Catherine Meng and Thom Donovan at The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand in Oakland

[Photos courtesy of Alan Bernheimer]

Sunday night, the 18th of July: Oakland:  The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. warm like summer though it was foggy in San Francisco. People in summer dresses and t-shirts. A completely PACKED room. Standing room only and then, graciously, more chairs. Catherine Meng started us out this evening.  Her poems were filled with animals. The first piece she read was entitled "Goat Farmers of Uruguay." Another was titled "Poet Safari."  And another "The Last Cowgirl." Another "65." Some lovely lines I heard included:

"commas come forward on shy hooves"

"widening iambic after lightning"

In the background of all this work lurked figures for the mediating interface of software and technology. This struck me as interesting and accurate, particularly for younger poets who have come of age in a software mediated environment.

Thom Donovan then took the stage and serendipitously one heard the words "sylvan" and "dirt" mentioned in some of Meng's work taken up in Thom's.

Thom launched into his reading of his first poem without commentary and thus sort of wrapped his arms around us, somehow including us by not marking the line between poet with explanation or intro to the poem and audience as hearer or receiver of poem. Since Donovan's work explores community and the communal, this was apt.

Lines I heard in this poem included "templates of a wound" and "the dead could not die. we must teach them," "into the diegesis we go."

Thom then read from a piece entitled "The Hole (Notes)," a piece that writes around and about a manuscript he was putting together this spring entitled "The Hole" to be brought out by Displaced Press.  These notes appeared on Harriet here in April of this year.

In this piece, he writes "Robert Smithson quotes Carl Andre as saying “a thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” And this is one way to think about the hole of this ms’s title—as an absence or negativity which affirms the fact that nothing is something too."  This is a beautiful piece in and of itself and circles around a number of issues that are engaging and provocative.  Here's another bit from it:

" The world is not totally administered, not a discursive machine, not totally, yet. Affect subtracted from emotion might make a collective subject. Lyric is (still) a site for collective subjects. Rhythm (the words as they find rhythm) and “sonic substance” (Fred Moten’s term) as a kind of marsh or phylum for the vita activa. The hole is what ‘I’ am digging and what digs ‘me,’ literally. Against expropriation lyric radicalized observes the fact of dirt moved. Dirt as property relation. Dirt as money (abstraction of social wealth). Dirt as what remains after irresponsible corporate-industrial behavior—strip mining, oil spills, deregulation of toxicity. How to sing this except through a tortuous and straining syntax? Somatic sublimation and decreation."

This piece offers hope and critical attention to the now and a possible future. This piece alone--never mind the lovely people, the rest of the poetry from both writers (Thom read a number of poems that appear on his blog here)--made the trip across the Bay--always a psychological as well as geographical barrier--so worth it.


Author bios appear here.

from Robert Glück's Reader

Pasolini




I

2 crows walk down the road.
One says, “Brother, when the state
is truly communist & out of
the jeweled grasp of church & capital
where even the weeds are looking for a better cemetery,
brother, then we will see–”
Every haystack trembles for the body.
These birds talk good sense. Later they are eaten &
their bones deliciously picked clean.




2

2 crows: politics: to believe and believe.
They experiment, one lies & the other believes,
obvious lies & obvious faith.
What’s left stands on one scaly foot,
its head under its wing
and a wink of complicity from the state.




3

2 crows, 2 crows walk down a road
that was shattered by economics.
One crow says “Brother,
I don’t know how to make a living.
When I wake up in the morning
tears already stand in my eyes
ready to flow. Brother,
to live in the world,
to change the world.”



4

2 crows walk & talk on the desolate
theme of early death.
“Yet lest we may be too one-sided, brother,
notice with what beauty & justice
the sun rises, colors
reflect off their objects, muscles flex,
breath is accepted & enjoyed.”
 
