L A G N I A P P E

• Reviews of:
  • Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  • Gift and Verdict by Roberto Tejada
  • The Evacuated Forest Papers by Jeff Conant
  • The Promises of Glass by Michael Palmer
  • Tottering State: Selected Early Poems: 1963-1983 by Tom Raworth
  • It Is If I Speak by Joe Wenderoth
  • Dear Sweetheart, by Laird Hunt
  • "One's Own Mind" by Michael Boughn
  • Between Dog and Wolf by David Levi Strauss
• Essays:
  • On Brice Marden's Hydra, Summer 1990 V by Robert Creeley
  • This Poetry Which Is Not One by Logan Esdale
  • Elephants Lay Cracked Eggs by Alan Gilbert
  • Stages of Man and Earth: James Ragan, the poet behind The Hunger Wall by Maureen Holm

Misery is not only suffering, it is basic to a vast number of human forms whose value it is literature's duty to indicate (just as extreme privation or infectious diseases like leprosy give to men a greatness at which it is impossible to arrive under ordinary circumstances). To understand this paradoxical relation between man and his material poverty, it may be useful to recall that it is a question of duty previously assumed by the christian religion.

Céline's already-celebrated novel could be considered the description of a man's relations to his own death, in some way present in each image of human suffering that appears in the course of the narrative; the use to which a man puts his death--which is made to give a terrible sense to common existence--is, then, not at all a new practice: not fundamentally different from the monastic contemplation of a skull. Whereas the greatness of Voyage au bout de la nuit consists in this, that it has made no appeal to the sentiment of demented pity to which christian servility has obliged the awareness of misery: today, to take notice of this penury, without thereby accepting a worse degradation--of the ordure of death, of the chiennerie of transgression--no longer signals the necessity to humiliate human beings before a superior power; it no longer supports itself with reference to the divine, that is, paternal, authority: on the contrary, it is become the principle of a fraternity proportionally more poignant as the misery is more atrocious, truer as he who takes note of it recognizes a debt to penury, not only for body and breath, but for the whole of life.

It is no longer ours to play Zola's derisory game of forcing his greatness on the bad fortunes of men and, after all, himself--outsider--on the destitute. What separates Voyage au bout de la nuit and gives it human significance, is the exchange of practical life with those lives that penury has rejected from humanity--the exchange of life for death, of death for degradation: a certain degradation being basic to fraternity when that fraternity consists in renouncing claims [revindications] and too personal a consciousness, in order to own up to the claims and consciousness of penury, that is, to the existence of the greater number.--Georges Bataille

It is difficult to place, and I mean this in the best possible way, Roberto Tejada's Gift & Verdict. Here in this brief collection, moral vision and aesthetic argument are unsettled, and thus are unsettling. We are brought back again and again to a central question, a question that indeed has political, personal, and epistemological underpinning. Gift & Verdict prompts us to ask "What am I to make of this?" Whatever answer we provide, we find it is only, as the speaker of one of these poems confesses, "half of what I should have said."

Haunting in its sensuous relief of the personal, this is poetry that seeks out the erotic immediacy of "self" and "other" as they might be found twisted in the barbed wire of Global politics. Positioning itself outside of an ethics of accountability, or the poetics of consolation, (a frequent charge directed against lyric poetry), Tejada's sequence is instead an invocation of sorts. Gift & Verdict is a calling forth of the imagination that thinks in metaphors of a "New world." Such an imagination sees how ironically "cracked paint on the ceiling" can be "an atrocity in the name of some collective self" when we have become inured to slaughter and "the ecstatic catacylsm of the terrifying lull."

In "The Destructive Character," a little discussed, minor fragment by Walter Benjamin, we find what might be a description of that imagination. "The destructive character," writes Benjamin, "knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred." This is to say the destruction that occurs is in no way personally motivated. This is the case when the daemon of a global market economy manifests its destiny in our everyday lives and imaginations. The notes of Gift & Verdict claim that it is an investigation of the "subjectivities, imaginations, and politics of the New World." But this is a redefined New World, one already visited by the destructive character who, as Benjamin describes, has "few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood or a victim lived." This is the space that these poems seek to explore and give voice to.

Although the chapbook is made of roughly eight discrete poems there is a principle of ongoingness that blurs, intentionally one is to presume, the interstices of the discrete units. The various speakers--the murderous, the journalistic, the marginalized, the predatory, and the haptic--and their multiple discourses, become as one voice--a voice that makes its way through various ethical and emotional registers, ("what happens / when you inhabit me thinking / here of each disordered instant with everybody / talking at once, all such a difficult web"). It is a voice that is at once a lyrical fierceness that instead of using an elegance or eloquence to particularize what we might otherwise be tempted to pass over in silence, stupefied with grief, seeks out that which is "as natural to the body as hunger." It seeks to confront violence in an effort not to reconcile it but to know it. The voice is of one "wandering all night, as in a vision" to quote Whitman's "Sleepers."

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself," writes Wittgenstein in his notebooks, and Gift & Verdict seems intent on not deceiving itself or anyone else with false consolation. Redemption must come after confession--it's not clear whether there's redemption here, but to stand unblinking at the worst of things is a start. To expect anything to be tenable after that becomes an act of faith. In what, it becomes increasingly unclear in the face of much of what Gift & Verdict foregrounds. Again we turn for context to Benjamin's essay which explains that the destructive character is attended by "the realization of how immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists." To couch the violence, as the speakers of these poems sometimes do, in terms of "God's Will" is somehow to justify it, to make martyrs out of real people-rendering them as icons or tropes, and erasing their humanity. To be murdered is to have lived, but to be erased, Gift & Verdict tells us, is to have never lived at all. This might be the byproduct of what happens when we make metaphors of people--transfiguring them. We transfigure to dissect. It is only in the negotiations of "executioner and victim" and witness that there's a chance that we might someday, as Tejada's work seems to suggest, "reappear in conversation." What are the ethics of figuration, one might ask in reading these poems, and what are we to make of this "order and lucible enormity"? Whatever the answer, it is a condition that demands our serious and immediate attention as if "our voices mattered amid this kind of predictable / thinking, institution of secrets civil silenced / or stammered over." No matter what else, these poems locate us in a kind of complicity.

To bear witness is problematic (as in Carolyn Forché's work) but to be silent is also problematic, a turning away. In this collection of poems, the places and positions circle out and undermine any easy conventions of morality and ideology. In the end I value this brief and ambitious book because it fronts the basic facts of life and is willing, though with pain and sacrifice, to publish its potential meanness as well as its actual meanness. This is no small thing. It is a book that challenges the reader, tells us that there is no place that we aren't implicated in the world's beauty and its ugliness. "Beautiful and a little terrible," Robinson Jeffers writes of a fire that destroys acres and acres of forest, which by killing everything in its path, is manifestation of the sublime. In the most important ways Gift & Verdict is beautiful and a little terrible.--Richard Deming

Conant, Jeff
The Evacuated Forest Papers
Buck Downs Books, 1998
70 pp., $10.95

These poems are especially timely at the present moment because the revolution that Conant observed has fallen out of the daily news. Their great novelty is that they are the product of a contemporary poetic intelligence, a rarity among eyewitness reports in recent years--which accounts for their pathos, preciousness, and most probably for the strong response Conant's work has aroused from readers as diverse in interest as Howard Zinn and Lyn Hejinian. Conant's poetic intelligence is contemporary because he is at once impassioned, abstract, fixed on details, and disjunctive. For someone--like myself--who has lived in the third world, his book rings true, is the first piece of writing I know of (except for some of Andrew Schelling's Road to Ocosingo) to say anything to the point about below-the-border life during the insurrection.

Beginning this writing, Conant seems to have made a Ginsbergian resolution to be sincere: he would write down whatever he happened to think and feel, regardless of how it would look to a second person. He is well aware--as some readers have failed to realize--that certain of his poems are self-dramatizing. And if many of his lines sound jejune, it is because the efforts of a poet to ennoble himself above an unpleasant world by making poetry out of it cannot but result in the jejune. He should be excused when he writes: "My own / mother, still living, never lived // to be a saint like many. Arriving in / this mountain town she is a goat or / cloud or clod of dirt on a soldier's boot." He also writes: "The men who raped you are the same / Who now circle the globe in satellites / Taking photographs, collecting / Rocks and spacedust, leaving finger- / Prints everywhere, on everything."

