Catch-up post

Sometimes people read my blog once a month or once a season or once a year instead of every day. Sigh.* So just to catch up…

I. Academia
I was in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo (also home of the famous Poetics Program). I decided to transfer because it’s very hard to get an academic job with a PhD in Comp Lit, so I cobbled together a Master’s Thesis under the direction of Henry Sussman (and with the help of Rodolphe Gasche and Joan Copjec) and “took” my M.A. I then went to UVA’s more conservative Ph.D. program in English under their Presidential Fellowship, which is supposedly prestigious, but when I got there I felt treated like an undergraduate and I was very unhappy with departmental interests and policies. I went to study with Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker, but McGann’s interests are mostly limited to Dante Rossetti right now and to make a long story short, I didn’t feel like I was able to work on things that actually interested me. And if you can’t work on what you’re interested in while you’re in a PhD program, then what’s the point? I certainly wasn’t about to devote 4+ years of my life writing a dissertation on something I wasn’t passionate about. So I quit doing work, and eventually UVA and I separated. We’re both bitter and we don’t talk. I still think about going back into Academia because I feel like I still have a lot to give, intellectually, to the discipline; but I’m not ready for a new academic relationship yet.

II. Geography
As I was considering whether to leave UVA, I lived in Birmingham, AL for a few months. I grew up there and my family is still there. Then I returned to Charlottesville in summer 2007, where I did a modicum of work on my outstanding incomplete papers. Then UVA and I broke up, but I stayed in Charlottesville for a few more months, working at Barnes & Noble, experiencing Charlottesville culture (a.k.a. drinking), and dating a couple of C’villians. Eventually, though, everything came to one of those points where you’re like, “shit, I cannot go on like this.” I didn’t want to be part of that culture anymore. The opportunity arose to move to NYC and live with an old friend from college, who had a cheap room available in his apartment. So I thought I’d try it– there weren’t any jobs in my field in Cville, really, and I was tired of feeling culturally isolated; the rent in this new place was cheaper than what I was paying in Cville; my brother lives in Manhattan; and I was interested in a boy who lived in NY. So I packed up and left Cville and arrived in NYC.

However, although there are many many jobs in my field (editing) in NYC, I haven’t been able to get any of them. I’ve been living off a couple of wage jobs (first, momentarily, The Strand; then scanning books for Internet Archive, and most recently temping) and the generosity of my parents while applying for literally hundreds of jobs. Last month I finally started getting interviews, but none of them turned into offers rapidly enough for me to reconsider what I’d already begun to consider– that is, leaving NYC. I don’t think the benefits of living here really outweigh the cost, commuting time and other stress factors. Some people think it’s absolutely worth it, but I just don’t.

Now I am moving back to Buffalo after 3 years away and I will be teaching again at UB in the fall as an adjunct in the English department. That is, I am exactly back where I started three years ago, except I’m no longer in a highly respected Ph.D. program, and I am many dollars more in credit card debt. Yay!

III. Creativity
While at UVA, I got really bored with the lack of local poetry community (I went up to DC for my poetry fix) and bored with graduate school, so I decided to publish my manuscript, Organic Furniture Cellar. I started a press and published that book, which received some good reviews and sold, to date, more than 400 copies (about 100 more than anticipated, and thus the book has miraculously paid for itself). With this boredom and this press I also started Foursquare magazine for women’s experimental poetry, which is supposed to come out monthly but comes out less frequently now than it did when I was bored in Charlottesville. I also conceived the The 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, which due to circumstances (stress, time, money) I’ve now given up, and Take-Home Project chapbooks which I’m still planning to make one day but are way, way behind schedule. I’ve learned that I’m not a very good editor, in that it takes me forever to get around to doing what I promised to do. I also take on too much. I’ve only written the barest smattering of poems since I left Buffalo in 2004, so I’m hoping that returning to Buffalo will reignite my creative fuels. I miss being a poet. I’ve become a (bad) editor, a blogger, and a poetry-friend (that is, I talk about poetry to my other poet-friends quite a lot) but my personal productivity is at an all-time low. I scoff at people who haven’t written in months– I haven’t written in years, baby.

IV. Love
So… when I entered the PhD program at Buffalo I left my boyfriend of 6 years, Aaron. Our relationship had devolved into an abusive mess. I started dating a fellow graduate student, Martin, who was a romantic dream, but unfortunately I developed PTSD after Aaron and was quite a pill to be in a relationship with. Still, we managed and were mostly very happy together, and it took 4 years before the relationship became untenable. Since then (2006) I’ve dated a couple of people, but mostly I’m emotionally exhausted from various romantic circumstances, such as a good friend and former lover getting married, and a long-term passionate friendship with someone who doesn’t want to get into a relationship with me, on top of those two long-term relationships that failed. The good news is that my PTSD has evaporated almost completely, but it’s become increasingly hard for me to form trusting bonds with new people, so when the bonds I do have are fucked with I retire further into myself, becoming even less interested in engaging in normal love behavior. I’m an optimist and a romantic when it comes to relationships, but sometimes it’s just enough already.

