Shabby-Old-Man Poetry, Etc.

This morning I woke up badly wanting to listen to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman“–most likely triggered by its being the first of many wonderful tracks in the mind’s-ear-blowing playlist at the bottom of this fascinating piece on the “alternative scene” in 1990 Durban, South Africa.

Instead, I listened to “The Building” by the Mekons (and then the rest of the Lipstick Traces CD that accompanied one of my favorite books of all time, the same book Michael Robbins calls “the best book ever written about pop music”)–most likely because of how the experience in sound “O Superman” is seems to me to fit with the “sound poetry” that comprises the Lipstick Traces CD.

And then I remember discussions I’ve had with the friends I’ve made in the Creative Writing program I’m attending. Specifically, I remember talking about how my poems tend to contrast with those of my friend Shane, whose poems I feel are often intimate and quietly erotic whispering (although the two QLRS poems don’t quite demonstrate this as well as some others I’ve read).

My poems, however, I describe as the ravings of a madman on a street corner. Specifically, I’m thinking of what Greil Marcus calls in Lipstick Traces the “shabby old man with a tin whistle, standing in the rain trying to make himself heard (94)” a figure embodied in the desperation that seems about to destroy itself at the same time is is preserved in “The Building.”

Reading what Greil Marcus says about the song makes me feel both inspired and exhausted, reaching toward an ideal I can’t ever fulfill.

+++++

I’ve just discovered Brian Joseph Davis, whose most recent project is visual: The Composites, which are images of literary characters using “police sketch software.” I find that very exciting but not as much as his earlier sound-driven work, which includes a response to Marcus’s discussion of Theodor Adorno.

In Lipstick Traces, despite characterizing Adorno as “no doubt [understanding] the Sex Pistols as a return to Kristallnacht if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die in 1969 (72),” Marcus nevertheless asserts that “you can find punk between every other line of Minima Moralia (ibid.),” and that

After 1977, a spoken rant lp could have been made into an album called Big Ted Says No and it would have made perfect pop sense, and for that matter it did: listen to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post-Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins. (72-73)

Davis, in his words, “take[s] this pop wish and make[s] it come true” with four songs that use Adorno’s aphorisms as lyrics howled along to the backing of music from such songs as, say, Minor Threat’s self-titled song. Davis’s Minima Moralia is mentioned here, albeit all too briefly.

Davis’s other recordings include:

1. Voice Over (a single track composed of 5000 movie taglines),
2. a women’s chorale performing the End-User License Agreement on Sony/BMG’s notorious rootkit CD releases,
3. 22 songs by the Carpenters played simultaneously as part of Greatest Hit,
4. 10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played (from Stravinsky and Mahler to the Dead Kennedys and 2 Live Crew),
5. passersby trying to remember the lyrics to the Beatles’ “Yesterday,”
6. an Original Soundtrack of 20 television sets and DVD players playing the “endlessly looping musical cues” from DVD menus

Pleased to Meet You: Juliana Leslie

The joys of discovery! I’ve never heard of Juliana Leslie before I came across the following tweet from “Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker” (I just love that)

"Be a better/ bluebell": fine inviting mysterious poems by Juliana Leslie. New book soon from @CoffeeHousePress http://t.co/u3l2o98T

— Stephen Burt (@accommodatingly) September 23, 2012

Stephen Burt‘s recommendation didn’t disappoint. Clicking on the Everyday Genius link, I immediately fell in love with the first two lines of “Confluence,” the first of four poems by Leslie:

A patient feeling I heard you say
a patient mouth absorbs the spark of a secret train

Leslie writes great opening lines, and when I say “opening lines,” I don’t only mean this poem and the other three (“Softer More Radiant Signal,” “Two Ideas,” and “Two More Ideas in a Different Mode”). I’m talking about how all four “parts” of “Confluence” have great openings. And middles. And endings.

Let me correct myself then: Leslie writes opening great lines. More examples:

• “The Dress I Wrote Backwards”
• “The Age of Speculation”
• “Figurine”
• “Queues”
• “Leaflets”

Actually, after reading the prose poems John Gallaher shares here, Leslie writes really beautifully, whether in lines or not. Rob McClennan’s review of Leslie’s debut collection offers more samples of her prose poems and lyrics, both short and long.

Now I’m itching to buy a copy of More Radiant Signal AND its follow-up, Green is for World, scheduled for release this November. In the meantime, I’m going to look for more of her poems online and will just leave you with this short video of her reading some poems.

Meditations on the Untimely: Thinking Through My Thesis

This morning: I checked out the newly-uploaded special issue of Screening the Past. It’s theme? “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time.”

Last Wednesday: I tweeted the following to get it out of my head and see how it grows:

Make it new. Make it unusual. Make it contemporary. Make it contemporaneous.