A poet with leftist sympathies, you put yourself in the company of an impoverished people under the assumption that the goal of making common cause with the victims of global economic policy outweighs all personal considerations of comfort. If the assumption of sacrifice was never quite consciously made, the brute fact of privation brings it forward. Since you are used to a higher standard of living, you find that everything that happens to you and that you experience is unnecessarily harsh when not repugnant. You feel keenly how worse it is for the others because your participation is an act of intellectual will, and if other North Americans have not risked the same commitments, your comrades in the revolution have been forced by necessity. This is not martyrdom. All of us are paying for our failure to be revolutionary, to take our lives in our own hands. Apathy in the first world and poverty in the third world are themselves forms of that payment. But at the same time your intellectual commitment makes you liable to certain exalted sentiments: solidarity with your fellow men, the sharing of their fate, etc., etc. Conant found himself in Chiapas along with a community of rural workers whose troubles startled him into a new realization of how arbitrary, inhuman, and unspeakably profit-driven the forces of power could be. There were also the ignominious details of routine and the incompetence and posturing of those for whom the revolution is being fought. You believe in the dignity of man and in his capacity to control his own fate. That "Those whose hands are tied / come to the world, like love, / full of love." Your own life has been a struggle to make yourself do only what is essential to untying your hands. You try to be conscious, to put yourself beyond the mercy of the petty detail; you don't gripe about conditions or quarrel as to whose turn it is to fix the plumbing. But here and there in your travels you see men and women refuting every claim the revolution makes for them: insentient, foul, rude, servile, petty and obtrusive. Soon, your most anxious concern becomes to save yourself from the culture of degradation and drabness that endangers every person now living, rich and poor alike. You are willing to make severe sacrifices--but only in solidarity with others, for the life of artistic solitude seems to vitiate every purpose you extract from your experience. Contemplating it, rehearsing recent memories and conversations, you fall into the sentimentality, perhaps true, of thinking what a lonely and defenseless thing a single human being is. You desire to participate, personally, in the evolution of a new species.

You wince, hearing about the kidnap and torture of a young man, not at the details so much as at the helplessness of his family in seeking redress, and at what this helplessness signifies. You also mind it because you must go on feeling the same helplessness, because you cannot separate yourself sufficiently, and because it is not impossible that the same thing may happen to you. Of course this is self-dramatic, but how else are you going to react? "Sloppy and obese, the hunter / levels, makes us, makes angels, makes angels of us all." And when a friend back home commits suicide, isn't he too a martyr? "A North American, killed by industry, / a rebel, tired of his doctors"?

Conant anticipates the objection. Though congenitally a sensualist, he is enough a product of the generation of webcams, twelve-step programs and tabloid TV to feel the allure of self-critique and self-exposure of faults. He worries about his inability to effect radical change, and becomes a kind of poster boy for liberal guilt and restless generosity. Derisively, he calls himself a monkey, declaring in the same breath "don't worry monkey"--referring to someone else. In another poem he writes:

        with full devote courage
        I'm sinking in the flower
        luxation a kind of Latin fracture
        who becomes an icon
        or a jealous competitive creep

        but this is only true at 4 o'clock
        and, i'm sorry, without a microscope
        the difference between fog and mist
                                  is
                                  velocity

Conant's experience posed under what were almost laboratory conditions the problem of deducing the correct attitude toward popular revolution, in practice, of the radical poet who rejects popularity in theory. The conclusions I would draw from Conant's (and my own) experience are rather trite. Populism is of dubious value in the abstract, or in the context of art, but is a necessary prerequisite for effective politics. The cost of solidarity is the acceptance of a crude distinction between the "right" and "wrong" side of history. Populism thus effaces the very fineness of sensibility that the artist requires in order to create art. In "It is" Conant struggles to reconcile these opposed tendencies:

	When a different country landscape jibes

	with your recognition of bacon and eggs

	it is the pigs and chickens of Eden laughing.



	When the brick wall between "oppressor" and

	"petunia" is worth noticing, it is

	set in opal as a fly in amber.



	It is bathing in your breathing, now.

Conant's writing evokes well enough the immersion in events which true revolution requires, but fails to make plain the nature of those events. Hegel was probably right in his contention that one of the aims of culture is to transform the private into the public. Culture enables the individual to communicate and appreciate what is most specific to his or her own life, and see it in objective relation to the facts governing other lives. Whereas the failure of individuals to articulate their experience converts them into an isolated group, severely delimiting the possibilities for effective social action in solidarity with other groups. Conant's impasse (as I see it) stems just as much from a crudity of articulation that keeps his readers from being able to share in his experience as from the crudity of conditions which separated Conant himself from the experience of the Zapatistas.--Wyman Jennings

"i have killed poetry/yes       and i had to tell you": thus boasts, or confesses, British poet Tom Raworth in his poem "Entry," indeed an entry, a beginning, a starting point in Tottering State, the recently re-released selection of his early poems, now including the long poem "Writing," by O Books. Well, Raworth has slain the aged art of Homer no more than the Hudson River School and the French Impressionists killed the painting of the Renaissance by moving the easel outdoors, or Duchamp "art" by nominating a urinal for that honor for that matter. "[T]he progress of art the aim is finally/to make rules the next generation can break more cleverly" writes Raworth in "South America." Indeed, his is a modern/post-modern understanding of art, which Debord explains as a history of negations, and Raworth has broken the stuffy rules of the Auden generation for a new generation of British poets with the help of the likes of Cobbing, Fisher, Mottram, and Prynne. He has, as is evidenced in Tottering State, injected British poetry with American developments such as visuals, parallel text, prose poems, Ashberyian wit, and political consciousness. Yet there is a dialectic here. Raworth maintains traditional Romantic and Modernist values; poetry is in fact still living in his work: in pathos, in imagery, in the development of that sixth sense of atmosphere and the world when one reads, as Stevens puts it, "with the spine," and poetry captures the real in its ineffable way when the Eliotic "auditory imagination" is at work, in a way that is unmistakably its own.

Raworth has to tell us he told us of his purported poecide. This utterance indicates a traditional high Modernist artistic self-consciousness whose locus is in such Romantic texts as Wordsworth's prefaces, Keats's letters, and Shelley's "Defense." Such an adherence to the old Modernist sense of artistic self-consciousness is very much a part of Raworth's enterprise, present in his work as water is in a wet sponge. He is, on his "Wedding Day" itself" sitting here/my hand cold on the typewriter" with his "pact, intelligence / shall not replace intuition," Urizen shall not replace Los.

	Understand my predicamnet
	now i have got here there are two paths
	no decisions, stop now
	i see my lines
	not
	growing, poems but a notebook for prose.

	10: AM June 6th. 1970

	word: a
	a: the
	the: the

	in
  	  adequate language
                   i love you

	8:06 PM June 10th. 1970

	poem

	9:25 PM June 10th. 1970

	poem
	poem
	
	7:19 PM June 29th. 1970

	organic

The "i love you" in "Stag Skull Mounted" is part of a pathetic aura that is the life of poetry in Raworth's work. Raworth summons pathos and the sense of the Lacanian real through language, nexus of the Lacanian symbolic in the "auditory imagination's" meanings and the Lacanian imaginary, the "auditory imagination's" soundings.

	but i don' love
	you she said      there were
	drops of sweat
                      on the receiver
	warm sun the sky

	i will wait at the station and you
	will send a note, i
	will read it
        	it will be raining

But Raworth brings a sense of the comic to the old tragic sense of life, a modern sense, and thus does represent a new generation. He can sound very much like Ashbery with red herring titles such as "Lenin's Minutemen," "Rome by Anonymous," or "Mordant Fleas."

	oh
	said her mother a
	mister dante called you
                      beatrice

And indeed, Raworth breaks from the high modernists in politics as well as humor. If one strand of modernism required one to be a fascist, as Raymond Williams notes in his essay "The Politics of the Avant-Garde" with some generalization and hyperbole, Raworth is certainly nothing of the sort. Raworth can be quite the opposite, an antinomian, writing, for example, "justice is what the victim of the law knows is right" in "Ah The Poetry of Miss Parrot's Feet Demonstrating the Tango." Yet he is as concerned as anyone when he asks in "Claudette Colbert by Billy Wilder," "Is democracy doomed?" In "South America" he meditates on every activist's question: "where power lies or how to effect change." "Songs of the Depression" is a folksy ballad of the economically disenfranchised. Then there is the egalitarian "learning to see what others see/there is no superiority," a line that also suggests group consciousness, be it race, class, or gender; or Habermasian consensus. Add to this these lines from "Stag Skull Mounted":

	12:15 PM May 19th. 1970

	the government has explained the situation to us
	pigeon in the beech tree

	first a shoe shine then the whole wide world
	Frank O'Hara
	(the plane dropped in an effort

Further, Raworth does oppose through form, repeating the passage three times. And indeed, part of Raworth's break from modernism comes with his formal dares, influenced by Americans, including the adaptation of prose, parallel text, and visuals. Such formal exploits, politics of poetic form, are in keeping with Raworth's expressive politics: such as a formalization that defies dominant ideology and a linguistic fluidity. All of Raworth's concerns coalesce in the long poem, "The West Wind," which plays on Shelley's Romantic "Ode to the West Wind." Raworth cuts the "Ode," deromanticizing the rhetorical device of the title.

	only intellect
	between you and the image
	past dreams
	a different real

This only begs the question: has Raworth "killed poetry?" One thinks of Peter Burger's classic study, arguing that the avant-garde must challenge the Modernist assumption of the autonomous aesthetic sphere, as well as the medium's own assumptions. Raworth's book happens to be subtitled Selected Early Poems: 1963-1983, and is put out by albeit not a mainstream poetry publishing house, a poetry publishing house all the same: a clear endorsement of traditional institutional means of distribution in the "field of cultural production" along the lines of "the rules of art," to use Bordieu's phrases. As for intrinsic concerns, although Raworth is progressive, he maintains Romantic and Modernists themes. The dialectic of "the progress" of art is a negative one, for there is no synthesis. "Progress" is always taken for granted in discussions of the avant-garde, but this seems to be an attempt of the avant-garde to leap ahead of history and escape historicization of the inescapable a priori institutionalization of art. In his essay on "Progress," Adorno points out the fallacy of Kant's conclusion to the third Critique, that there can in fact be "aim." But for Raworth "aim" is a process, a "dynamic" to use Adorno's word. Ironically, Raworth brings poetry to the attention of politics and society, as the avant-garde ought to, and negates earlier rules while doing so, yet he cannot understand that he cannot kill "poetry."--Ramez Qureshi

Joe Wenderoth's second book of poems begins with an epigraph, a piece of dialogue from Sophocles's Oedipus:

 
	OEDIPUS: Did you give him the child he asks about?
	HERDSMAN: I did. I wish that I had died that day!
	OEDIPUS: You'll come to that if you don't speak the truth.
	HERDSMAN: It is if I speak that I will be destroyed.