V. Cats
I have three of them.

* Sarcasm. It is very very rare that I am not sarcastic. So don’t get all upset! I don’t really expect you to read my blog. Which is why I bother posting a narrative like this that covers so many years of my life.

5 years, 15 homes.

Only the places I’ve lived for more than a month…

Protected: A Coney Island of the Mind

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: I got a job! … Etc.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Limbo

So… I’ve decided NYC isn’t working and that I’m moving to Buffalo on 5/19.

Protected: It’s weird.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Things I like about New York

1. Cats in bodegas. Every bodega has a resident cat. The cats are utilitarian– they’re for catching mice– but I like cats so I find it nice to have one around when I’m shopping. They’re usually very healthy and sweet. Also, I didn’t know the word “bodega” until I came here and it’s a useful word.

Blind Witness Party

-
Monday, May 5, 8pm
Medicine Show
549 West 52nd St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.), New York
$5 admission
Reservations requested to ensure seating: 212-262-4216

Blind Witness brings together in one book Charles Bernstein’s libretti for Blind Witness News, The Subject, and The Lenny Paschen Show, written for composer Ben Yarmolinsky in the early 1990s. Bernstein & Yarmolinsky will perform sections of the operas along with Deborah Karpel, soprano; Nathan Resika, bass; and Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano. Discounted advance copies of the books (with eye-catching Susan Bee cover art) will be on sale. (From CB’s blog.)

Things I dislike about New York

1. The subway. Public transit is great in theory but in practice, in a city this big it’s disgusting. In the winter it’s a disease factory, where sick people spread germs to healthy people and the stress of everyday life in New York makes everyone vulnerable to contagious diseases. I’ve heard about how gross it is in the summer, with the smell of bodies and sewage, but I plan to be in Buffalo before it gets too hot. Along with the people who are actually on the subway, there are the people who use the subway as a bathroom and all the other shit that drips down into the subway from above. Then, there is the slowness of the thing. It is not always slow. Sometimes it’s great. But to make up for the times it’s great, there are the times you get to the subway station and instead of having to wait the usual 5-7 minutes you have to wait 15-20 for no apparent reason. And the constant repairs that reroute and delay.

Protected: Incessant job interviews

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Many things have happened since

I last wrote. My parents came to town; I gave a short reading here in Brooklyn. While the folks were here we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I love Botanic(al) Garden(s). They appeal to deep basic needs of mine. I need to see flowers. I need things to be organized and labeled. Part of what I love about Nabokov– the precision, the characters who are botanists and lepidopterists. I think going back to school for library science is going to be fulfilling for me. Although the Cherry Blossom Festival is this coming weekend, all the cherry blossoms were in full bloom while we were there, and we walked down corridors of pink fluffy flowers.

Protected: A Tale of Two Cities

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: April Job Interviews

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Girls everywhere

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: More interviews

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Poetry Reading

I’m reading Friday night at Stain Bar in Brooklyn.  Details here.

Protected: Two more interviews

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: I had two job interviews today.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Three books to look for

Not exactly reviews, just comments about a couple of books I’ve been impressed by lately.

I. Craig Morgan Teicher’s Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems
From the little I know about Craig, I never expected to really like his poems. Maybe they would be ok; but when you hear “Publisher’s Weekly” and “State Prize” (in this case, Colorado), “good experimental poetry” isn’t necessarily the next association you make. But I went to a mammoth poetry reading on Friday night and he read. I wasn’t expecting to like it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to like it so much that when he was finished reading, I snatched the book out of his hands and eagerly devoured half of it there and then while he looked on nervously (”who is this girl and is she going to give my book back?”). Such is almost never my reaction to a poetry reading, and it’s not like Craig’s reading was such an amazing performance that I was drawn to the book by the force of his personality. He’s just a normal guy. But this is a fucking good book, especially if you like thoughtful poetics. (UP Colorado, $16)

II. Lisa Forrest’s To The Eaves
A Buffalo poet from the ecopoetics tradition, Lisa has been an active organizer in the Buffalo community and a rising star for many years. She’s not really the “rising star” type– she’s never obnoxiously careerist, but is deep and shiny and real in the way that many of my favorite female poets are. If you like the other earthy experimental female poets that I like– let’s say, Susana Gardner, a.rawlings, K. Lorraine Graham, Michelle Detorie, Alixandra Bamford, Brenda Iijima– you’ll love this work too. Better cover design than usual from BlazeVox and free mp3s to accompany the text. (BlazeVox, forthcoming)