— Andrew Ty (@EnterDuration) September 5, 2012

Last weekend: I picked up my copy of Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries, this time to read the essay “Minor Writing and Minor Literature.” I’ve gone through bits of it before, enough to recall a remark near the beginning of the piece about how Deleuze’s “concept of minor literature has been of some use to students of postcolonial, ethnic, minority, and marginal literatures (63).”

I’m still reading it to see exactly what Bogue proposes as “some [of those] use[s]” in the hopes it can help me articulate my thoughts in response to some remarks made here. For now, I’m struck by Bogue’s description of how Deleuze writes his histories of philosophy almost like an extension of the spirit of Nietzchean Unzeitgemässe: 

Rather than offering a narrative of the development of ideas, arguments, positions, and so on, he describes the functioning of specific problems and sets them in resonance with one another through the unfolding of the problems proper to his own thought. In this manner, Deleuze creates his own precursors…and brings them into a kind of untimely, interactive coexistence within the problems he articulates. To the extent that Deleuze himself is successful in formulating genuine problems, his thought should disrupt conventional narratives of the history of philosophy, and his accounts of others’ thought should bring into existence an idiosyncratic, untimely network of precursors that constitutes an “antihistory” of his own thought.” (67-68, emphasis mine)

Because I haven’t read much by or even about Deleuze*, I can’t quite assess whether or not this is more Deleuzian than Bogueian, though I trust that it is and can be both. What’s more important for me right now is how, in many ways, this “antihistory” of “my own thought” is the approach I want/need to use for the critical essay of my thesis. As what should ultimately be a statement of poetics, I have fundamental difficulties getting there from my preoccupations with what can be called “discourses of newness.” Now, it seems clearer, if no less contentious or difficult:

What I need to do is an antihistory of my writing, at least those poems I’m including in my thesis.

* The only Deleuze I’ve read is “Literature and Life,” the essay Bogue cites as where “the larger theoretical assumptions that feed into the notion of minor literature…are neatly summarized” through its description of “the function of literature in terms of stuttering, becoming, fabulation, and visions/auditions (70).”

Also, though I’d like to say Ronald Bogue’s essays are engaging, I’m a little hesitant because this isn’t a book I’ve read straight from cover to cover. I leaf through it, going through its essay on death metal (!) or bumping into/against Bogue’s claim that “[a]ccording to Deleuze, the basic linguistic act is not the phoneme but the statement (énoncé), or speech act (110).”

Another time, I read “Deleuze, Foucault, and the Playful Fold of the Self” to give myself a chance to understand more than two pages of Deleuze’s book on Foucault, which I’ve owned for more than a decade already (excerpt here). I really want to understand the dynamic between Deleuze and Foucault. Maybe I can get another book, but I’m scared I might end up leaving that unread as well.

For now: thesis!

The Spoils: August 2012

1. The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry by John Ashbery
2. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination by Wallace Stevens
3. Romanticism by April Bernard
4. Savage Night by Jim Thompson
5. Daydream Nation (33⅓:) by Matthew Stearns
6. Rid of Me (33⅓:) by Kate Schatz

Man on the Dump 2

Because I need to start closing tabs on my Web browser:

1. Benjamin Friedlander‘s One Hundred Etudes and Citizen Cain (Friedlander interviewed by Nada Gordon)
2. Bryan D. Dietrich’s “Gotham Wanes,” Chad Parmenter‘s Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book, and Stephen Burt’s essay “Poems about Superheroes.” Samples of Parmenter’s work, though not all are sonnets:
   1. “Batman Leaves a Sonnet on Selina Kyle’s Voicemail”
   2. “Batman in the Garden of Eden”
   3. “Batman vs. Osiris”
   4. “Batman in Mr. Freeze’s Glacierworks”
   5. “Batman’s Closing Time”
3. “These Great Sentinels” by Geoffrey Nutter is a contemporary nature poem I like. And yes, I initially thought it was about these Sentinels.
4. Caryl Pagel’s Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death
5. notes on Umberto Eco’s “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” and “Living in the New Middle Ages”
6. “To Be Not Stupid” (great title) by Amy De’Ath (great name) from her collection Caribou (great song). Earlier collection: Erec & Enide.
7. Susan Schultz’s “Memory Cards: Oppen Series” (prose poems that begin with a phrase from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems)
8. I actually first came across Oppen’s “lyric valuables” through Hank Lazer. Here’s a review of his essay collection Lyric & Spirit.
9. excerpt from Andrew Mossin’s Drafts of Shelley
10. A blog entry displaying a collection of vinyl from Dischord Records.