Reader was published by The Lapis Press in 1989

from the Melmoth Letters

A poem from an epistolary series I've  been working on for too long called "The Melmoth Letters." The letters are written by a character called Wanda; some are addressed to Melmoth and others to Immalee.

Note: Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820) is widely considered the last of the Gothic novels. This sprawling series of stories within stories follows Melmoth who makes a bargain with the devil–his soul for 150 years of life. Ironically, he spends his life traveling the world trying to convince someone to trade places with him. Over the course of his story he is entangled with the Spanish Inquisition and meets and falls in love with Immalee, an isolated Indian princess who later in the book turns up in Spain, now named Isadora. Immalee/Isadora is in love with the stranger.



August 2009


Dear Melmoth–

In Solaris, the gaze is turned on the water grasses’ undulating stir. Were they ever real? Why the obsession with the real anyway. The woman who is the cosmonaut psychologist’s dead ex-wife is someone he loves more than when she was. even after he kills her his bad conscience. Then he turns, gives himself and mimesis crosses over. passion a seeping ink. Outside the vessel window the sea swells and churns. His father is at home in a house with rain water falling inside. The psychologist drops to his knees. attention is lavished on the Brueghel paintings. people in snow. a medieval village scene. On the one hand, I wept. On the other, it is 1974 and the breeches are tight on the psychologist and from this vantage point, I can appreciate. Tarkovsky sends Kubrik a long film, his version of the letter. Dave and space were never so corporeal. Which returns us to the embedded. Being embedded. Abetted real. reportage. Embed the reported. a film body unwinds.

In another painting inside on screen in the film, near the ships and cliff, in the corner foreground, Breughel gives us Icarus fallen into sea.

–xo Wanda

See a trailer for Solaris here.

Thinking about the Rethinking Going on Around Rethinking Poetics Conference

June seems to have crumbled around me without a break.



Out in the world--in the virtual and material worlds--on Facebook and in NY and in the blogosphere, there has been much discussion about the recent Rethinking Poetics conference held in New York and co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia.  I did not attend. Did not even know about it until after the fact, largely because of Facebook and blogs.


Much discussion about the white male hegemony, the impossibility of rethinking anything from the centers of institutional powers (Nada Gordon and others). There appear to be so many poetry conferences of late. Is it my imagination or do they breed like rabbits? Do musicians and dancers and painters convene to discuss their work, to rethink it in community as much? Is it because poetry's material is language, is that why there is so much discussion of it? Is it because its theorists and critics are so often also its practitioners? Is it because largely those who read it are also its makers? Does that explain it? Conferences and convenings--they have their pleasures. Though one does hate to be in rooms with those who raise their voices to talk over others and to perform their own dazzling intelligence merely to perform it, for others. But of pleasures--my first National Poetry Foundation conference in Orono was daunting, exhausting and also thrilling. A little like poetry camp for adults.  So many attendees at the Rethinking (I keep typing Rethinging!) conference as Stephanie Young points out, are degreed--either with PhDs or MFAs. What do these degrees get one? As someone with an MA (in English and Creative Writing) and a Phd in literature, I'm not sure I have an answer. Debt as Juliana Spahr says--yes. Indeed. A dramatic swerve off a previous career or work path--yes. A lack of health insurance. Yes. A situation of imbalance in one's relationship. Some ones of us want to free that partner from the circumstances of primary regular earner of a livable wage in the midst of one's own adjunct and part-time temporary gigs. It is important to note that in many places the salary for Assistant Professors is less than that of a city garbage collector, or nurse, or social worker, or librarian or construction worker, or paralegal, certainly lower than that of an entry level attorney. Many of us from working class families who succumbed to the pleasures and ideologies of education, find ourselves still in extremis. Perhaps even more so than our parents who did not go to college. We are as Linda Russo has said elsewhere, itinerant.