III. Sandra Beasley’s Theories of Falling
Maybe I’m just weird, but when a book wins a poetry prize I’m actually less likely to buy it. I think poetry prizes– especially those sponsored by state university presses– are often bullshit and the work they put out is usually middle-of-the-road stuff– it almost has to be to get through the first round of judging and make it to the final celebrity judge (I’ve been a silent screener for such contests so I’ve seen how they work from the inside). I keep my eye on a couple of presses rather than on contests when I’m considering the publishing pulse, and when Foetry was up and running I was glad there was a contest watchdog. But, then again maybe sometimes a book wins a prize because the poetry is actually just really good. I know Sandra from my days in D.C. and although her work looks and sounds very different from my own, I love and respect her work thoroughly. She is more likely to write left-aligned narrative poems than I am, but in the subgenre of narrative poetry, her delightfully rhythmic ear and the uniqueness of the stories she tells overwhelm my prejudices. Poets often fall into “camps” or cliques and in some less-than-grand scheme of things I think that Sandra and I are not in the same camp, but if one discards all that and looks at the work, one cannot help but want to read it over and over again. In this way Sandra reminds me of Alice Notley– her poems might well transcend petty poetry politics. The book website features selections, one of which is one of my favorite of Sandra’s poems, “Cherry Tomatoes” (it was also recently featured at Poets.org). (Western MI UP, $14)

Free food

This week I’ve been working a temp job at a market research facility.

Class Reunion

–

I got an email today regarding my upcoming high school reunion. I’ve basically been dreading this thing for ten years. My parents say, “oh, it’ll be fine, you’ll see that everyone just became more normal, people won’t even remember you, etc.”

But. Neither of my parents, who also went to my high school, were quite so unpopular as I was in high school. I was pretty much as unpopular as you can get without being in the Special Ed classes. I was, as I am now, beautiful, creative and very intelligent. But I was openly sexual (with my boyfriend, who I was with for 6 goddamn years– I was 21 before I had sex with anyone else), which made me a slut and a nymphomaniac. I was openly pantheist, which made me a devil worshipper. Ah, the hyperboles of the ignorant. Walking down the halls each day was like running the gauntlet.

Jobs

I have a temp job starting tomorrow, for the other days this week.  My weekend flood of apps resulted in 3 interviews for the week.  At least now, recently, I am getting interviews.  I think my cover letter must’ve improved.

Protected: I need a job.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

A Chair Burning Retrospective

-

Protected: Dating ABDs

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: One of my favorite breakup poems

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Law

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Hughes, Wintz, & Friedlander

So far, I’ve gone to two poetry readings this week: Andrew Hughes and Sara Wintz at Zinc and Ben Friedlander and Anselm Berrigan at St. Mark’s.

My aesthetics did not align with Andrew’s in such a way that I could get a lot out of his reading. I don’t have anything against Andrew personally or even against the poetry, I just wasn’t taken, although every now and then a word pair drew my attention. The tiny publishing industry would have supported the publication of these mere word pairs, which I would have liked. My roommate, Eric, loved the whole poems. He said, “It was wonderful! It was so musical!” So there you go. Consult Eric for further analysis, or check out Andrew’s book forthcoming from Book Thug, which has yet to make a bad editorial decision.

I’d recently seen Sara read in Buffalo at the Small Press Book Fair, so I thought I knew what to expect. But the poetry reading in Buffalo was a marathon where everyone got only 5 minutes, and I was wrong to think that Wintz could be properly represented in 5 minutes. At the Zinc reading she also read short of her time, but in such a way that I craved more–something that rarely happens to me at a poetry reading. My favorite of her reading strategies was a technique in which she (a very small person) seemed to contort her body with the effort of stopping and starting the poem so that one heard only fragments. The sonic effect was like changing t.v. channels rapidly, but the performative/visual effect was mesmerizing. Here is one of the poems she read like that.