Pick Your Edition:

I love this. I also got into stairs via Escher and the tribute to him at the end of Labyrinth. I also liked learning about l’esprit d’escalier from an issue of The Sandman.  These days, my favorite personal associations with stairs have to do with the cover of Bauhaus’s Swing the Heartache and Ann Lauterbach’s On a Stair and the photographs she took for the cover of Or to Begin Again.

 

More stairs here.

Burial, Hauntology, Etc.

Six years since a blog entry called “Phonograph Blues” introduced me to Derrida’s concept of hauntology, not directly through Spectres of Marx but through Burial’s records. My grasp of the concept (not too strong) and my love of the artist’s gray wisps of electronica’s echoes (very strong) really owes a lot to Mark Fisher’s blog entry and the “unedited transcript” of his 2007 interview with Burial himself.

Other interviews with Burial include this one from The Guardian that begins with him referring to himself as “a rubbish super-hero,” the one from Fact magazine where he mentions that “his favourite sound in the world is the motion-tracker from Aliens,” and the Cyclic Defrost feature-interview that calls the Burial track “Archangel” a pop song that hasn’t been invented yet.

As for hauntology in general, Fisher has been discussing it since at least the start of 2006. Here are three I like, though I’m sure there are many others worth reading:

• “Hauntology Now”
• “Home is Where the Haunt is: The Shining‘s Hauntology”
• “Is Pop Undead?”

After Fisher, I guess Xaven Taner’s “Hauntology: A Primer – The Absent Present Resonates” is a pretty good round-up, too. After all, I love Taner’s special section on Nurse with Wound and his “Reflections on David Lynch’s Inland Empire“ is a short but interesting read.

Somewhere on Taner’s site is a review of Inception. I like Christopher Nolan a lot, but he always gets accidentally bumped off my mind by David Lynch. Here, Inland Empire beats Inception. It’s just like how, a few years ago, my first viewing and enjoyment of Memento was derailed by my viewing of Mulholland Drive a day later. Coincidence kills!

Ciaran Carson

These are by no means the only places online where one may find poems written by Ciaran Carson, but it’s a start. First, the “official” pages:

• His Academy Of American Poets page (yes, I know he’s Irish, but I’m still glad he’s present there, since he’s not on the Poetry Foundation site) feature four poems: the anaphoric “Fear,” the condensed lines of “Home” and “Let Us Go Then,” and the imagery of violet in “The Assignation.”
• His Poetry Archive page also has four poems with (unfortunately low-volume) audio readings: “Belfast Confetti,” the first poem of his I’ve read and still among my favorites, the imagery of white this time in “Snow,”  the cute “Catmint Tea,” and “Fear” again.

Carson has translated Irish epic poems, from the traditional heroics of The Táin to the erotic farce of The Midnight Court, as well as Dante‘s Inferno.  He has also “adapted” sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme in The Alexandrine Plan (and used the same Alexandrine line for his own book-lengh sonnet sequence The Twelfth of Never). It seems appropriate then for his work to be translated as well in:

• a Spanish-language essay on “the quotidian violence” in Carson’s work that contain the English texts and Spanish translations of “Belfast Confetti,” “Night Out,” “Campaign,” and “Ambition”
• an Italian-language essay on Carson’s “poetic maps and stories of Belfast” that feature the English texts and Italian translations of “Turn Again,” “Loaf,” “Punctuation,” the celebrated “Dresden” (as well as, once again, “Belfast Confetti” and “Campaign”), “Smithfield Market,” “Travellers,”  and “Slate Street School”

Here are two big-name periodicals with one poem each:

• “Through” from The New Yorker
• “Second Time Round” in The Guardian

Finally, two other sources:

• a discussion thread on The Blue Dragon has two moving poems of love and potential loss: “Pas De Deux” and “The Story of Madame Chevalier”
• an unpublished personal anthology of favorite poems from 2000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. include three poems by Carson: “Bagpipe Music,” “Dresden” once again, and “Hamlet.”

W.S.

WordStars, word processors:

Wallace Stevens
W.S. Di Piero
W.S. Graham
W.S. Merwin
W.S. Gilbert
W.S. Rendra

Word Stew. Warning Sign.

Odes To Nightingales

Keats, of course. And Benedict Cumberbatch reading it.

And then Stevens says this:

Vachel Lindsay, however, gives us “The Chinese Nightingale,” with its cartoonish Orientalism (but which isn’t the same as this 1935 cartoon of the same title.)

To go back to the Keats poem, however, and its exploration of music (as compared to the focus on the plastic representational arts in “Ode On A Grecian Urn”), here are two different songs from The Dubliners and Julee Cruise.

And I’ve nearly forgotten: med-school dropout, nightclub singer, and Eyes Wide Shut character Nick Nightingale.