Like the work of Stevens, Wenderoth's poetry often involves the investigation of philosophical ideas. The reference to Oedipus and the other characteristics of tragedy in the work recall in many ways the artistic agenda of the Confessional poets, that of Lowell and Plath in particular. But their influence on Wenderoth's work, if it's there, is rewritten in an important way. For while the Confessionals, like Wenderoth, tend to place us in the most uncomfortable place, the place without safety or reassurance, in order to destroy what had become dangerous social and metaphysical beliefs--in nationalism, say, or immortality--their ideas of poetic speaker and constructed person differ from this poet's. And whereas the Confessional Poets often conflated the poetic speaker and his or her historically located "personality," Wenderoth keeps the two distinct. The unbearable, impossible tension between our constructed personalities and that which drives them, that invisible, omnipresent part of us that understands, that must understand that the scene cannot be kept--this tension forms the central drama of the book: "You alone remind us that what we have understood/ has never been what we are" ("As Hour and Year Collapsed").

Given that we must maintain a relatively stable "identity" to survive on a daily basis--even if by "survive" we mean acknowledge and participate in society, live with and love others, choose and even stick to a career, etc.--the obligation to understand that the scene cannot be kept is almost unbearable, but that is our obligation. In this light, we are all writers, driven by the need to know--ourselves, our loved ones--and faced instead with an ever-changing scene that we cannot hold. Here is "Writer" in its entirety:

 	A person, for you, is a book.
 	Impossible to categorize,
 	it veers from non-sense verse
 	to the most tedious of novels
 	and back
 	in just a breath.
 	And the book ends, the book ends.
 	And what makes the person more real,
 	then,
 	than a book,
 	is just that you cannot reread
 	one chapter, one sentence, one word.
 	You must rewrite him,
	her,
 	and you cannot.
 	You cannot.
 	This inability is the source
 	of everything you have to say.

Most of us would rather not be told our sweetheart's dreams every morning, but if that sweetheart were one of the best writers you knew and condensed the dreams in question into postcard-sized letters, you might warm to the idea. With Hunt's Dear Sweetheart, we are privy to such a correspondence--one, however, in this era of who why and wherefores, remarkably free of any daytime intent, from a place wiser (and sillier) than our waking selves: "A book of letters because a book of letters and not because of the two whom or from one."

Dear Sweetheart is a chapbook of twenty-seven, paragraph length letters or dreams. While much dream-inspired work can be tedious, not since Michel Leiris's Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (a collection of dream-stories published in 1961) have dreams made for such crisp, and funny, reading. Long ago dreaming used to be the place where body and spirit sat down with language to invest a dreamer with song (and power); indeed, this is one origin for poetry. (As Leiris wrote: "The dream--mirage shimmering against darkness--is basically poetry." Or Nerval: "The dream is a second life.") Hunt seems to be after the old convocation; but mainly for the song, that is the good writing, to be got out of it:

	I'm at the Brasserie des Ternes next to the flower market in the 17th
	sharing a crème brulé with this guy who says he's Charles Darwin and that
	he's pleased to meet me and when I'm finished eating my half of the
	dessert will I please let him open my stomach so that he can catalogue its
	contents.  Ha! I say.  So he opens his stomach instead and a flock of
	nectarine-finches flies out.

But Hunt's is also an affair with narrative, how a dream unfolds from one sentence to the next: the tension when we ask, how is he going to get us out of that one? And how did we get here? And at times it seems all the thrift of Hemingway with the ingenuity of a Raymond Roussel are employed in answering the questions--as when, in one episode, the narrator, in quest of goose liver, wakes up inside of a snowball diorama speaking German: "The shopkeeper clubs me over the head with a brick of sugar and when I come to I'm sitting in the middle of all this incredibly warm snow. Du bist aus? says a man coming over to stand next to me. Yeah, I say." When we find out, by way of a footnote, that "the German belongs to Paul Celan," the dream--which ends with a vision of the "dark and glistening" waters of the Seine--has become, from another angle, a meditation on hermetical understanding vs. the inscrutable appeal of death. Only here, the dream has been turned inside out, not manifesting a consciousness so much as taking root in the world. For Hunt, consciousness qua consciousness is the "chambers of a human brain" (in the epigraph from De Quincey), an empty prison (Alcatraz) amidst whirling ships and pelicans, deserted Notre Dame, the Acropolis at midnight, or an abandoned home, in his version of Rip Van Winkle, "already empty, as is the home I then occupy for many years, as is the home I slink back to, you, obviously still gone." The absent addressee does not haunt a house of self, in these dreams, so much as world--one seemingly triangulated between France, Greece and America. Such a triangle is a labyrinth, a mise en abyme, a series of nestling Chinese boxes: "Sunny dream. I don't have any sunscreen so I go inside." A theatre of writing.

Dream writing is composition but it is also translation. Dear Sweetheart, activates a range of reference appropriate to the "global" age--not clinging to the authentic American experience, say, that has energized so much writing but that also gets tired as affect--why shouldn't writers "have culture?" And why should culture be a narrowly localized experience? In the best of possible worlds, one should be able to translate (or fail attempting) between Tierra del Fuego, the Parthenon, the Gamma Quadrant, the Minotaur's labyrinth, a baseball game in the Algerian suburbs of Paris, Notre Dame and an Indiana childhood: "The French will never figure out baseball. The Americans will never figure out crêpes." German and French ("hiver," "rêve nebuleux") do actually enter these dreams; by translation, however, I mean more a sense of idiom arrived at by eloquence, from a certain distance. While Hunt does not espouse the fragmenting explosion of idiom generally considered appropriate to the age, he still writes as if he's just moved into, or out of, his language. As if we might be reading English, but couldn't be sure: "I get this hunch so I sneak up the Acropolis after hours and sure enough there is good old Montaigne sitting cross legged on the East steps of the Parthenon sucking on a pipe. Bon soir, maître, what are you thinking about?, I say. I am thinking about myself, Manny-boy, he says. Oh wow, I say. . ."

Ovidian metamorphoses, labyrinths, translation may be what fuel this work, but emblem and strong framing edit story down to the spareness of parable, which distinguishes the book from much process-oriented narrative--as when the narrator winds up in a snowball speaking German with Paul Celan, or when we find a sardonic Montaigne "out of ink," writing on the Parthenon with lemon juice ("He tells me to pick a column, any column, and sniff"). At one point we meet another author of parables, one who might be considered the daemon of these stories: "In the last dream I turned a corner and ran into Franz Kafka wearing his bowler. And nothing else. On his chest was tatooed, mess with the bull, you'll get the horns. . . . You don't look much like a minotaur, I said. I know, he said." When the narrator does, against his will (in the throes of his dream), kill the Minotaur, he finds "a pair of delicate white horns, glowing softly, under his hat." Image, which grazes archetype and epiphany, inset in the dream structure is made to speak more intimately (there is writing on the horns in the dream, but you'll have to get the book to find out what is written there), with the unparaphrasable condensation of poetry. This technique, reminiscent of Michaux, was worked out splendidly in an earlier chapbook, Thousands (1997, Alyricmailer online). The stillness, brevity and compaction of multiple angles make for work that, while full of movement, can be approached again and again, with deepening insight, in ways that distinguish it from the principle of excess ("more of the same") that has come to dominate process narrative since Joyce or Stein.

If I err, perhaps pedantically, on the side of classicism, in reading Dear Sweetheart, it is only to balance Hunt's evident zaniness: "I decide that Captain Kirk is my best friend. He's not quite as sure, as a matter of fact he tells me to BACK OFF SAILOR." Sometimes this translates into a gratuitous surrealism--"Then it starts snowing and all our teeth fall out"--or a flip sounding throwaway--"I don't know. It's lovely. That's all I have to say about that"--but more often it's the very humor that makes these dreams accessible, down to earth, and fun to read. (Hunt's other epigraph is from Frank O'Hara: "hahahahahaha, he laughed briefly.") One must take "down to earth" in a very qualified sense, however; the way Niedecker's New Goose poems are "down to earth" or the way your kid brother would tell stories, if your kid brother were Raymond Roussel: "I get a job as the horn for an ocean liner. Great job. I just sit around on deck all day watching the hands until it's time to blow. It's time to blow as we're entering the Panama Canal and I really let loose: the ship the lock and all the lamps of Panama shatter. Ay carumba! the captain says."