Ben Friedlander was like a big brother to my generation at Buffalo, so I must like him, according to my friend. In actuality I do like Ben’s work most of the time, as well as Carla’s and as well as Ben’s editorial and scholarly production. He’s one of those good all-around poets who not only writes but maintains the community. I liked most of last third of his set, but in the first part of the set there were many poems referencing people in the audience, namely Flarf people in one quadrant of the audience, a technique that while very entertaining to those named, sometimes alienates others in the audience who aren’t “in” the in jokes. I was seated between two people who weren’t “in” and who were trying hard to pay attention but, I think, felt left out. So that is a hazard to reading poems like that– it’s hard to win over a new audience. That said, there was quite a good poem about Nada Gordon that really captured something about her– I think this was my favorite piece. I like Ben’s voice. I would like to put it on my iPod and fall asleep to it. His reading style is very much like his personality– happy, with a ready grin, but calming, fatherly, instructional like a bedtime story.

After Ben’s reading, I met some cool people so I left.

Protected: Divorce

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Other fairy tales (less pleasant)

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Marriage manifesto

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Despondence

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

What I Loved

A friend of mine with whom I sometimes attend readings whines that I “never like anything” or sometimes switches it up to “you only like your Buffalo friends.” It is true that I derive much inspiration from two of my Buffalo friends, Ric Royer and Christopher Fritton, and that people who went through Buffalo comprise much of my diasporic support network: Lauren Shufran, Linda Russo, Kevin Thurston, Mike Kelleher, Matt Chambers, Matthew Klane, Mike Basinski, Aaron Lowinger and the Houseketeers, Jonathan Skinner, Lisa Forrest, Douglas Manson, Sarah Campbell, Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, etc. That’s what happens when you go to a great poetry school– you end up meeting a lot of amazing poets. Most of the poets I know, I know because they either went to or visited Buffalo while I was there. To “only like my Buffalo friends” would still involve liking a lot of people.

But of course my network is much wider, and presently I think of myself as working in a virtual community that includes

Different perspectives from Schiavo, Field and White

I’m unemployed in NYC, so right now I’m limiting myself to kostenlos activities, or activities that only cost the price of the subway fare (which is already $2 each way). Thank heavens for reading series like Zinc and Burning Chair, where I not only see friends but hear good poetry for free.

I understand the need to charge for poetry readings when you have a super-important historical venue and a staff like at the Poetry Project, and I appreciate the capitalist sentiments behind operations like the Bowery Poetry Club. Moreover, I think poets should get paid when they read work, and I’m a fan of the pass-the-hat game. But sometimes you just really don’t have $6 to spend on a poetry reading and you still want to hear some poetry and support the poets (with your ears, not your wallet). Thus, yay Burning Chair and Zinc.

So. Last night Burning Chair offered up three readers: Michael Schiavo, Farrah Field, and Jared White. The only one I’d heard of was Schiavo, who read first. Perhaps the first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t reading in The Poetry Voice. He had a certain brash, confident stage presence (although I don’t think he’s really like that offstage) and a resonant voice, more like a poet from two generations ago. First he read from The Mad Song, which dates from 2006. This sounded like British 3rd-wave modernism to me, although there were signs that it postdated that era. I thought it might have been more interesting if it were consistently anachronistic–if he really were writing a Basil Bunting-esque text in the 2000s. But the chronoaesthetics seemed unwieldy and in the end, it wasn’t my cup of Earl Grey.

More recent work proved better– as one would hope that one’s recent work is better than one’s older work, but sadly that isn’t always the case. The second poem, “The Preacher and the Goat,” Schiavo dedicated to Obama. It had a Southern folksy rhythm (this might be most easily compared to the cadence of speech on My Name is Earl) and a recurrence of crop imagery. The poem’s nostalgic images brought to mind old (but not too old– 1970s-80s) photographs that have been damaged by light and heat, the way that everything in the South is and like the color filters in the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? I don’t know if Schiavo is Southern, but he definitely captured something about the South–the endless fields of corn, the way everything is slow and heat-damaged. The style and timeliness of the piece seemed truer to Schiavo as a writer than the previous work. Some lines I liked (which may or may not be accurate and have accurate line breaks):

“the butterfly / though she has always been a violent machine”

“hang ropes from their trees as a sign of intimidation”

“I have a vote in my pocket primed to roll away the stone”

I should probably mention with regard to this piece the Southern racial politics involved. For instance, the second line here– I don’t recall whether the context of the piece made the allusion to “Strange Fruit” and lynching completely evident or whether it was, like the first line here, about crops. Alongside the vegetables and mnemotechnics there were these violent images. To me that’s very Southern–in the beautiful lazy South you can’t get away from this history of violence that underlies everything, that’s part of the red earth.

I particularly liked the violent butterfly. I have my own interest in butterflies but this line made the butterfly sound more like a cross between a locust and a Golden Snitch, and I remembered how my grandfather hated the little white moths that laid eggs in his garden.

