunctional (for my needs) poetry scene, and one with a functional poetry scene (for my needs), and I'm about to move to a third city, and I am, frankly, a bit worried that I won't have a functional poetry scene in this new city. Which is to say, that I won't have poetry in this new city. In that sense. And what will I have to do about it, or what will I be able to do about it.

3. Which makes Faville's reaction -- of withdrawal, of burying one's head in the page, and declaring it to be the true place of poetry -- seem all the more tempting; it is safer, more controllable. Hell, we can all agree, is other people. But I'm not ready to give up on the possibilities and the poetics of human interaction yet.

(Any significant updates are in this color.)

0 First off, I want to thank the people at Lewis & Clark and at PSU who made this weekend's poetry symposia happen.

0.a (For those who didn't attend, they featured some "big names" in experimental poetry: Lyn Hejinian, Hank Lazer, and Joan Retallack, as well as one of the biggest "names" in avant-garde literature/poetry criticism, who was, as we were reminded a few times, until recently the president of the MLA: Marjorie Perloff.)

0.b Poetry is not rare in Portland. Experimental poetry is no longer rare in Portland. Extended events involving experimental poetry are still a little too rare in Portland, but there are one or two each year. Poetry criticism is extremely rare in Portland, and mostly consists of Rodney. But famous experimental poets still rarely read in Portland.

0.b.1 No, really, I might be the second most active poetry critic in Portland. Please prove me wrong. This is a bit of overstatement that I might write about soon. But I still encourage you to prove me wrong.

0.b.2 It's possible that by "famous" I mean "the kind you have to pay traveling expenses for to get them to Portland".

0.c "Experimental" is a problematic term for poetry, but I'll use it for now to refer to a group of poets who have been clustered together for whatever reasons, and who may or may not be distinguishable in a blind taste-test from poets who are not "experimental".


1 One of the nice things about these events was that, for almost the entire time, I was paying full attention to the readings.

1.a My friends who don't attend poetry readings regularly mention that they lose focus during readings, that their minds wander. They think this makes them feel like they are bad audiences for poetry readings. My mind wanders all the time at readings. It does not seem like a bad thing. Drifting off can allow the text to work on other levels, and where your mind wanders off to might meet up with the text in unexpected and delightful ways. Nevertheless, it sure can be nice to find yourself actively engaged with someone else's mind for an extended period.

1.a.1 It is even nicer what that someone has the sort of mind you enjoy being engaged with.

1.a.2 But the frustration of engaging with a mind that you find all wrong can sometimes be nice as well, in its way, in how it provokes you to shore up your own thoughts.

1.a.2.a They are so wrong, which just confirms that you are so right.


2 All of which is meant to serve as an opening move in untying myself from the knots of anger and vitriol that Marjorie Perloff contorted me into this weekend. Without, perhaps, disturbing the sense of calm, delight, and excitement about what poetry can be that Joan Retallack (in particular) inspired or reawoke in me.

2.a Poetry as a systemic, organized, semiprofessionalized force.

2.a.1 Poetry as "the poetry community".

2.b "Methodical doubt", as Retallack said, and as I wrote onto my too-small paper coffee cup.

2.c "Ontological poof", as Maryrose misheard, and as I considered txting to Seth.


3 If Marjorie Perloff recommended a book to me, it would be a good book. If Joan Retallack or Lyn Hejinian recommended a book to me, it would be a good and surprising book.

3.a Marjorie Perloff has been reading The Arcades Project and the controversial new translation of War and Peace.

3.b Lyn Hejinian has been reading up on late nineteenth century technophobia.

3.b.1 The doorbell: Dangerous new technology that will startle people and cause heart attacks and will disrupt and tear down the family.

3.c Marjorie Perloff reads strategically. She hedges her bets.

3.c.1 With the exception of a single Japanese-German writer, I knew every one of the cultural touchpoints that Perloff touched during her two papers and two panel discussions, during over two hours of motormouthed namedropping. I had not read all of them, but I knew of them enough to know when she was getting the names wrong.

3.c.2 I knew them enough to know that she could have come up with better examples from her own reading to illustrate some of the points that she wanted to talk about. If you want a modernist predecessor of a person who writes in a foreign language to estrange themselves from their text, you do not turn to the Cantos, as Perloff did, you turn to Beckett.

3.c.3 I do not actually consider myself all that well read in poetry. I am better read than your average so-and-so on the street, sure, but I spend time with David, Maryrose, Rodney, and others who have read far more of this stuff than I have. I am a dabbler compared with them. I do not read the journals, I do not know that poet who did that marvelous book of translations in the 60s before taking her life, I do not try to keep up with such things. My interest in poetry is no longer in the system that is called poetry, so I don't keep up with it. Nevertheless, Marjorie Perloff, famous critic, alleged expert in the field, made me feel phenomenally well read.


4 Obviously it is not what you read that counts, but what you do with it. One thing you could try doing is to construct some sort of historical narrative out of it. You could try to explain why poetry styles change over time.

4.a I mean, I might recommend that you start by showing that poetry styles in fact do change over time, and that it isn't just what we talk about when we talk about poetry that changes. No, really. Try. I'd be curious to see if you could get anywhere with that project.

4.b History is, perhaps, not as good at showing continuity over time.

4.c Either way, your job as a historian is to show, discover, invent, whatever -- to note potential paths of causation between one thing and another.

4.d So, Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.

4.d.1 It mostly consists of clippings, lifted whole, with minimal connective critical apparatus!

4.d.2 Many of those clippings are in French, while Benjamin's text was in German, and it switches back and forth between the two!

4.d.3 Benjamin ties together different parts of the text together using set-off keywords, through which you are encouraged to jump to another related section!

4.e So, what does this remind us of?

4.e.1 Clippings? Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, in which he retypes a Sunday New York Times in its entirety! Or maybe sampling!

4.e.2 Languages? Poems written in more than one language are "on the rise", we were told repeatedly throughout the weekend!

4.e.2.a The proof of this goes something like, "Well, the poets in In The American Tree (an early 80s anthology of language poetry) weren't writing in multiple languages so much, whereas the poets who would be in a similar anthology today would be more likely to write in multiple languages."

4.e.2.b This proof, of course, asks that you take In The American Tree as representative of all the poetic activity that was going on in the late 70s/early 80s, which is a mind-boggling proposition.

4.e.3 Keywords sending you to other sections? It's hypertext! Click!

4.f Perloff spent maybe twenty minutes explaining 4.d.1-3 and 4.e.1-3. This was the centerpiece and culmination of her hour-long talk on Saturday, which was part of the introduction of a book she's writing on "unoriginal genius" or something along those lines. An expansion on Kenneth Goldsmith's ideas, it seems.

4.f.1 No, really, like twenty minutes to explain what I explained in a dozen sentences.

4.f.2 Was she drawing a historical connection between The Arcades Project and Day, and sampling, and polyglot poetry, and hypertext?

4.f.3 Well, no. I mean, you should probably hope not. The Arcades Project wasn't published in English until 1999, a little late to influence hypertext, sampling, and polyglot poetry. And anyway, there are clearer precedents for all of these.

4.f.3.a Especially for sampling, ffs.

4.f.4 There are also precedents for The Arcades Project's use of all these forms.

4.f.4.a The sampling is far closer to a daybook -- or, lets say, to a historian keeping files of the source materials that he's going to use as a reference -- than to musical sampling as it's been developed in the past few decades (which is perhaps closer to how Biblical quotes are used in medieval European writing, though not historically related, of course).

4.f.4.b The polyglot aspects are not remotely remarkable for a work of European scholarship in the early twentieth century.

4.f.4.c The hypertext elements are like encyclopedias and Bible concordances.

4.f.5 Let's not forget that The Arcades Project really was just a guy's notes and initial stabs at a standard critical thinkpiece that ended up getting published as is.

4.f.6 So it would be difficult to prove a historical connection between The Arcades Project and the works that Perloff points out are similar to it. And there are works that share these features that The Arcades Project probably does have a historical connection to, and works that share these features with the more contemporary works that they do have a historical connection to, but none of that is what Perloff wanted to talk about.

4.f.7 Marjorie Perloff is not a historian.

4.g Well, OK. Perhaps she never claimed to be. (Although I am told she claimed as much more than once during the symposia.) After all, she's primarily identified as a critic. Perhaps she is highlighting the similarities to suggest that reading strategies that are typical for one of those texts might be useful for reading the other texts. Polyglot poetry is kind of like The Arcades Project, and we can read polyglot poetry like we would read The Arcades Project, or vice versa.

4.g.1 [This is where I would summarize what she said along those lines, had she said anything at all along those lines.]

4.g.2 [OK, I guess she suggested that The Arcades Project is funsies for employing these strategies just like Day or polyglot poetry is funsies for employing these strategies.]

4.g.2.a [It is hard to imagine a more surface reading of these texts, one which would fail to point at what is actually funsies in them.]

4.g.3 She did a close reading on a list of shop names, and was convincing enough in her theory that the list was organized suggestively and poetically, that items in the list were not arbitrarily put one after the other but were done so to be suggestive. This is a good example of using a poetic technique to pull meaning out of what might be considered, at first, a nonpoetic text.

4.g.3.a But, then again, it has nothing to do with the points of similarity outlined above.

4.h Except that, ultimately, the point seemed to be that The Arcades Project could be profitably read using poetic strategies. Also, it employed these strategies that contemporary things labeled poetry employ.

4.h.1 Perloff spent most of her time suggesting this rather than doing this.

4.h.2 But all texts can be profitably read using poetic strategies. That the nature of poetic strategies is to render profit. Poetry is the irrigation of dry fields of text.

4.h.2.a Though I'd love it if you would show otherwise.

4.h.3 So why this text? Why in relationship with these other texts?

4.h.4 It seemed like she was using one set of texts to validate another set, but whether The Arcades Project is supposed to be validated by being like Day, or Day is supposed to be validated by being like The Arcades Project is unclear.

4.i What is clear is that both are supposed to be validated by being liked by Marjorie Perloff.


5 Marjorie Perloff said on Saturday: "I like to pick winners."

5.a Perloff is not terribly interested in providing critical or historical context or understanding to poetry. She is interested in promoting what she likes and ignoring what she does not like.

5.a.1 She said she doesn't teach work that she doesn't find interesting.

5.a.2 There was some interesting discussion, especially by Retallack, about what pleasure is and how it functions as a tool to keep you engaged with the world. I am still thinking about that. It is an issue.

5.a.3 If you find someone's poetry interesting, that is one thing. If you want to say something about why it is interesting, that is another thing. If you want to place it in some sort of historical, cultural, and critical context, that is yet another thing. And to do that last thing right, you are going to have to rub up against the various things that were going on around the place and time that the text came into being. And much of that will probably not be all that interesting to you.

5.a.3.a If someone writes a poem you find interesting to react against poetry that the poet found not interesting, then you as a critic or historian had probably study both pretty carefully.

5.a.3.b This seems obvious to the point that I don't feel like going into it, but it might not be that obvious to others, and I will try to explain it further if asked.

5.a.4 And it is your pleasure in the interesting texts that should drive you to investigate the texts that you find less interesting. In this way, pleasure increases your engagement with the world.

5.a.5 Perloff uses pleasure as a buffer to keep herself from engaging with the world.

5.a.6 Perloff is not a historian and is barely a critic.

5.b Perloff said that she is upset that there is a "glut" of poetry these days, thanks to the internet, thanks to what is sometimes called the increased democratization of publishing.

5.b.1 It is hard to keep up with.

5.b.2 There is so much of it.

5.b.3 Perhaps: How can you know who the winners are when you can't keep tabs on the races?

5.b.4 Perhaps: How can you pick the winners when people are running so many races that you can't be involved in all of them?

5.b.5 Perhaps even: How can you have a democracy without a centralized authority?

5.c I live in Portland. Portland is not central to the scene that is considered the poetry scene, and yet here we are, writing poems, reading them, having a poetic discourse, running what you could, if you felt the urge, call a race. And Marjorie Perloff was only just invited to town! But she was not invited to talk about, look at, investigate, or judge our race. She was invited to talk about the "big race". The one that, by and large, we are not participating in, here in Portland, except, perhaps, at the margins.

5.c.1 OK, races don't have margins. Do they?

5.c.2 Also, there are many races going on in Portland.

5.c.3 Isn't it amazing that so much poetry could be going on in Portland without Marjorie Perloff being aware of it!

5.c.4 Perloff mentioned that Yeats wrote, in his autobiography, that at some point in his life he had met all the poets of his generation. She believed him.

5.c.4.a Surely there was some person roughly contemporaneous with Yeats, some woman who wrote little bits of poetry for her friends, nothing innovative, perhaps clunky, with rhymes and poor scansion and tired metaphors, but still recognizable as poetry. And whom Yeats never met.

5.c.4.b Perhaps, because the writing was nothing innovative and was clunky, it doesn't count as poetry.

5.c.4.c Perhaps, though, we don't know how to read clunkiness; we are raised on sophistication and urbanity, and cannot pierce the veil of clunkiness.

5.c.4.d Perhaps it does not count as poetry because we don't like it.

5.c.4.e Perhaps it does not count as poetry because it was not part of the system that is called poetry.

5.c.4.f But then, Perloff was willing to make fun of others for discounting Stein, Bernstein, or Goldsmith because their writings were not part of the system that those people called poetry.

5.c.4.g There is nobody unbiased, not one. When we are aesthetes, we can follow our pleasure without hesitation. But when we are trying to be good historians, good critics, good thinkers, we have to allow a wider range of possibilities in.

5.c.4.h Also: It is good to learn how to take pleasure in things. While we can't all learn to take pleasure in all things, we nevertheless shouldn't set up a methodology that ignores the unpleasurable!

5.c.5 I grew up in New York City, where the poets believed that they were deep in the midst of "the big race"; I have spent the last eight years in Portland, where poets are largely cut off from that big race.

5.c.6 The panelists complained about a lack of personal connections among poets, in part thanks to the internet and globalization; but it seems like the disconnect from a globalized "race" has strengthened Portland's poetry scene and made it more personal, more one-on-one, more "communitarian".

5.c.6.a When Lyn Hejinian said "be careful of global capitalism", perhaps what we should have heard was "be careful of canon-makers, be careful of people who think of poetic history as a, if not a single thread, then at least a single rope made up of twine, be careful of people who try to accumulate cultural capital and pave over distinctions, be careful of people who fear that democracy and autonomy will take away their abilities to accumulate that capital; be careful of Marjorie Perloff."

5.c.6.b Well, perhaps.

5.c.6.c Marjorie Perloff is not a historian and is not much of a critic; instead she is a tastemaker and a capitalist.

5.c.6.d Marjorie Perloff is a robber baron. Or, she would be, if poetry -- actual poetry, not that which is called poetry -- were susceptible to capitalist shenanigans.

5.c.6.e More than one person has suggested to me in response to this point that Marjorie Perloff is a carpet bagger. Which may be true. Critics can often be accused of carpet bagging, inasmuch as most of them talk about people who do a thing that they value but do not do. In Perloff's case, her fame and value rests not so much on the quality of her criticism but on how well the poets she picks do (Frank O'Hara, the Language poets, now it seems Kenneth Goldsmith), and how she can ride their fame, which she helps create. This is specifically how she wants it to work. So while it seems a bit much to accuse a critic of carpet bagging, which might be a function of the job, Perloff might be an egregious example of critic as carpet bagger.

5.d When someone wins in poetry, we all lose.


6 After Perloff read her paper on Saturday, Joan Retallack read a ten-minute essay/poem. Like the Perloff paper, Retallack's piece contained no content that I didn't already know. But the Retallack piece contained almost no explicit content. But I followed its twists and turns, its logic and puns, it rhythms and assonances, and I found myself tracing the paths that an engaged and excited mind had gone down. I can't explain or justify or even, necessarily, recommend it to anyone else -- I was falling down laughing with delight at parts of it even though no one else in the room was responding. Poetry, and even thought, are personal and idiosyncratic things, and just because Retallack's piece "worked" for me can't indicate that it would or should work for anyone else. I am not as interested as Perloff is in cultural hegemony, or in picking "winners", but I do want to acknowledge that Retallack's piece was a terrific path to travel down, a scenic walk through a field of wildflowers after Perloff's brass and hurried double-decker bus tour of the must-see places in Midtown Manhattan.

6.a But, yes, Retallack's piece was terrific, which has nothing to do with whether one can or should write criticism about it. Perloff wondered why Joyce had much better critical writing done on his work than Stein or Beckett did: It is because Joyce wrote the sort of work that one can write critically about, whereas Beckett and Stein didn't. This doesn't say anything about their work except about whether you can successfully write criticism about it.

6.b Yup.


7 So thanks again to Lewis & Clark and PSU for bringing Perloff, Retallack, and Hejinian to Portland. It was nice to be angered and even nicer to be pleased by the event. And while I am glad enough to have seen Perloff once, I don't think there's much to be gained by inviting her back to Portland. Retallack or Hejinian, on the other hand, should come back early and often. And while I have not said much about Hank Lazer (who only read on Friday), I enjoyed his poetry and his comments about poetry, and I thought he was a very nice and engaging person, and I am looking forward to hearing him read tonight with Laura Feldman for Spare Room.