I am feeling like a heretic in the church. I suffer from lack of belief in the structure and existence of PoetryLand even while participating in it and the poetry itself, delighting in the ritual moving of words around--"critically" or "creatively," (that problematic rivalry/binary) the manual intellectual labor of it and the doing and undoing that it enables. The extremity that it convenes, exposes, perhaps attempts to mend and fails. And yet it is worth doing. And undoing. Doing. We're undone.

from Memory for Forgetfulness (Dha:kira li-l-nisya:n), August Beirut 1982

by Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Ibrahim Muhawi


Darwish's book begins with an epigraph from Roland Barthes:


C’est précisément parce que j‘oublie que je lis.


I am just beginning this moving and powerfully written book and am finding Darwish's work an extraordinary investigation into reading, writing, history, memory, forgetfulness, occupation, exile, identity, nation, violence. That said, gendered constructions in this passage strike me as problematic. Also, among other things, it would be productive to read this along side of Jacques Rancière's The Names of History.


In 1948 Darwish's family fled from Birwe in Upper Galilee to Lebanon. Shortly thereafter "the newly formed Israel destroyed the village. Darwish's family...stole back into the homeland, but too late to be included in the census of the Palestinian Arabs who had remained in the country" (xii). Without identity papers and under Israeli rule, Darwish was vulnerable. In his Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Yawmiyya:t al-Huzn al-?a:di), Darwish explains, "you realize that philosophically you exist but legally you do not" (xiii).




All quotes (including footnotes *-***) are from Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982 by Mahmoud Darwish. Translated with an Introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

And where is my will?


It stopped over there, on the other side of the collective voice. But now, I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. Now I feel shame. I feel shamed by my fear, and by those defending the scent of the distant homeland--that fragrance they've never smelled because they weren't born on her soil. She bore them, but they were born away from her. Yet they studied her constantly, without fatigue or boredom; and from overpowering memory and constant pursuit, they learned what it means to belong to her.


"You're aliens here," they say to them there.


"You're aliens here," they say to them here. *


And between here and there they stretched their bodies like a vibrating bow until death celebrated itself through them. Their parents were driven out of there to become guests here, temporary guests, to clear civilians from the battlegrounds of the homeland and to allow the regular armies to purge Arab land and honor of shame and disgrace. As the old lyric had it: "Brother, the oppressors have all limits dared to break/ To battle then, of ourselves an offering to make.../ Of a sudden upon them with death we came/ In vain their fight, and nothing they became."** And as those lyrics were chasing out the remnant of the invaders, liberating the country line by line, these youths were born here, any old way--without a cradle, perhaps on a straw mat or banana leaves, or in bamboo baskets--with no joy or feasting, no birth certificate or name registration. They were a burden to their families and tent neighbors. In short, their births were surplus. They had no identity.


And in the end what happened, happened. The regular armies retreated, and these youths were still being born without a reason, growing up for no reason, remembering for no reason, and being put under siege for no reason. All of them know the story--a story very much like that of a cosmic traffic accident or a natural catastrophe. But they also read a great deal in the books of their bodies and their shacks. They read their segregation, and the Arab-nationalist speeches. They read the publications of UNRWA  [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency], and the whips of the police.***Yet they went on growing up and going beyond the limits of the refugee camp and the detention center.


And they read the history of forts and citadels conquerors used as signatures to keep their names alive in lands not theirs and to forge the identity of rocks and oranges for example. Is history not bribable? And why, then, would many places--lakes, mountains, cities--bear the names of military leaders but that they had mouthed an impression when they first beheld them, and their words became the names still used today? "Oh, rid!" (How beautiful!) That's what a Roman general cried out when he first saw that lake in Macedonia, and his surprise became its name. Add to this the hundreds of names we use to refer to places previously singled out by some conqueror, where it has since become difficult to disentangle the identity from the defeat. Forts and citadels that are no more than attempts to protect a name that does not trust time to preserve it from oblivion. Anti-forgetfulness wars; anti-oblivion stones. No one wants to forget. More accurately, no one wants to be forgotten. Or, more peacefully, people bring children into the world to carry their name, or to bear for them the weight of the name and its glory. It has a long history, this double operation of searching for a place or a time on which to put a signature and untie the knot of the name facing the long caravans of oblivion.