The strength of that one poem dominated Schiavo’s reading in my mind, and I thought about how we publish books and chapbooks and magazines and online writings but that a good poem comes along once in a hundred thousand, and that when it comes it’s pretty easy to recognize. I thought about how we could save a lot of trees and time if we just published broadsides when those singular poems come along. It would be cool if you could go to a poetry deli and pick your favorite broadsides and have them sewn into your own self-edited anthology.

But then Farrah Field read. Again, I was surprised by the lack of Poetry Voice. Farrah was more like a storyteller, and her poems were about her “pirate alter-ego” who she invented to talk about the social pressures she felt when she turned 30. As someone feeling similar social pressures, these poems really appealed to me. Part of what appealed to me about them was that they were not about Farrah, they were about a pirate. I much prefer metaphor to first-person confessionalism. And Field had done a thorough job of writing about how a pirate might think and feel–from his zen-like calmness during periods of extreme violence, to musing about knots and how a baby might feel the same in his arms as a sack of gunpowder, to riparian navigation and thoughts about “land life,” it seemed like Field had gotten eerily into character to write these poems. Though she seemed to borrow from contemporary fashionable genres (comics, movies), Field’s poems weren’t merely “hip” pirate poems (doesn’t it seem like pirates are everywhere these days?). Recurring detailed images of bounty/booty (what the ship’s hold held), knot networks and mapping made the diegesis particularly convincing. And from within that diegesis, within my sympathy for Captain Fielding, I could think about my own life and the cultural expectations imposed upon it in a different way.

For me, this is one of the major goals of poetry and of all art: to make a reader/listener consider his/her cultural surroundings as plastic (i.e. malleable) by disjoining him/her from them for a moment. To a certain extent, I want poetry/art to represent my culture, to speak to me in a Wordsworthian or Homerian way– to record the spatiotemporal coordinates of my experience in artistic/”higher” language. But when the poem’s done with that recording function, I want it to say: it could be otherwise. The world is like this but it could be different. The poem doesn’t have to say that outright–aesthetic displacement is enough to make one think differently about the way one interacts with the world, and that displacement might snowball into social change.

A few lines from Field’s poems that I wrote down are less stupendous out of context:

“this is honesty: two ships pass each other and one will sink.”

“she isn’t sinking, merely burning in pirate waters.”

“you’re supposed to have answers by now. / You’re worried there’s nowhere to port.”

The final line here shows something of the rhythm in Field’s work, but all of these lines are places where Field’s description of the pirate’s life intersect with “real life,” where the metaphor becomes translucent.

Field’s work made me rethink the publishing thoughts I’d had with Schiavo’s work, because the pirate poems worked well as a small series. They necessitated a little book, a chapbook. Field has a book coming out, but these poems aren’t in it, so I don’t know how to get ahold of them. I did ask her for work for Foursquare, but if they are not a chapbook then they should be (ehem, Maureen).

There was a break and then Jared White read. There was a lot of parataxis, which doesn’t to my mind doesn’t serve the same plastic function that it did 20 years ago when Ron Silliman was writing The New Sentence. Parataxis is legible now in ways it wasn’t when Perelman confounded Jameson, and the reader’s ability to assimilate disparate thoughts nowadays makes all but the most outlandish paratactical maneuvers governable so that they don’t have this plastic effect of disruption/displacement. White’s use of parataxis, informed as it was by Jack Spicer, was particularly bland (I’m not trying to be mean, I just like the play on Spicer/bland). Then, I have never been a fan of Spicer. Lines I did like:

“the onion sprouted in the compost / who is rooting” (sucker-pun)

“I had all these wants / that were actually good things to want”

“the action– you said– lacked space to flesh it out properly”

“in these costumes of adults we can do anything.”

White’s reading proved once again that although it’s considered the prestigious spot to read second, or last, this isn’t always the most advantageous slot if you want a rapt audience, because if the previous reader did a good job then it’s hard to pay further attention.

Bad press

Let me begin by saying that I never actually mean to cause controversy.

Protected: Food

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: A beautiful spring day

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Square. Round.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

American morning

- 

-
A bright, sunny, slightly cold morning. I interviewed for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. It was weird– the school (Washington Irving H.S.) was beautiful. Afterwards, I ran smack into spring. The farmer’s market at Union Square had loads of spring flowers and colorful eggs alongside the typical winter fare– hot apple cider, cellar veggies, fruit pies, fresh bread, hand-dyed yarn, candles, honey, and jam. Seeing these winter goods reminded me of my favorite children’s book, The Ox-Cart Man.