In short, if there's one chapbook you order from SPD this month (at $4 it's a steal), make it Dear Sweetheart. In fact, buy an extra one to give away. For once, we are presented a work which, at its best, offers a sense of language (and the world) vast enough to tumble in, opening horizons of possibility rather than closing in on some threadbare limit, and which, "forc[ing] the infinite into the chambers of the human brain," gives us something to dream on.--Jonathan Skinner

"A Curriculum of the Soul," an ambitious decades-long project assigned by SUNY, Buffalo, teacher and poet John Clarke to individual authors from a plan of Charles Olson's design, first published in "The Magazine of Further Studies," 1968, nears its completion with a recent publication by Toronto-based poet and "Intent" collaborator Michael Boughn.

"One's Own Mind," fourth in Olson's projected soul curriculum (now managed and published by Albert Glover), joins other titles in the series--"Attention," "Bach's Belief," "Phenomenological" and "Homer's Art" to name but a few--written by poets and students of poetry like Harvey Brown, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger and Bob Grenier. "One's Own Mind" brings attention to a daunting subject, that receives more than 20 paragraphs from Partridge in his etymological dictionary, "Origins." Boughn's goal, of course, is not etymology, but to examine by aperture the historical and personal experience of that ancient and evolving solar apparatus.

"Get your / mind a / round it," he writes, bringing to his poetry prose fragments from several sources, using most extensively letters from Robin Blaser that discuss Olson's literary rejection of Ralph Waldo Emerson. "One's Own Mind," in many ways, shows a dialogue between Olson and the Yankee transcendentalist, with Boughn mediating the arguments through a paratactic placement of key texts, and by projecting his own mind into the work. "Don't you hear Emerson in all that push toward mind as dynamic," he writes with Olson in mind, whose own dynamic push out into space resonates with Emerson's Transcendentalism. He locates Olson's "quarrel with Emerson . . . in great part with Harvard's school-time reading thereof." He then builds his case, presenting a perceptual and dialectic understanding of the mind that's located, for Olson, beyond the cranial homestead of the brain.

	To be really man in nature when thinking one must think with all one's
	body.



	*



	The body makes the minde.

	Mental. Heaven is

	mental. No Viewpoint

	from within. No "height" ...

        	Heaven

	is a condition

	likewise. Heaven is

        	Mind (drawn to

	Gloucester

In many ways, Boughn attends "Olson's mind problem" and "Melville's crisis of mind," not to clarify so much as to show the depth of thought and energy devoted by Olson to this subject. "The terror of loneliness" that "Emerson does domesticate" and "which Melville takes (mis-takes?) for the stabled structures of a Gansevoort mansion" show a complicated respect and hard review of the facts and acts of cognition that include and influence the kinetic and emotive processes of our whole being. But it's "the other side of the problem of one's own" that Boughn returns to, reminding himself to "Mind / your own / business" with self inquisition: "are you out / of your / mind?"

"The fascinating thing for me is the way Emerson invariably infiltrates the foundations of our mind and becomes invisible," Boughn writes. "Whatever other issues Olson had to work through with Emerson, Man Thinking and Man Living are down there shaping the curve of the road. Not an inconsequential issue in thinking through 'one's own MIND.'"

This complicated little book is tightly wound, and it moves with speed of mind. It reflects a process of attention, of "one's own" mental wakefulness, and the seamless conversation of voices presents a unified experience of poetic immediacy. "One's Own Mind" invites readers to look at the book as an active presentation of "one's own" mind through a dialogue of many. Besides, as Boughn reminds us, "it ain't what / you got it's / what you / do / with it."--Dale Smith

Gathered and selected from various publications as they appeared between 1988 and 1998, these ten essays by David Levi Strauss are, together in scope and resolve, a sustained analysis of those symptoms at once productive, narcotic, circumspect and perplexing in the ever-unsettled relationship between art and society. Artworks and artifacts of course, even despite certain tenets of modernity, are anything but self-evident or autonomous; it's the conditional nature of art as valid inquiry into the public sphere--even in its most pleasure-producing of guises--that allows aesthetic meanings to circulate. Therefore, and not only because it continues to be a forceful and prevalent shape in the imagery of thought in contemporary systems of representation, David Levi Strauss locates the body at the axis of current thinking about art and politics; that is, at the interstice between aesthetics and anaesthetics.

In this, these essays are a welcome addition to some of the most clear-minded viewpoints into visual culture as practiced by contemporary art writers and critics in that hybrid genre conversant at once with scholarly discourse, the language arts, and cultural journalism. Not surprisingly, Levi Strauss writes in a remarkable prose whose image-insights sever through the page ("Private speech made public often incites a kind of terror, related to the feeling that arises from seeing your own blood outside your body.") His field of engagement stretches from a compelling discussion of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to Columbus as the "prophet of global economic despotism;" or from the pedagogy and social communication in the medical symbology and coyote tricksterism of Joseph Beuys, to the formal disturbances and "creative stutters" in the early image technology of video and television produced by Jean-Luc Godard & Anne Marie Miéville; or from the politics of sexual specificity in the work of Carolee Schneeman and Cindy Sherman, to art praxis Soviet and post-Soviet, as well as a riveting media dissection of Desert Storm. In his take on the incommensurability between art and politics as staged by artist Daniel Martínez (with nods to Diogenes, Hannah Arendt and Jean Genet), Levi Strauss points to the possibility that there are endless forms we give to what we know on account of those we have yet to make visible. The relationship between the two poles--one given, the other latent--are rhymed, in Between Dog & Wolf, by the individual (artist/citizen) and his or her particular collectivity.

In a variation on a theme by Freud as he addresses those pressures applied to the somatic nature of the human order, Levi Strauss gives flesh to this in-between-ness of seemingly opposing knowledges: "The nervous/social system tries at every point to resist stimulation and change, to avoid pain (or pleasure), to remain in equilibrium. The aesthetic is by definition a threat to this equilibrium." In the very suggestive argument of his opening essay, Levi Strauss evokes how the space between the anaesthetic and the aesthetic is nothing if not the very movement between power and desire:

	Pleasure is redefined as the absence of pain. But pain killers do more
	than kill pain. They replace pain with their own 'algebra of need,' their
	own addictive logic and progressive history (. . .) The anaesthetic is
	usually discussed in purely utilitarian terms, like propaganda: if it
	stops the pain, it is successful, no further questions. But the aesthetic
	is all questions, disequilibrium, and disturbance (. . .) As with all
	other parts of the allopathic complex, the anaesthetic only masks
	symptoms; it does nothing to treat the root causes of pain, to trace it
	back to its source, give it meaning, or counter it with pleasure. This
	requires the older, more radical practice of aesthetics.

	a society of the imperfect and incomplete, whose citizens routinely
	discuss, disdain, hire, vote for, and invest in a wide variety of parrots
	to represent their desires in various fields of discourse--who elect the
	representative of their desire and occasionally re-elect them. Thus
	unconcerned with class, culture, and identity, this society is perpetually
	created and re-created in non-exclusive overlapping communities of desire
	that organize themselves around a multiplicity of gorgeous parrots.

Cautious of the new totalization, teleology and unquestioned utopias championed in the name of democracy and art, Levi Strauss examines how cultural production and consumption are sites of struggle and pleasure; contested kingdom-comes of radical opposition and creative incorporations; a place--by way of William Morris and Joseph Beuys, the latter ever-present in these essays--perhaps even a habit where labor and pleasure in their necessary differentials might at last come together.

In his closing discussion of art, the public, and community, in "Coming to the Point at Three Rivers"--a veritable call to artists and available institutions--Levi Strauss counters that:

	utopian thinking does have real political purposes. For one thing, it
	makes explicit criticism of existing social and political arrangements
	from a radical rather than a reformist perspective. And for another, it
	offers a social imagination of how things might be different.

Brice Marden and I were put together some years ago--about the same time he was working with such drawings as this--to do a collaboration. It was to be his response to a poem-cycle of mine, "Helsinki Window," a curiously repetitive construct of twelve-line units, sonnet-like, loops of insistent frame, a "window" which looked out on the place we lived in, for about a year, in Helsinki, Finland. Its form, intuited, derived from impulse and need, was my way of surviving that oppressive world--it was winter--and of keeping the gloom of our situation otherwise at bay. Writing became my securing company and, looking out the literal window, day or night, words occurred in reply, coming to me, as Williams might say, "to be written down."

But the collaboration, proposed to us soon after my return, fell apart for a number of reasons, despite the good intentions of all concerned. Brice felt the text was too full of specific colors--"yellowish place," "solid red both brick and seeming/ metal roof," "black solid trunks," "greyed," "black edge," "red / car parked," "green/ and blue parked too," etc. How could he assume that any of these might occur in what he did? Their presence in the poem distracted him. Then our host, the friend sponsoring the undertaking, had his own opinions to offer--concerning scale of page, concerning format, concerning typography. So attempts to get something started became a snarl of unintended confusions.

I'm reminded of my mentor and elder, Louis Zukofsky, quoting Wittgenstein: "A point in space is a place for an argument." Not the 'argument' we were experiencing, but the one which makes clear, as its root states. Needing to begin, one begins somewhere and so finds the way. There was always the insistent fact of Brice Marden's work itself--I recall the look of the studio. It seemed to me an intense, spare place, altogether defined by its activity. Coffee in take-out cups, etc. Small provision for the casual visitor. Since my so-called work was done, I felt outside it all, already at the end of what was about to happen--with any luck.