Why then should those whom the waves of forgetfulness have cast upon the shores of Beirut be expected to go against nature? Why should so much amnesia be expected of them? And who can construct for them a new memory with no content other than the broken shadow of a distant life in a shack made of sheet metal?


Is there enough forgetfulness for them to forget?


And who is going to help them forget in the midst of this anguish, which never stops reminding them of their alienation from place and society? Who will accept them as citizens? Who will protect them against the whips of discrimination and pursuit: "You don't belong here!"


They present for inspection an identity, which, shown at borders, sounds an alarm so that contagious diseases may be kept in check, and at the same time they note how expertly this very identity is used to uplift Arab-nationalist spirit. These forgotten ones, disconnected from the social fabric, these outcasts, deprived of work and equal rights, are at the same time expected to applaud their oppression because it provides them with the blessings of memory. Thus he who's expected to forget he's human is forced to accept the exclusion from human rights that will train him for freedom from the disease of forgetting the homeland. He has to catch tuberculosis not to forget he has lungs, and he must sleep in open country not to forget he has another sky. He has to work as a servant not to forget he has a national duty, and he must be denied the privilege of settling down so that he won't forget Palestine. In short, he must remain the Other to his Arab brothers because he is pledged to liberation.


Fine, fine. He knows his duty: my identity--my gun. Why then do they level against him countless accusations: making trouble, violating the rules of hospitality, creating problems, and spreading the contagion of arms? When he holds his peace, his soul is taken out to the stray dogs; and when he moves toward the homeland, his body is dragged out to the dogs. The intellectuals, capable of trying on the latest models in theory, have convinced him he's the only alternative to the status quo; yet when the status quo pounces on him, they demand self-criticism because he has gone too far in his patriotism: he has gone so far as to put himself beyond the fold of the status quo. Conditions are not ripe. Conditions are not yet ripe. He has to wait. What must he do? Chatter his life away in the coffee shops of Beirut? He had already prattled so long he was told Beirut had corrupted him.


Society ladies, armed with automatic weapons, amid the tinkle of their jewelry give speeches at parties organized for the defense of the national origins of mujaddara. Yet when he feels embarrassed by this and says something to the effect that the homeland is not a dish of rice and lentils, and when he takes up arms for use outside, on the border, they say, "This is overstepping the bounds." And when he uses these arms to defend himself inside, against the local agents of Zionism, they say, "This is interference in our communal affairs." What's to be done then? What can he do to end the process of self-criticism, other than apologize for an existence which has not yet come into being? You are not going there, and you don't belong here. Between these two negations this generation was born defending the spirit's bodily vessel, onto which they fasten the fragrance of the country they've never known. They've read what they've read, and they've seen what they've seen, and they don't believe defeat is inevitable. So they set out on the trail of that fragrance (13-17).


Notes:
*Recurring throughout, "there" and "here" represent two major poles of experience in the text. Literally, they are references to Palestine (there) and Lebanon (here).


**After the loss of Palestine in 1948, this lyric was made famous by the Egyptian singer Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab (to whom there is another reference later in the text). To Darwish, an innovative and experimental poet, the lyric represents the decadent use of the qaSi:da--the classical form of Arabic verse. The reference in the sentence following the lyric to "liberating the country line by line" is extremely bitter and ironic, since the country was actually lost while that kind of poetry was still being written. The lyric's content demonstrates another form of decadence for a poet who, as we see from this book, has an overriding concern with language; it shows the vacuity of pre-1967 Arab political discourse in general and discourse about Israel in particular. The Arab defeat in 1967 (a watershed year in modern Arab history and a major theme in the book) opened the eyes of many intellectuals to the need for renewal on all fronts.


***UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, was created in 1950 to take care of Palestinians living in the refugee camps in the Arab countries when "it became clear no resolution of the refugee question was likely." Charles C. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 154.

(photo from the Palestine Monitor)

Leslie Scalapino 1944-2010

Leslie Scalapino died May 28th 2010 in Berkeley, California.  When I first heard this news, I didn't believe it. Call it denial. Call it, I don't know what. The news finally became concrete when it was confirmed by my friend and fellow blogger Kathy Lou Schultz as our two families ate sushi last night.  The news has left me speechless.

This morning at yoga I realized I hadn't asked Leslie some of the questions I'd wanted to and should have asked her about poetry goings-on from the 80s on and her participation in them. That opportunity is lost.

We do have her work and this morning I flipped through That They Were at the Beach and the book opened, strangely, here:

The thought that
I'd then be dead
later.
---This wouldn't
be a good
time for it to occur
---having had the feeling of being depressed then.

---Though now
time
has passed since that.

photo: Charles Bernstein, 2006

More on Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Chris Nagler, Yours Truly, and Charles Bernstein Respond

In response to my blog post on Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer's talk at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, Chris Nagler, who was also present that night, made the following important comment:

This is a great summary of that interesting evening, Robin. I just want to mention one moment that stayed with me from the conversation. I'm talking about the moment when Bernstein quoted the Israeli writer Amos Oz (this quote also appears in Loss Pequeño Glazier's interview with Bernstein, collected in the book of essays and interviews, My Way):

"Now suppose a new Kafka is growing up right now, here in San Francisco, California. Suppose he is fourteen years old right now. Let's call him Chuck Bernstein. Let's assume that he is every bit of a genius as Kafka was in his time. His future must, as I see it, depend on an uncle in Jerusalem or an experience by the Dead Sea, or a cousin in a kibbutz or something inspired by the Israeli live drama. Otherwise, with the exception of the possibility that he is growing up among the ultra-Orthodox, he will be an American writer of Jewish origin--not a Jewish American writer. He may become a new Faulkner, but not a new Kafka."

Bernstein's comment on this idea was that it was "repugnant," though he didn't explain precisely why. In the Q & A, the young woman employed by the JCC to host the event asked Bernstein why he had such strong feelings about Oz's statement. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it had something to do with how "reductive" an idea of Jewishness it is. What I remembered so vividly was the questioner's clear uncomprehendingness juxtaposed with Bernstein's strong condemnatory language. It felt to me like a moment that stood in for some issues that could not quite be addressed in that setting.

Note: The Oz quote is from his essay "Imagining the Other: 1."

I responded:

Chris---

Thanks for this comment and the reference, and yes that was a memorable moment. And while Morris's reference in the intro to Radical Poetics clearly outlines the problematic and reductive vision of Jewish American Writing articulated in the Telling and Remembering anthology for example, that background was not offered in so clear a format in the JCC discussion though I think Norman Fischer's comment about his own experience in NY with his book Opening to You and the stories and anecdotes that both offered were suggestive, including Bernstein's comment about his own experience of and interest in Jewish writing and its lineage not so much deriving from Israel but rather Europe. He said something to that effect. At the talk, I was not sure how to interpret Bernstein's performance with the Oz piece because I didn't know who Oz is. It wasn't until Jocelyn [Saidenberg]outlined Oz and then I had a chance to read the remark (rather than just hear it at the talk) that I could get a handle on it. That is probably NOT the case with the questioner....or maybe there was something about the performativity of that piece that made it challenging to the questioner? What is the politics or the poetics? Where the line between?

*******
I then wrote to Charles who kindly responded even though he is in Coimbra, Portugal. Charles gave me permission to post this from his email:

Robin,

I very much appreciated your post about the JCCSF event and the book. On the Amos Oz quote, my reply to Joanna Steinhahardt is on the unedited version of the talk, now up at PennSound – think it’s the first comment in the discussion period. Eric Sellinger originally sent me that quote and I used it earlier in an autobiographical interview in My Way. What do you think about it?