Protected: What I really wanted to say

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

photojournalism

I’ve had way too much fun this week. First there was the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair. Then the Outside Voices reading at ACA Gallery. Last night, saw my cousin’s band,Drive-By Truckers at Terminal 5. Creative: finished February 4SQ, ditched the Anthology, began a small chapbook. Job: unemployed, but scheduled two interviews (if anyone has advice about the NYCTF interviews please let me know.) Love: saw lots of old friends.

2.9, Valentine

-

-

Foursquare February, featuring love-ly cover art from Bettina Cronquist and poetry by Deborah Poe, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Julia Drescher, and Shannon Smith. For sale at Etsy. (January’s issue is delayed due to cover art issues. I have cover art issues often. A poet making a magazine that contains the work of poets and artists is a recipe for delay.)

Protected: On the job search front

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Musings on the Anthology after the first Anthology reading

Last night, Outside Voices Anthology authors read at the d.a. levy series coordinated by Boog City’s David Kirschenbaum, at the lovely ACA art gallery. Since the Anthology was only recently canceled, I expected many things: no one to show up; to have to explain again my motives for giving it up; a lack of energy; anger, sadness. I did have to explain– once, to an old colleague– that I had given the Anthology up. But the other bad feelings I expected to characterize the event didn’t, and the crowd size was reasonable. Everyone seemed happy to see each other and the readings were mostly successful. I had the following feelings:

• Oh, these young poets are so promising and great and I wish I could just finish the Anthology so their work would be out in the world!
• These poets have grown since I solicited poetry from them. The Anthology may no longer be representative of their talents. I wonder what kind of Anthology I could make that would keep these guys associated and in touch with one another but not pin them down at any stage of their careers? That would grow with them?

(I like bullet points.) I had also been thinking about the comment here that an Anthology (especially a print one) would never be able to capture the energy and– life? of a community. Once you put something into print, it’s stagnant. This feels differently even with a book than with a chapbook– a book feels dead, while a chapbook feels like a landing on a staircase. So I’ve been thinking about how to make the Anthology project livable. It’s still a valuable project right now because there’s a big list of people on the website (like, the website is already fulfilling one aim of the Anthology– to bring people together). But I wonder how the project might morph into something else, something more useful to us as a group than a tome that will be consigned to a shelf?

Another thing I thought about at the reading was the sound component. As some of you know there’s a cd inclusion with the Anthology that featured sound poetry. It was edited by Canadian sound poet Max Middle. It’s a smaller venture, and thanks to Max’s good sense it is almost complete. So my friend and ally j.s. makkos told me that he will be able to put out this part of the Anthology within the next six weeks. This makes me happy– that someone is already doing something about it.

Death to the Anthology

I am giving up on the Anthology for the following reasons:

• I don’t have the money to do it like I’d like to do it.
• Receiving daily emails from people who want to know when the Anthology will be out or other silly emails from people who have nothing better to do than hound me about it stresses me out
• I can’t get 400 people to proof a book. I can’t even get 400 people to give me bios in a reasonable time frame. For that matter, there were submissions flowing in two months after the submissions deadline. I don’t know if such problems derive from the number of people, their youth and inexperience with professional projects, the fact that they’re poets, or my own errors, but looking down the line at the number of details that must still be dealt with irritates me. Getting 400 people to do anything is insanely difficult, who would have thought?
• It takes away time from my life and my work. Rather than improving my quality of life in any way, it is a stress factor. I thought I could do it when I was bored in grad school, but now I’m not bored in grad school and I have enough problems with my own life without inventing new (publishing) problems. I need a job– I need this not to be a stress factor once I get a job. I need to write– I am a poet in my own right and the stress of this project kills my ability to write my own poetry.

I have help– offering to help isn’t going to make the project happen.

If your press would like to take over the project, I will send you all the files I have. Outside Voices will still be around as a sometimes-publisher. I am not an editor– or, I don’t want to be an editor, and in many respects I’m a bad editor. I feel an obligation to the community to edit– I often find myself resenting people who don’t either run a press or give significant sums of time or money to those who do, since publishing doesn’t just “happen” and living off the fat of the land without contributing to the process seems selfish– but I will continue to edit Foursquare, so I will still be doing my part.

If you have pre-ordered the Anthology, your payment will be refunded within 90 days.

Tomorrow night’s reading will go on as scheduled. Even as a ghost, the Anthology is a unifying element. Although the commercialism of poetry readings seems almost pervasive, I think we don’t need to have a book to promote in order to have a good reading.

Protected: One line

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Civilization and Savagery: Plasticity and the work of Cai Guo-Qiang

Sunday I went to brunch with my brother and his girlfriend, who are approaching their one-year anniversary but, as they will tell you, still like each other enough to make out at any available moment (hooray). We had a delicious brunch at Regate, funded by my comparatively wealthy and generous brother, complete with unlimited mimosas and bloody marys. I had poached eggs with capers, tomatoes and feta, so I opted for the spicy bloody marys which were quite good.