Zukofsky quotes also Gertrude Stein's remarking of Picasso: "His drawings were not of things but of things expressed, in short they were words for him and drawing always was his only way of talking." Of his own work, Marden says, "Drawing is a way of thinking…it's very direct but not specific. My real thinking is visual. I think the closest I ever get to the meditative state is when I'm drawing."

Not long after we'd made our abortive beginning, we were invited to take part in a panel on collaboration at the 92nd Street Y, in company with Jorie Graham and Eric Fischel, Arthur Danto presiding. It was Danto who finally asked us how our collaboration had worked out, to which we had to answer, there had been none--we were imposters! At least we collaborated in that.

When young, I'd read Klee's comment that drawing was like taking a line for a walk. It was akin to the poet Robert Duncan's saying that the impulse to write is very like one's feeling a readiness to take a walk--to go looking for that "point in space," perhaps, else to become it? Move, and a line follows, or leads--"a point moving through space." The arts conjoin in whatever they do insofar as they are moving to recognitions and instruction they cannot know or apprehend otherwise. So Charles Olson writes, "We do what we know before we know what we do."

Brice Marden says, "I start out, with a formal structure--couplets or whatever. It's about joining things up, making relationships, but at the same time letting the drawing do the work." So is the line drawn in poetry, drawn out, "Each step initial and problematic, "experimental" and "suggestive." It is of the essence that we be, as readers, not admiring the pride of the writing, but stirrd to our like pride, "the great pride of man in himself--not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning." The line exemplifies, embodies; it is in itself metaphor," Duncan writes of Walt Whitman.

Then set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea . . . Pound's Cantos set out by means of the "line" from Andreas Divus, his 1538 translation into Latin of Homer's great epic. The art must be initial and initiating, but it is always "to be continued," a faith kept with the world it enters. It is fascinating to see the number of drawings Brice Marden has done, moving into the habits of a time and space he has no wish or need to own. To shift the conventional means of drawing, he used a lengthy stick as his instrument: "By getting father away, with a delicate instrument . . . you move away from it with a delicate instrument, in a way it becomes closer . . . the slightest move is reflected."

I find that I get excited. There is a thing I can't quite get my hands on about making those drawings. There is a certain strangeness to it that I really enjoy. Sometimes I take the stick and I'm drawing. I'm moving--or only moving my arm. Just to see what happens on the paper and what I can do with it. There's also accident and I use it . . . ["Brice Marden/An Interview" by Pat Steir, Brice Marden/Recent Drawings and Etchings, Matthew Mark, New York, 1991.]

It's all to have something happen--to be there. My preoccupations as a poet are the same and so are my pleasures. Zukofsky said, "Art is seeing." Pound, "The way out is via the door."

            we crossed the charred portico,
            passed through a frame--doorless--

            entered a shrine; like a ghost,
            we entered a house through a wall;

            then still not knowing
            whether (like a wall)

            we were there or not-there

                   --H. D. Tribute to the Angels (1944)

In the spring of 1999, Marjorie Perloff gave the keynote address at two experimental or innovative women's poetry conferences, one at UC San Diego and the other at Barnard College. Perloff has published work on the Futurists, Ezra Pound, Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, John Cage--or, in other words, her work has been primarily on male writers--so she was asked to speak not because she is a women and feminist critic but because she is one of the most influential poetry critics of the last twenty-five years. Perloff has never used her influence to forward women's writing in particular. She does not edit collections of (women's) poetry. She has edited just one book, Postmodern Genres, the contents of which again prove only that she has consistently engaged difficult, resistant subjects, apparently regardless of their genre (visual art, philosophy, poetry) or gender.

Despite this recognizable approach, it was still a surprise to many in San Diego that Perloff used the context to say, "I am beginning to wish poets would once again take to composing poetry rather than producing so much 'theoretical' prose." And the "poets" she referred to specifically were women poets. She repeated these comments again in New York. It surprised her audiences since (innovative) women's poetry conferences are new and self-conscious. There is no tradition of formally gathering to celebrate the accomplishments of women poets, in poetry or prose. Perloff's comment obviously suggested that women poets not linger on their achievement, but look ahead. Her "wish" for the future became a provocation in the present, a wish that women's poetry develop further innovations. As well, and more important, Perloff's comment suggests that female writers have been competitive with their male counterparts in poetry, but not in "theoretical" prose.

A year later, at a twentieth-century literature conference in Louisville, Lisa Samuels, a poet and critic, argued in a paper on Lyn Hejinian that Perloff misrepresented the critical accomplishment of women poets because she read their work as criticism--what Perloff referred to as "theoretical" prose--and that as criticism it was a failure. What Perloff was referring to, as she well knew, was a "genre" known as "poetics." This "genre" is, however, at best incipient, not yet accepted in the academic community. In most cases, "poetics," when not referring to a theory of writing or aesthetic system in general, is regarded as a particular form: a mixture of genres, a poetic essay, a meditation rather than an argument. Blake says in "Auguries of Innocence," "To be in a Passion you Good may do / But no Good if a Passion is in you"--so too criticism puts the poetry inside, containing it, while poetics attempts "to be in a Poetry." Poetics, with no tradition, exactly, insistently sells to and steals from the normative features of the two genres it is situated between, poetry and the critical or philosophical essay. But poetics can be different from the essay and the poem, more than another version.

Recently (16 March 2000) on an international poetics listerv, Brian Kim Stefans argued for "the distinction between that criticism written by a poet--which, I think, by nature has to do with how such a book could create possibilities for future writing (by oneself most importantly, by others secondarily, though the poet-critic usually reverses these values in public)--and that written by a professional critic, one whose aims are to, one suspects, create a consistency among her distinctions and propositions, to create a sort of critical vocabulary that could be extended to other works not being discussed, and which would, one presumes, have a wider scope of views and claims even to knowledge (all of which a "poet-critic" could do, though we don't necessarily ask this)" (emphasis added).

This debate is semantic to an extent, a productive argument concerning definition--whether my blue is or should be your green--and generation, in that each new generation of poets wishes to differentiate its poetry from its predecessors and still agree that everyone is writing "poetry." Brian Kim Stefans and Lisa Samuels are two young writers, of a generation one younger than Perloff's. A younger generation needs imaginative (for production) and real (for definition) space from the older, and this need will affect the terms of the debate. There has been, it must be noted, in the last twenty years much slippage in the terms, as poets use them strategically according to their needs of a moment (adherence to an authoritative position or distance). Since Perloff knows what poetics is better than most, I will assume that she is arguing implicitly that "poetics" on the whole was merely a strategic genre employed usefully during a particular historical moment, like 70s feminism was a new disciplinary tool. Poetics of the 70s and 80s did politicize poetry and bridged marginal poetries into academic contexts. Given the current controversy, it's an open question whether poetics was merely historical and strategic, and has reached its useful end.

Perloff's argument that contemporary poets write either poetry or criticism, and know the difference between the two, relates to another recent one. Lyn Hejinian says in her essay "Reason" (1998) that many poets today--men in particular--have taken "contemporary poetry [and poetics] to task for its withdrawal into numerousness. It is not that a poetics of possibility is wrongheaded but that, if we stop there, we risk a directionless pluralism" (40). Twenty-five years ago women (poets) could wonder whether the "death of the subject" was simply serendipitous for men since women seemed on the verge of finally becoming subjects, different from men. Now we can speculate on whether men were once again spoiling instantiation of women poets. This time, just as poetics is potentially emerging as a distinct and legitimate genre, it is being characterized as "directionless pluralism"--and feminine--and women are being urged back into "their" genre, poetry (if they have one at all).

Women's poetics is finally beginning to receive academic interest and sanction. "Reason" is part of a new collection of Hejinian's essays, The Language of Inquiry, forthcoming from an academic press. Poets Joan Retallack, Leslie Scalapino and Kathleen Fraser also have books out or forthcoming from academic presses which collect essays written in the last two decades and originally published in small press periodical or book form, or given as talks. And Susan Howe's The Birth-mark (1993), although catalogued as "American Literature / Criticism," is much closer to (her) poetry than what is normally called "criticism."

Academic sanction means legitimacy and distribution of influence; its methods of selection remain precise and arbitrary, which makes the terms "marginal" and "mainstream" still profound markers. This debate--about classification, membership and genealogy--about gender and genre, is a Romantic one. Derrida notes in "The Law of Genre," "it can be shown easily enough that we have not yet been delivered from the Romantic heritage . . . as long as we persist in drawing attention to historical concerns and the truth of historical production in order to militate against abuses or confusions of [genre]. The debate . . . remains itself a part or effect of Romanticism" (61-2). Mainstream poets today have explicitly followed in a Romantic and masculine tradition, where language is a vehicle for the expression of eternals and universals--"A poem is the image of life expressed in its eternal truth" (Shelley). Marginal or innovative poets such as Hejinian critique modern Romantic poets for what is only a "natural" expression of the desire for authority, the continued authority of the Romantic tradition. Recently (April 2000) the terms used to justify Carl Dennis's $100,000 (Ruth Lilly) poetry prize express this well: "Carl Dennis is a poet who has valuable things to say--about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, loneliness, life's regrets--the great What if's and roads not taken--in ways that are personal and universal at the same time." In other words, Romantic language merely carries a message, and vanishes.

Language has instead for Hejinian an aesthetic and social context that needs its history and its effects unbound and unveiled--not just once, but insistently. This movement reveals not what is behind language, but what is before the eyes on the page--its materiality, its body. The body is of course hardly universal or eternal. Hejinian also knows consciously that who you are as a writer is defined by where you publish. A mainstream poet (coyly or ignorantly) believes that the writer determines the publishing venue, that academic sanction is the result of the quality of the work. Therefore enormous hesitation exists for both sides at the prospect of publishing elsewhere.

Poetics by men too has been neglected by academia as a new development in contemporary writing. In the 1980s small presses (Roof and Sun & Moon) brought out substantial collections of essays and talks by Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Steve McCaffery, but Bernstein's A Poetics from Harvard UP in 1992 marked the first instance of poetics in the academic scene. Each of the three poets approach a poet's prose and the essay genre differently. McCaffery jams expectations by discussing writing not in terms of structure but Bataille's theory of economy or Sade's erotics. Silliman's influential essay "The New Sentence" begins, "The sole precedent I can find for the new sentence is Kora in Hell: Improvisations and that one far-fetched." This mimics the opening sentence of William Carlos Williams's Kora, "The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched." Silliman inherits as he names Williams's "broken style" as paratactic. I would simply name his (their) concern with precedent "masculine," the agon of father-son drift.

No writer could possibly ignore entirely the concern for precedent and originality and say anything new, but Bernstein seems more concerned with tomorrow. I see a difference between precedents and earlier instances. Instances appear simultaneously. A writer cannot inherit an instance. Bernstein (as Stefans would later say) wants a writing that "creates possibilities for future writing"--in prose or verse or both. This writing Eliot suggested in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) was itself created by "the historical sense": the poet with historical sense writes not only with her own generation in her bones, but with all ancient literature too, so that all has "a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (38). Only the historical sense truly makes a poet conscious of her own "contemporaneity."

Bernstein begins "Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)," an essay or lecture or fiction interested in "defining" poetics: "This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended. / As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry. / As a way to extend ideas about closure--the rejection of closure--into the discussion of essays and critical writing. / To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to say: completed saying. / So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or problematicize any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive" (150). Not a transcription: that is, this is not about precedent, as Silliman's was--nor a Romantic poetry. For Romantic poets the precedent is the self. Coleridge anticipates in letter (15 January 1804) that Wordsworth's The Prelude will be "the first & finest philosophical Poem," if it is "a Faithful Transcript of his own most august & innocent Life, of his own habitual Feelings & Modes of seeing and hearing" (emphasis added).

Later in the essay Bernstein quotes Luce Irigaray, from "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine" in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). Irigaray says, "the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself. . . . Its 'style' resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept. Which does not mean that it lacks style [in other words, is just a numerousness], as we might be led to believe by a discursivity that cannot conceive of it. But its 'style' cannot be upheld as a thesis, cannot be the object of a position" (qtd. in A Poetics 169). This style is tactile, simultaneous, fluid--subverting and exceeding dichotomy, which is always and only a false pair (Only One), one positively inflected, the other negatively. This disruptive excess or feminine logic defines a poetics. Bernstein is not as explicit as he could be on the gender of poetics--Irigaray is: this feminine language work would cast the masculine "loose from its moorings in order to return the masculine to its own language, leaving open the possibility of a different language" (80). The masculine would no longer be "everything," which fashions space for a different, feminine style.

In "Reason" Hejinian offers questions on poetry and thinking as a philosopher, though she is by profession a poet. She never explicitly discusses gender effects. Samuels too only touches on the gender of certain genres and disciplines. But neither would have asked the questions they did without thinking about their gendered origins and implications. For Hejinian, the implied critique of a "numerous" writing is that it lacks purpose or direction: reason. In other words, "numerousness" has been gendered distinctly feminine. It has thus been characterized as, in effect, something inconceiveable, a not-essay and a not-poetry. Hejinian asks instead that we consider the meaning of "affirmation," which is "lodged in a dilemma, and therefore in that activity of mind which we term doubt. This doubt is not entirely unlike what Keats called 'negative capability,' but what is at stake is affirmation of our deepest reason, the one that tells us that things and our experiences of them count. That is what it means to be in history and in a history with a future-to be in reason" (42). Can you affirm something you cannot see, conceive or believe? Yes yes. Like affirmation, doubt, dilemma, history, poetry and passion (to return to Blake), then, reason is not something a person has, but is something a person is in--a condition of something happening and being born, a context that "is the medium of our encounter, the ground of our becoming" (35).

"Reason" begins with the sentence, "Along comes something--launched in context." Mainstream Romantic poets understand the poet to provide the context for poetry. In contrast, Hejinian and company perceive that the poet must always be in context, and context provides or makes a poet. Being in context or in reason or being curious constitute a "prepoetics," "a condition necessary and simultaneous to a poetics" (33). Reason is not the product of study or gender, but a context; like dilemma, reason names the interaction of difference (of kind and not just degree). Along comes a reason.

The use of the word "reason" here defines it not as a quality of thinking, exactly, but as similar to "cause," the cause for something that is happening, and for something that will happen--"If I do this now, then that will result." An inquiry in reason is an inquiry into overdetermined happenings--instances with multiple causes. This sorting is only possible in writing, in reason, and by inhabiting not a diversity of positions but different ones.

Along comes a poem--launched in community. Launched: towards and away. Launched: to separate--Irigaray's reason for casting masculine discourse loose from its moorings. Poetry must provide writer and reader with a ground for happening and becoming that allows both to be "present at the same place at the same time" (35). Hejinian wants an incipient poetry, not one that forestalls the acquisition of history (experience), a poetry of instances and not precedents. She wants writing to be open to a context in which things are born. So instead of reason being a particular faculty of the (masculine) mind, inside the poet, reason is outside, larger then any poet, like language itself. To be in reason. To perceive that reason is outside (control), other to you, even something that flows through you. Reason as mental faculty--something inside you--arrests flow to sort cause and effect, and so is always working pastwards. To be in reason allows for reasons to appear as happenings, now and to be followed into the future as the effect of reason.

In the academic context, poetics will be read ultimately as either criticism or poetry, or as having fallen out of genre altogether. This poetics is rendered unreadable because its difference has been rendered invisible. Written not as criticism or poetry, poetics is "no-genre," something with no defined characteristics which allow it to be successfully copied (a genre must have iterability, must be teachable). For Irigaray, "woman" is really "no-gender," since "woman" is not separate from "man." Apparently poetics has not appealed sufficiently to the sciences of thinking. The impression Samuels gets from Perloff's comment is that women poets especially have failed to make their "poetics" appear like a science of thinking. Poetics by women has been read as a series of impressions, an untheorized account of the experience of writing and reading. Samuels wants to consider whether this labeled "inability to overcome" experience disguises a different mode of thinking and writing. To resolve this problem of unreadability "poetics" must becomes a new genre, a distinct discipline, one made by and for a feminine discourse.

Hejinian risks being loyal to the art of reason: a poetics. She is a loyal subject of "reason" in the best sense--she transforms its meaning. She risks in the best sense as well--she has something, reason, to lose. Hejinian's definition of "reason" overcomes the received Enlightenment definition. It becomes a third term, not the superior complement in a staged binary with sensibility, but a wedge or a wrench jamming the cogs of binary thinking. Third or undecideable terms, terms that connote rather than denote, in the territory of the excluded middle:

      /poetry/ reason or poetics /criticism or philosophy/
      /criminal/ detective /cop/
      /human/ monster /devil or animal/
      /human/ cyborg /machine/
      /awake/ intoxication /sleep or dream/
      /life/ illness or ghost /death/
      /gay/ queer /straight/
      /diary/ letter /poem or any public writing/

The final term in this short list of (often) repressed or abjected terms that pass and cross, that provide leverage, unsettle meaning and truth, and allow encounters between self and other--letter--I will mention only in passing as a genre that I think stands as an earlier instance of poetics. Holding The Post Card, Gregory Ulmer says, "Derrida's experimentation with the letter [here] puts into practice an interest he has had for some time in the letter as a philosophical genre-the letter is of interest in this regard because of its marginal status in the discourse of knowledge, and the undecidability of its statements due to the informality and autobiographical component of the form" (41). Typically autobiography, as a record of experience, sends the reader feelings rather than thoughts. The experience of thought has seemingly been withheld, given the limits of the genre--and, in women's autobiography, given the discipline of the gender. To make the letter a philosophical genre, a poetics--this is the project facing certain contemporary (women) poets. One of Hejinian's (feminist) principles: "Poetry takes as its premise that language (all language) is a medium for experiencing experience. It provides us with the consciousness of consciousness" (36-37). As an earlier instance of poetics, the letter was a feminine genre. The letter as an organ of sensibility in eighteenth-century writing (and on) activates the mind in the body rather that the body in the mind; it thinks through feelings instead of feels through thoughts. Today, as the letter (by women) once was, poetics is being called simplified numerousness and directionless pluralism.

Marshall McLuhan once said in a weary modern voice, "If it works, it's obsolete." Romantic (masculine) poetry "works." A (feminine) poetics? Shakespeare's plays, Coleridge argued, "are in the ancient sense neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one, but a different genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in degree" (I: 197). They are without precedent, but not without history. What they are or are composed of occurred before, in earlier instances. Coleridge suggested the plays be known as "romantic dramas or dramatic romances," but the insufficiency of this suggestion points out the difficulty in naming something different in kind. Hybrids such as "dramatic romances" and "poetics" (poetry and criticism) are vague and probably misleading. In fact, there is an insufficiency in the names for all "hybrid" or "third" species. A "ghost" is something neither alive nor dead; a "cyborg" is neither human nor machine. What then are they? Despite this problem naming the things of the "lawn of the excluded middle" (as Rosmarie Waldrop calls it), that stuff that is neither a house nor a street, but in between, I think, with Samuels, that the "poetics" genre should not discredited and discarded. No one has argued credibly that feminist theory is a static artifact and should be retired. "Theoretical prose" by poets with pointlessly complex references to hip philosophers is useless writing, and both poetry and criticism are equally useless when they do the same. Such writing occurs in all three genres as the result of inexperience or the desire for an authority the writing otherwise lacks. All three genres, though, can and do "create possibilities for future writing."

Bernstein, Charles. "Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)." A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 150-178.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. 2 vols. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1930.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Law of Genre." Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 55-81.

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1919. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. 37-44.

Hejinian, Lyn. "Reason." Shark 1 (Spring 1998): 33-44.

Irigaray, Luce. "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine." This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 68-85.

Samuels, Lisa. "The Logopoetics of Lyn Hejinian's 'Reason.' " Twentieth-Century Literature Conference. University of Louisville. 26 February 2000. 1-8.

Ulmer, Gregory L. "The Post-Age." Diacritics 11 (1981): 39-56.

	See Republicans up close! 
	Get near to them, but not too near!
	See this exotic and partially endangered species!

What struck me about this particular group of people, and of the delegates I saw in hotel lobbies, on shuttle buses, and--more rarely--walking around the streets of Philadelphia, was how exotic and endangered they seemed as a species. Caught in a demographic freeze-frame, as if Goldwater had never lost in 1964 or Reagan's Alzheimer's hadn't set in before he left the White House, they instigated a brief rush of optimism in me--that these dinosaurs would soon vanish, and a more evolved politics might struggle to the fore, one based on mutual dialogues and pluralities, not the narrow set of political beliefs held by a minuscule portion of the population and their air-conditioned large suburban house to air-conditioned Lincoln Town Car to air-conditioned country club existences.

As my sense of their exoticness lingered, I wondered if they viewed as equally strange the many different oppositional groups who gathered near the Philadelphia Art Museum at the end of the Unity 2000 march. What did they think of the people dressed as prisoners to show support for Mumia Abu-Jamal and oppose the death penalty? Or the two guys on the back of a flatbed truck who mud-wrestled while wearing Gore and Bush masks? The members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who, along with handing out informational materials, protested in front of a guy selling Philly Cheesesteaks? The small group of barefoot hippies who danced around a communal drumming session? The Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) who put on tuxedos and gowns and mock-harangued people for being poor? The individuals in big pink pig costumes protesting pork barrel government spending projects (on the news I saw that at least one of these pigs was later arrested at the Democratic National Convention in L.A. [just so no one thinks I'm talking partisan politics here])? Of course they would have seemed as strange to the Republicans as the Republicans were to them.

What does democracy mean if people view everyone who doesn't share their political ideals as too unlike themselves to even begin to attempt a dialogue? Or, to put it more provocatively, what form does democracy take when everyone sees everyone else as a bunch of weirdoes? As politics becomes more and more subsumed by style, this isn't such a flippant question. At one level, it perpetuates what has always existed: that the group in power--usually unrepresentative of the population at large--tries to impose its hegemony by whatever means necessary, be it force, seduction, coercion, compromise, cajoling, appropriation.... At another level, the fact that this hegemony appears unnatural--that Republicans looked strange--is the first sign of its demise, because it's the goal of hegemony, and ideology in general, to be seen as natural, eternal, immutable. When things don't appear natural, they're more easily contested. Hence, my brief rush of optimism.

I think there's also an important distinction to be made between seeing those in power as unnatural, and those in power seeing those not in power as unnatural, with the varying degrees of discrimination, repression, and persecution that tend to follow. This partially explains the Christian Right's rabid--not a natural condition in any species, by the way--approach to depicting non-heterosexuals as "deviants." Unfortunately, the Republican Party isn't only made up of out-of-date Goldwateresque Republicans and their physical and ideological look-alikes. And it very well may win in November, precisely because of how natural its values appear to many voters (though given low voter turnouts, it's not as if this is ever close to being a majority of the population).

All the talk of inclusiveness at the Republican National Convention is window-dressing to this process, as Brent Staples pointed out in a New York Times editorial published during the week of the convention: "It may seem difficult to believe, but the Philadelphia convention is whiter than the convention of 1992, whose whiteness [and fierce right-wing Christian demagoguery] provoked many voters to reject the G.O.P." For all the money the major networks pay to have so-called experts spend hours analyzing convention speeches, proceedings, and images, you would think one pundit might have taken the time to conduct a simple head count. Instead, strategically-placed minorities and Cheney's out lesbian daughter gave the illusion of an inclusiveness in the party that doesn't exist.

But the organizers of the Republican National Convention aren't stupid. They know that window-dressing disguises cracks in the eggs of ideology. The leaders of the Democratic Party are less smart. The shift to the right made by New Democrats under the stewardship of Clinton and Gore attempts to further solidify the general ruling class ideology both parties share. In this sense, what the Democrats don't realize is that their move to the right signals their own demise at the same time that the Republican Party, foreseeing huge demographic shifts in the U.S. population in the upcoming decades, seeks to partially redefine itself--as superficially as possible, it should be noted. In a post-R.N.C. analysis published in The Village Voice, Tom Carson experienced his own brief rush of optimism: "If the Republicans revert from being the party of hate to just being the party of business . . . the Democrats might have to rediscover a few reservations about unbridled capitalism--and what a wonderful world that would be." Wait, that's Nader's position.

I made plans one night with a couple friends to go out dressed up as Goldwater Republicans. We hoped to gain entrance to the bars and lounges of the most expensive hotels in order to get a closer look at this vanishing species. But because it was a spontaneous plan, none of us had packed the clothes--and some didn't even have the right haircuts--that would have gotten us through the front doors. If we had cobbled together evening wear from what little we did have, in those environs we probably would have looked more like potential swingers than young Republicans from West Palm Beach. And while I'm not certain what a Goldwateresque Republican's take on swinging might be after a few stiff drinks, it seemed better to save our energies for the much hotter oppositional streets of Philadelphia.

Poet James Ragan began as a painter. Language was a resource quickly acquired to parry the jabs every immigrant child confronts. "Oh, boy, were there fights!"

To visualize Slovakia from the perspective of post-war Pittsburgh surely challenged insular, young minds. The lesser twin in a political amalgam, Slovakia knew a tradition as territorial wild card traded off between Bohemia and Hungary, much as Norway was prized and contested by Denmark and Sweden, or Poland by Germany and Russia.

While Ragan soon shed all traces of his parent's accent, he matured into their features: wide-angle Slavic cheekbones and a slight lift at the eyelid's taper as though predisposed to a smile. From them he bears as well the memories of place and event too deep to descend by speech, the a-verbal impressions bequeathed by blood. That legacy informs an inner kenning which he successfully transforms to idiom and sound.

	Imagine if,
	in the rehearsal of her lines so long repeated, 
	she had favored as a lostness in us all
	the bestiary of our tribal greed.

In the Talking Hours (Eden-Hall, 1979) and other individual pieces convinced the hosts of the 1985 inaugural International Poetry Festival in Moscow that they had found the unusual American poet, one who addressed the things that matter outside a country that 'needs to be invaded.'

It serves to recall that an Old Dealer had then just been re-elected by the nation that prides itself on youthful naïveté. Standing tall in trickle-down greed and star wars one-upmanship, he let pockets of poverty finance a B-movie High Noon face-off against the Evil Empire and beachhead adventures against the Grenadian mouse that roared. Why indeed address self-absorbed imperialism, beyond recognizing the oxymoron and then leaving its parsing to journalists? To paraphrase Milan Kundera: shared life--and language--is elsewhere.

	We are faces phrased in voices, 
	lost vowels in the drift of innuendo

	in a city's dream. 

Yeats's four ages of man offer a paradigm for the phases of nationhood. The U.S. staged its first fight with doughboy body and walked upright in Europe's Great War, struggled second with the heart and saw its innocence and peace depart as France's can-do-better successor in South Vietnam. André Gide's words in 1918 acknowledged for a continent its midnight defeat in the battle with God, the fourth and last: "Nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortels."The U.S. is engaged in the struggle with the mind, still just the third. If we are ever to leave pride behind, then, short of the invasion others prescribe for us, we do well to assimilate the blood memory of our immigrant native sons.

	And with my hair soot red
	as coals above my grandfather's bones,
	buried near the poems of Desnos,
	I hurried . . . to holding cells
	where brush wire and Jewish arms
	in tubs of creosol
	scrubbed all brains of the mind's eternal no.

Ragan sought out and honored his poetic antecedents as well. Begun early, his dialogue with them continues. Any student of poetry, practitioner or critic, must know the canon, heeding John Gardner's cautionary that even a genius, if ignorant of the highest effects previously achieved, is doomed to search out the lesser. The more that Ragan conveys to those he mentors at USC, in Prague or New York is the potential for dynamic internalization of impressions won both on and off the page.

His own work realizes that potential in full color and with no visible trail to another's palette. Any "anxiety of influence" has long been overcome; the authority of his voice leaves no afterchime of "triumphal usurpation." Yet he could be a genial host on "apophrades," Harold Bloom's day of ancestral poets returning to inhabit their former houses, thus, the poems of their progeny.

But, whether appearing by invitation or intrusion, are ghost-sightings the most rational explanation for Bloom's sense of déjà-lu or do the best poets simply have unstudied access to a collective pool of elemental imagery? Ragan's poem, "Zivanska," takes its title from the forest gathering of men around a fire to make music and roast animal flesh, a ritual identified with Janosik, the legendary Slovak bandit and folk hero.

	After the doors were shut and the windows sealed
	to let the ember's soft foot lie, my father
	slapped the crystal clear of wine and rising
	tall as Janosik, full of heart, whispered down,

	"Grass is burning. Stags are in the wood."

	And out into the green night and salt arbors
	of the brook we followed the king of bandits
	upslope through the branched spires and thickets
	into woods where only mold and roses thorned.

	Under a moon as low as a mushroom scone,
	we soured coals in sprigs and ginger grass,
	and hidden as with any intention the mind deceives to rob,
	the sparks saw into the burning earth

	what flint of fire could set the night to gasp.
	A crackling sound began to grow into the roaring
	hooves of deer and longer still to racing herds
	as bacon fat dripped longingly into laps of bread,

	and onions skewered and spat above the fire spears.
	In my father's fist the long wind reed became a switch
	that like the last finger on a hand hooked
	potatoes by the eye. Wine took the aching down

	into the throat and further in, the heart of something
	shook that only nature recognized as sound.
	The grass had burned to snapping darkness and to the last
	sobbing tongue, my father pointed down to silence,

	"The stags are gone. Boars have killed their young."

	And no one moved. The king of bandits sheathed 
	his spearhead into ground. None had known
	that hidden in the wet rock of the August clearing
	a boar, alone and sorry for its breed, had moaned and wept.

The forest takes on a druidic feel with Yeats, but imagery and mood, cross-cultural, remain intact. His calls as hound with one red ear unheard by the white deer with no horns, he longs for the boar without bristles to root the sky of stars and end the world, grunting in darkness. ("He Mourns for the Change that has come upon Him and his Beloved and Longs for the End of the World")

Ragan's "Zivanska" proceeds from shared legend to renewed private awe, from community to isolation. While wholly independent of Yeats's lament, the painterly, elemental imagery chosen by each is strikingly similar; each voice suffers change and degradation in his role as pursuer. The lover, who all in green went riding to low-crouching hounds after red deer, of cummings, and Stevens's primal men at their flame ritual in "Sunday Morning" could form panels, right and left, in a narration by progressive tableaux of wooded, birdless romance whose players know, "there is enough evil in the crying of the wind." ("He reproves the Curlew," Yeats)

"I think I like my answer to that question!" James Ragan's eyes, already so inclined, tip into full grin. "It's something I always wanted to talk about." We are five poets and musicians in interlude with the grape on a lengthening April afternoon in New York, while design becomes dinner on the stove. With a paraphrase of Yeats's "The Spur," someone has opened a free-for-all colloquy on the age limit imposed on passion.

Ragan's response invokes more than the maxim of sensing anew; the key is his knowing anticipation of the next sip taken, kiss exchanged, love made. He expects more, not less intensity in the writing of his fifties and sixties. Implicit is a different turn on the benefit of familiarity to searching out the highest effects, and the value of a vintage sensibility, like that of Yeats, able in 'The Spur' to objectify itself even while in their embrace.

Not leaving frustration unacknowledged, he reminds that Yeats also wrote from the extrapersonal rage and bewilderment of his interwar era. As a graduate student in the late 60's, Ragan was overexposed to radiation treatment for bone spurs, developing a cancer which lamed him for two years, as anti-war marches led to wholesale revolt against U.S. bombings in Southeast Asia. Temporary handicap became permanent gratitude, both relative, both audible in Talking Hours.

Through Yeats and Eliot, among others, he appreciates the 'pastness of the past,' depending on it to merge present into future, excited when all commingle and the boundaries vanish, giving the lie to linear time. His share in the Slovak past no doubt implanted ken that spatial borders were more metaphor than reality, and in his upcoming sixth book, Lostness (Grove, 2001), he deliberately folds and spindles both to cyberambulate at large.

Ragan was in Prague in 1968; a portrait he painted of a Czech girl omits her fifth finger. He was in Beijing not long before the massacre at Tien An Men Square. Then, with his second book, Womb-Weary (Carol, 1990), he logged distance and risk.

	In the single dying of a stone's 
	last breath there is progress
	we will all come to
	in time, falling, each of us
	through the rain of our breath,
	imitations of the Dantesque,
	fused by the body's currents
	down the chutes of Montparnasse,
	birth-wet and river-deep
	in bones descending.

He has plotted around the world the fault lines become fissures that part rich and poor. In his third book, The Hunger Wall(Grove Press, 1995), he connects the globe's dots from the stone reality of Prague's Hladová Zed, the WPA-like hill project of the compassionate Charles IV, to Berlin ("a symbol of nothing / more a wall could do"), through Native American community and myth, to a metaphoric have vs. want badly which collapses under the Turneresque valley skies of Rodney King's riot-riven Los Angeles.

	On the day that fire swathed the clouds,
	we heard the crackling of eucalyptus
	ignite the distant barricades,
	as if some Virgilian urge
	had launched all minds into bereavement,
	as if, in searching far from the fire's edge,
	but for its madness we were so near to it,
	raging with Cato on the rock line's scree,
	'Are the laws of the pit thus broken
	or is there some new counsel
	changed in heaven . . . ?'

A "lizard Lazarus," more "hiss than grammar," prefigures Ragan's next, expanded inquiry into the origins of violence, "a million years of stutters racing / hatred with fitful starts." ("The Skinhead") In Lusions (Grove, 1997), he tracks its evolution with reverence and humor from prehistoric pebble culture through premillennial seclusion to gratitude in "The Astonishment of Living," which urges, "Let all buckets fill, all loss be light," inviting elemental placation of the ravenous flame. Gravity soon re-exerts its "pull-step," and he takes up burden, personal and universal, in "The World-Shouldering "I" (Grove, late 2000). Suspicious of "trauma résumés," his courtesy is tried by self-termed "victims," whose injuries, exaggerated by privilege, rate minor in the planetary triage.

In six collections, Ragan has sought to ensure that each word earned its place, that all rhythms rang true. While that crafted approach remained constant, shifting affinities led him through phases, from image to sense to sound, before arriving at what he hopes is an equal-parts blend of metaphor, meaning and music. He tips his goblet toward the piano.

"At his lyrical best when . . . ," is a phrase that appears with regularity in reviews of American fiction. Are boundaries blurring?

Ragan responds that the image-making mind, spatial where tenses merge free of linear time, is more easily rendered visually, with the immediacy of canvas or film. To achieve similar effects in prose demands verbal reproduction of dream-state flow and truncation, thus, stream of consciousness. Metaphor and mythos are automatic givens, the stuff of Freudian and Jungian examination. Poetry is the verbal means to the highest effects. Since the key is fluidity, lyric poetry may well be "the way in."

Does lyric poetry only ever deal with love and death? Ragan identifies the fallacy: The essence of lyric is song, argumentation, resolution, love and death merely the simplest cases to argue--for enduring, against transitory, sometimes vice versa--though certainly not the only ones. His "Purgatorio," like Picasso's Guernica, lyricizes rupture and devastation, completely persuasive of the way out.

In the community of dinner lit by two tapered flames, Ragan seems a man suffused with profound happiness and unspoiled sensuality. As we raise the red over white lace, his eyes angle down, replaying ceremonial imagery: from The Deer Hunter, its scene of spilt wine, from "The Wedding," his parents' of spilt blood, memory, the way across illusory borders.

		and all she could think of
	was the eye turned black
	on her white trousseau,
		and all he could think of
	was to steal away beyond the walls
	the guards had bribed
	each night to open like a cask,
		and all she remembered
	was her breath tossed like a river
	rasping over rocks and the wet
	weeds of her bed when he left at dawn,
		and all he remembered,
	was the year of nightly raptures,
	and mourning in the cell he had grown
	like stones around his head,
		and all that each remembered,
	was the passion they had married
	to the slow want of an embrace,
	a bridal dance to death,
		two continents
	adrift in a world racing 
	past the Archduke's carriage,
	falling off its rims and spinning
	slowly into ash.