If would be as if I wrote:

Now suppose a new Kafka is growing up right now, in Tel Aviv. Suppose he is fourteen years old right now. Let’s call him Amachi Oz. Let’s assume that he is every bit of a genius as Kafka was in his time. His future must, as I see it, depend on an uncle in Miami or an experience learning Yiddish in the Catskills or the complete DVD set of Curb Your Enthusiasm and all Mel Brooks’ movies, or something inspired by Bob Dylan or Jerry Lewis. Otherwise, with the exception of the possibility that he is growing up among transplanted upper West siders who have memorized Gershwin, Berlin, and Sondheim, he will be an Middle Eastern writer of Jewish origin—not a Jewish writer. He may become a new Darwish, but not a new Kafka.

No one would accept this except as a spoof; but is the Oz quote any less problematic? In the absence of the European secular Jewish culture in the wake of the Extermination Process, the U.S. has developed its own Jewish secular culture that doesn’t play second fiddle to Israel, which has over this time, cultivated its own distinct brands of Jewishness, no more or less authentic than ours. Israeli writers don’t get to dictate who’s Jewish or what’s Jewish (and neither do Israeli rabbis). The Jews who thought they were excommunicating Spinoza really just cut themselves off

I responded:

Charles--

Thanks for your note. And, thanks again for the talk at the JCC.

I think the confusion for me lay in the fact that at the talk I had no idea who Oz is, wasn't sure if that was his quote or whether you had revised it. I did just read the portion of Oz's "Imagining the Other: 1" (and I'll post some quotes from it--see below) that is accessible via Google Books and it is completely clear to me where he is coming from and the problems with what he says. Israel is the only site of "live drama" and all depends, in Oz's vision, on Israel. It was hard to interpret the Oz quote in the context of the talk at the JCC because I had no context for it. I am assuming that the questioner knows of Oz's work, but can't say for sure. It would be interesting to ask her more about this.

Here are the quotes from the Oz essay. They clearly locate his position:

Now, my point is that in all exiles, including America, Jewish culture is essentially in danger of becoming a museum where the only proposition that parents can make to their children is, Please do not assimilate. Please go on running the show--the museum. Please be impressed by the richness of our inheritance.
The other option, as I said is live drama. And live drama is no rose garden, nor is it ever pure. It is a perpetual struggle; sound and fury. Sometimes even bloodshed. But Israel is the only place in the Jewish world now, where there is live drama on a large scale at work(119).

[note: section below immediately follows the quote about chuck bernstein that Charles read and is included in Chris's comment above.]

In other words, I am suggesting that even individual creation in the future, to the extent that it is going to be Jewish, will depend on Israel to some extent. This is not the end of the world, by the way. As I maintain that in the long run individual creation springs from the fertile ground of collective creation, and as I maintain that perhaps there is no collective creation in the present Diaspora, the only choice for Jews is either to turn to Israel or maybe despair(122).

from Amos Oz's contribution "Imagining the Other:1" in
The Writer in the Jewish Community: an Israeli-North American Dialogue Edited by Richard Siegel, Tamar Sofer. Cranbury NJ and London: Associated University Press, 1993.

You can read the piece online here:


Here is the question about Oz from the SF JCC talk and the first part of Charles' response. This is from PennSound. Click here to hear the whole thing yourself:

Steinhardt: Why did the Amos Oz quote offend you?

Bernstein: Because he's defining, He's choosing to speak for defining what Jews are. One reaction I have as someone who grew up here in the US....is that he doesn't get to define or tell me what I am. To me, the crisis for Jewish life, for all Jews is the extermination of the European Jews by Nazis which is predicated on the idea of defining who is Jewish or not.....I certainly think he is entitled to his views but his views exclude in a way that does not allow for an understanding of what American Jewishness is so it is important for other people to speak up to make that point.....

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