After brunch we traveled uptown to the amazing Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit at the Guggenheim. This was my third trip to the Guggenheim in six months, and I anticipated being a bit Guggenheimed-out. Instead, I was really excited by the work I saw.

We waited in line outside for about 15 minutes before we could even enter. The museum was packed. When we entered, we saw a series of white cars hanging from the ceiling to the floor, penetrated with shafts of dancing lights. The series of cars was hung so that each car was like a still in a film of a car bomb going off (like viewing all the stills together in a line). This deconstruction of film and its manifestation as sculpture was made all the more awesome by the scale of the installation, which took up the entire atrium, and by the physics of the thing: there were multiple cars hanging from the ceiling filled with vast networks of cables and computers controlling the light display.

But this piece was just the beginning of a series of serial pieces that combined large-scale thinking with an incredible sense of space/installation. We next encountered a group of stuffed tigers completely shot through with arrows. My brother’s girlfriend found these offensive, but I thought that the piece commented well on the violence done to endangered species; moreover I didn’t think it was more offensive than making a film of a car bomb going off into an aesthetically pleasing gallery installation. On the plaque for the tigers I read the pithy phrase, “civilization and savagery.” This contradiction was a good one for characterizing most of the work in the exhibition, which often commentated on the use of violent methods by civilized society or by those attempting to bring about a more civilized society.

More pieces involving arrows followed and I tuned out a bit until we came to a room with multiple small installations including a bag of live snakes, a birdcage hanging from the ceiling filled with live canaries, a clear curtain with anatomical drawings studded with acupuncture needles, and a boat filled with red tissue-paper lanterns in nontraditional shapes like airplanes, houses, and cars. The largest piece in this room was a river-shaped pool through which one could row a small hide vessel. Excited by the idea of participatory art, the three of us waited half an hour in a line of mostly children for our turns in the boat. If you go to the exhibit, I cannot recommend the trip highly enough, even if you must wait for a long time.

-

-

In the vessel, rowing through the gallery filled with people looking at the art from the normal perspective, one’s relation to viewing changes significantly. First, one becomes part of the piece in that one is viewed by the other gallery members as a “live animal” in the way that the snakes and birds are. One operates the piece, making it work for the viewers. At the same time, one views the viewers as a separate piece, perhaps titled “Viewers at an Exhibition,” so that who or what is on exhibit shifts.

Second, moving through the gallery space by rowing a small boat through water changes the way that one uses one’s body with regard to the space, thus calling attention to the efforts required under normal viewing conditions. Both the space and time of viewing are disrupted. One uses different muscles when rowing than when walking, and moving through water is different from moving through air. The awkward way one must row the strange little vessel forces one to move slowly through the gallery, even if one tries to go quickly. When one leaves the river, one’s spatiotemporal relation to the gallery has changed irrevocably.

After this experience, we went slowly to the next tier in the winding gallery and saw wolves hurling themselves at a plexiglass wall, a commentary on civilization’s tendency to happily build violent walls between countries (Berlin, China, Israel). Cai’s fascination with the violence of wall-building was repeated in another piece in which he “expanded” the Great Wall of China by setting off fireworks along a ghost path succeeding the current wall, making a dragon-like wall of smoke and fire.

Continuing upwards, I got stuck for a long time with a group of others who were watching the “how these things are made” video. It was fascinating and involved lots of things exploding. This was a preview to the bulk of the rest of the exhibition which comprised 2-D works of exploded gunpowder on paper. Although some of these works began as figural drawings using black brushstrokes of gunpowder like the black ink of Chinese calligraphy, the lighting of the gunpowder disfigured the figures leaving the representation almost unrecognizable in most cases. One could derive a sense of the organic, as many pictures were of natural things like wolves and trees, but the gunpowder introduced a factor of dangerous indeterminacy.

It feels almost trite to comment on the traditional Chinese elements in the work of an artist who works (geographically) on a international scale and comments on timeless human patterns, but these elements are inextricable from the power of the work. For example, in making the gunpowder “paintings,” Cai uses languid calligraphic strokes reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy to mark out long black lines made of one of China’s “great inventions,” gunpowder. The violence of exploding the gunpowder produces an unpredictable, potentially hazardous outcome– as one watches in the videos of how the work is made, Cai employs assistants who quickly damp out the fire after the explosion. The result is often beautiful. These two inventions of “civilized” Chinese society, writing and gunpowder, can produce beautiful texts, but the unpredictable outcome could have been otherwise. The fine line between beauty and violence invades the viewer’s senses.

Another example is the series of life-sized clay figures that depict a violent clash between the wealthy and impoverished. When was the last time you heard the phrase “life-sized clay figures”? The strange phenomenon of the famous terra cotta warriors is haunted by one’s sense of what terrible war-like cunning and violence lies in their history. Similarly, the war-like act of rent collection shows in the faces of Cai’s money-warriors. The violence of class struggle is echoed in the real physical disintegration of the artwork, which is unfired clay and thus subject to the elements as well as the clumsiness of visitors. The unfinished pieces strew the viewer’s path, set up as a work-in-progress complete with buckets of moist clay, notes, plastic coverings and wire forms rather than housed in the comparatively safe little nooks where art is usually displayed at the Guggenheim. The “safety” of the work is compromised, echoing the social dangers the work depicts.

Cai’s pieces reinvigorated my interest in installation art and in how art’s ability to change the viewer’s sense of time and space might affect the way the world operates. I don’t imagine a world without violence (social change, like all action– like all thought– is violent), but for the agent to be delayed and made to think about his or her actions appeals to me as a method for decreasing the “savagery” in “civilized” life.

Wandering thoughts on Academia and job-hunting

Although there were many straws on the camel’s back by the time it broke with regard to academia (I will not begin to list the discouraging, disrespectful, condescending, limiting, frustrating comments from more than one faculty member at UVA, including my would-be dissertation director, regarding my ideas, projects, interests, and teaching– thank god for the few faculty who thought I might be relatively intelligent and worthy of their attention), I think one of the first things that really turned me off was attending the MLA. Thus, I fiercely encourage all those in pursuit of a Ph.D. to avoid the MLA until they actually have a job interview there. If you go before your job interview, and especially if you go while your friends are interviewing, you might get a taste of how dire the academic job market actually is. And you will know that, even with publications and teaching experience and invited lectures and post-docs and interpersonal skills and awards and a good academic pedigree, your chances of getting a job of any kind are very low. Luckily, there’s always adjunct comp! — Which you will probably end up teaching even if you worked your ass off creating a beautiful and jam-packed c.v.

Along with the stressful environment of the MLA, I watched a very intelligent friend of mine– one of the smartest people in the Poetics Program, to my mind– get shuffled off to a 4-4 non-tenure-track gig, comp-based, in the middle of nowhere. Having already sacrificed one relationship to Academia, I did not like the idea of having to follow Academia around to crappy jobs in out-of-the-way places. I did not like watching this person get treated that way. I heard horror stories from everyone, though– years of applying with no results; moving cross-country every other year to follow the available jobs; never having time (with these 4-4 schedules and the plethora of committees and red tape) to finish one’s first book and thus having a bugger of a time getting promoted despite one’s intelligence and abilities. I found the idea of devoting 3-4 years of my life to researching and writing a dissertation while living on graduate student income, only to be shuttled off to East Nowhere University and get paid the same salary as an entry-level position (in a city of my choosing) to be very unappetizing. I gave up emotionally long before I physically dropped out.

Now I am applying for jobs, and although I’ve had a few medium-wage jobs since leaving UVA, it’s hard to find a salaried position at which I might be able to utilize some of my skills. I didn’t really realize that I had a skill set until I began applying for jobs. For one, I speak English. I can answer the phone, type (82 wpm!), write, edit, maintain websites (as long as they aren’t terribly advanced), serve customers, research, etc. Who knew that these qualified as “skills”? I never really thought about them. I thought skills were like, whether you’d had a book published by the time you had your Ph.D. in hand (by the age of 30). I thought “time management” meant trying to teach, fulfill degree requirements, prep papers for conferences and journals, maintain a creative career, and run a press at the same time (not to mention all the people who do these things and have families!). I don’t really know what to think about this other world. It’s kind of a culture shock.

It’s hard to find a job out here in the Real World– I mean a job that might hold my interest and pay well enough for me to stop looking for other jobs. But I don’t think it’s any harder than finding a job in Academia, and my starting salary will probably be the same or better. I might have ended up in exactly this same place 4 years from now, but with a Ph.D. and a (useless) dissertation. And with my M.A. and teaching experience, I can still get those adjunct comp jobs– in a city that I actually want to live in. I might change my mind after working in the Real World for awhile and I might choose to go back to school for a marketable degree like an MLS. But as cruel at the Real World’s job market is, it feels like a huge relief to not be facing the tortures of the Academic job market.

Protected: Reincarnating Riding

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Chapbooks

-

-

Yesterday I made a whole buncha copies of Problemattica and bird-book. They’re for sale at Etsy and will also be available at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair.