exchange with stan apps

there's an interesting exchange between me and stan apps, stemming from his brief comments on my serial poem "brakhage notes," which just came out in the latest issue of primary writing. it's going on mostly in the comments box, so i pull it from there and reproduce below -- but read the whole post for his take on joseph mosconi (in the same issue) and stephanie rioux (in the very interesting previous issue).

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Tom Orange in his “Brakhage Notes” aims to provide a language of “defamiliarize[d] vision” in order to “discover a more natural, primal vision” similar to the vision that Brakhage’s films share with the viewer. I can’t reproduce Orange’s spacing but a typical series of images is:

undermerged / climbingdown mouth / pickedup armheld / fingers / eye turns to eye / to mouth / fingers / taste / from spoon

branchlined / glitterbreeze / playground / relearned mass skeletal / shaken scream

This language does enact an interestingly primal narrative of childhood sensory experience, the romanticism of which presents an interesting contrast to Mosconi’s fierce critique of the legacy of Romanticism in the same issue. Orange’s work here seems unlike much of his other work; “Brakhage Notes” seems to succeed at performing a rather limited intention. The sensory narrative it constructs seems to be offered entirely for its own sake, with no intention of recuperating it for any broader purpose or project. So when we are given the image of a playground climbing structure as “skeletal” and shaken with children’s screams (assumedly mostly happy screams), I find myself with nothing to do with the image but to relate it to my own experiences; this particular work resolves into narrative for me.

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At 7:48 AM, tmorange said…

hi stan,

just to clarify: by claiming brakhage's cinematic goal was "to artifice and defamiliarize vision so as to discover a more natural, primal vision," i did not mean to infer this to be the goal for my "brakhage notes" piece as well.

i am, however, interested in the plausibility of this goal for any creative endeavors -- even tho i'm suspicious of modifiers like "more natural" and "primal," which i think are far more important to brakhage than they are to me personally.

as i think about it now, the "brakhage notes" are concerned primarily with the (failure of) translating of visual experience into language on the field of the page. that is, much of what's going on in the brakhage films cannot be captured on the page. (as a multi-track sound-text performance, the piece comes closer i think to a more faithful rendering of the visual experience.)

thanks,
tom

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At 12:12 PM, sa said…

Hi Tom,

That's very interesting! I seem to have seriously misread the intention of your piece. I read your piece as a sort of reconstruction of the Brakhage, whereas it's actually more intended as a critique of mimetic processes.

I'm always trying to decide how interested I am in this question of can a work in one medium be reproduced in another. It seems to hinge on whether one is reproducing "content" or "sentiment".

It seemed to me that your piece did reproduce sentiment typical of a Brakhage film, and that was why I read it the way I did--these notions of "natural" and "primal" are interesting sentiments. You must have had some sense that you were re-transmitting these?

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At 9:52 AM, tmorange said…

stan,

well you're right actually -- i guess in a similar fashion to joseph's bristling at the idea that he had written "persona poems," so i initially bristled at the idea that i was striving for brakhage's "more nautral, primal vision." to the extent that my poems are a verbal record of the visual experience of the films, it's inevitable that brakhage's "content" will find its way in -- "a sort of reconstruction of the Brakhage" as you say.

and the passages you cited and commented on certainly reflect that kind of "more natural, primal" content, going back to childhood and all. so i guess i'd say i admire brakhage's goals but don't thereby identify with his natural/primal framework, or the sentiment that inheres to it.

quite the contrary, i'm suspicious of something like "human nature" as a fixed, unchanging, transcendent category, as well as appeals to origins and the primitive. it's all a bit too noble savage, child is the father of the man for me.

if instead we take "more natural" to mean more enabling of our untapped human potentials (wcw's "the perfection of new forms as additions to nature") and "primitive means complex" (rothenberg) -- then i'm on board.

allbests,
t.

p.s. i'm curious tho, if by "sentiment typical of a Brakhage film" you mean the natural/primal thing or something else.

executive priviledge

Dear Editor,

The White House claims that the conditions it has placed on its officials testifying before Congress over the politically-motivated dismissal of eight federal prosecutors last December -- that they be interviewed only in private, without transcripts, and not under oath -- are based on "executive priviledge." This may be legally sound.

Unfortunately, this administration has demonstrated a compulsive inability to tell the truth. Justice Department officials have changed their story over these dismissals numerous times, and now we see a gap in the e-mail messages released by the White House -- between November 15 and December 7, the very weeks leading to the dismissals. Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and the others need to testify -- in public, for the record, and under oath so the truth can be compelled from them.

[sent to Chicago Tribune, USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NBC News, Washington Times, American Conservative, American Enterprise, American Prospect, American Spectator, Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Cook Political Report, Human Events, Insight On The News, National Journal Magazine, Public Interest, Roll Call, RollCall.com, Washington Monthly, Weekly Standard, New Republic, Sojourners, US News & World Report, C-SPAN Radio, National Public Radio (NPR), C-SPAN Radio, Pacifica Radio, Voice of America, Cybercast News Service, Dow Jones Newswires Washington Bureau, Gannett News Service, Hearst News Service, Reuters America - Washington Bureau, Scripps Howard News Service, States News Service, Capital Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Florida Times-Union, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Times-Picayune, Charlotte Post, Cincinnati Post, Columbus Post, Denver Post, Dover Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Post and Courier, Post-Standard, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post Writers Group, Dallas Morning News, Detroit News, Duluth News Tribune, Knoxville News-Sentinel, New York Daily News, News & Observer, Patriot-News, Pensacola News Journal, San Antonio Express-News, Savannah Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, Springfield News-Leader, Union Leader & New Hampshire Sunday News, Wheeling News-Register, Wilmington News Journal, Arizona Daily Star, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Indianapolis Star, Kansas City Star, Lincoln Journal Star, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pasadena Star-News, Tribune Star]

Library of Congress Jazz Film Series

April 2-30, 2007
Mary Pickford Theater
James Madison Building
Library of Congress

All programs are free, but seating is limited to 60 seats. Reservations may be made by phone, beginning one week before any given show. Call (202) 707-5677 during business hours (Monday-Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm). Reserved seats must be claimed at least 10 mins before show time, after which standbys will be admitted to unclaimed seats. Programs subject to change without notice.

Monday, April 2 (7:00 pm)
Cecil Taylor: All The Notes (2003)
directed and produced by Christopher Felver (73 mins)
This insightful portrait of the avant pianist, composer and poet Cecil Taylor finds the free-jazz firebrand playing, dancing, reciting, performing with a big band and talking about life, art, music and memories.

Monday, April 9 (7:00 pm)
Home (2005)
directed and produced by Dorothy Darr (72 mins)
Just two months before his death in 2001, drummer Billy Higgins visited saxophonist Charles Lloyd at his home where they recorded a series of duets eventually released as the two-CD set Which Way Is East. The artist and film maker Dorothy Darr rolled both audio tape and video, revealing an intimate celebration of spiritual connection between two musical giants.

Monday, April 16 (7:00 pm)
Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation (2005)
directed and produced by Mike Dibb (85 mins)
Pianist Keith Jarrett discusses his creative life in music with rare clips, interviews and performances featuring his American and European Quartets, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, the Standards Trio and producer Manfred Eicher.

Monday, April 23 (7:00 pm)
Los Zafiros: Music From The Edge of Time (2004)
directed and produced by Lorenzo DeStefano (79 mins)
Music, emotion and rarely seen archival film clips from Cuban television fuel this bittersweet, award-winning tribute to the beloved vocal group Los Zafiros (The Saffires), known as the Beatles of 1960s Cuba. Thirty years after their breakup, the two surviving band members, Manuel Galbran and Miguel Cancio, reunite in Havana sharing songs, celebrations, memories and tears.

Monday, April 30 (7:00 pm)
Irene Schweizer (2005)
directed by Gita Gsell; produced by Franzika Reck (75 mins
Swiss pianist, composer Irene Schweizer has performed and recorded with many of the most important American, African and European improvisers. Since the 1980s, she's been associated with both the Feminist Improvising Group and the European Women's Improvising Group, as well as the collective trio Les Diaboliques, with Maggie Nichols and Joelle Leandre. Gita Gsell's stylized, visually stunning documentary features Schweizer talking about her work and performing with Les Diaboliques, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Han Bennink, Louis Moholo and others.

This screening is co-sponsored by the Embassy of Switzerland.
----------------------------------------------------------

Series curated by Larry Appelbaum
For press details or further information: lapp[at]loc[dot]gov

favorite bill berkson poems

a list in advance of the career-spanning selected poems due out from coffee house in a coupla years...

from Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007)

• No Danger of That
  
• Never Happened
  
• Last Look
  
• English Suite
  
• Merit
  
• Heine Song
  
• Thuringian Equals
  
• After the Medusa
  
• Salad Spinner
  
• "I thought they were beautiful but they're really glamorous"
  
• Glass Hoist
  
• Compass Points
  
• Cuban Fives

from Fugue State (Zoland Books, 2001)

• A Head at the Covers
  
• Shelter
  
• Way How
  
• Melting Milk
  
• Graphics
  
• Enough Already
  
• Saint Francis Dark
  
• The Reader's Lover
  
• Binding Grievance
  
• Camera Obscura
  
• By Halves

from Serenade: Poetry and Prose 1975-1989 (Zoland Books, 2000)

• Basis
  
• From a Childhood #101
  
• Poem ("cutting brush...")
  
• Voyage from Jericho
  
• Anti-Poem
  
• Tint Guard
  
• On Ice
  
• Try Again
  
• Ocean Grove
  
• Burckhardt's Ninth
  
• First Turns
  
• Source
  
• Stopping Is Nothing
  
• You Know What Crazy Is?
  
• End-of-Century Thrush
  
• Start Over
  
• On the High Window
  
• A Fixture
  
• Chocolate Chocolate Chip
  
• At the Skin
  
• Chasing the Slip

from Blue is the Hero (Poems 1960-1975) (L Publications, 1976)

• Floors
  
• Carolinas
  
• Oscar

[still working on this book...]

second commandment republicans

from tmorange
to letters@time.com
date Mar 20, 2007 9:37 AM
subject Joe Klein, "The Second Commandment Republicans" (3/15)

Dear Editors,

I wonder if you and Mr. Klein appreciate the ironies in your story that tries to point up a kinder, gentler Christian right in the person of Mike Huckabee ("The Second Commandment Republicans," 3/15).

If Huckabee's January 28 performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" is any indication, he's hardly the "political inconvenience, a destroyer of stereotypes" that Klein makes him out to be. No, he's an evasive, backpedalling waffler whose extreme right-wing positions are out of step with the American mainstream. All he could say to Russert about how badly this president has botched the War in Iraq is that "he's had a lot of struggles" and "it's been a struggle for the president." How about the struggles of the families who have sent their children to die in Iraw under false pretenses?

At a conference of Southern Baptist pastors on June 7, 1998, Huckabee said: "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ." Asked by Russert to clarify, he offered, "I think it's dangerous to say that we are a nation that ought to be pushed into a Christian faith by its leaders" -- which is of course exactly what he called for at the pastors' conference. Finally, he told Iowa's Christian Alliance in March 2006, "In our lifetimes, we've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head,' from Barney Fife to Barney Frank, from 'Father Knows Best' to television shows where father knows nothing," subsequently defending this blatant piece of contempt for homosexuals and an affront to an elected offical a "rhetorical device" that "wasn't any particular attempt to be derisive of him." Rubbish.

Huckabee "talks like a liberal" only out of one corner of his mouth: with the other he backpedals and doubletalks his way through extreme right-wing positions. And as for the "moderate candidates who live like liberals" (referring to the multiple divorces of Giuliani, Gingrich, Romney and McCain), in fact the complete opposite of the time-worn stereotype of liberals reiterated unflinchingly by the so-called liberal media is true: Obama, Clinton and Edwards each remain married to their first and only spouses.

Revoke the 2002 AUMF

Dear Senator [Name],

While I am sure you are disappointed that you could not bring a majority of your colleagues to pass S.J. Res. 9, I encourage you to continue to fight on our behalf. The Senate is way out of step with the conviction of most Americans that this president's failed policy in Iraq must be changed, but this will not happen without your continued efforts. To the Republicans' ongoing claim that you are trying to "micromanage" the war, please respond that since this president refuses to end his own "macromismanagement," we will do it for him.

Furthermore, I urge you to introduce legislation that revokes, rescinds, or otherwise revises the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243). This is the only logical resolution to be drawn from S.J. Res. 9's whereas clause that "the circumstances referred to in the [AUMF] have changed substantially." Indeed we are no longer fighting the same war this president deceitfully sold to us five years ago, and therefore he may very well be conducting current military operations unlawfully (to say nothing of their immorality).

[sent to 47 senators voting "yea" on the joint resolution to revise United States policy on Iraq (S.J.Res. 9): Akaka (D-HI), Baucus (D-MT), Bayh (D-IN), Biden (D-DE), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Brown (D-OH), Byrd (D-WV), Cantwell (D-WA), Cardin (D-MD), Carper (D-DE), Casey (D-PA), Clinton (D-NY), Conrad (D-ND), Dodd (D-CT), Dorgan (D-ND), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Feinstein (D-CA), Harkin (D-IA), Inouye (D-HI), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Klobuchar (D-MN), Kohl (D-WI), Landrieu (D-LA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Lincoln (D-AR), McCaskill (D-MO), Menendez (D-NJ), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Nelson (D-FL), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Rockefeller (D-WV), Salazar (D-CO), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), Smith (R-OR), Stabenow (D-MI), Tester (D-MT), Webb (D-VA), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR)]

revoke the AUMF

since the november elections, the discourse surrounding the protracted failure that is Gulf War II provides a studied contrast between the effective, unified messages of the republicans and the scattered disarray of democratic messages. i won't go through the lexis/nexis record to prove this because a summary is clear enough. the basis of the republican message is fear (we must stay and "win" in iraq or else face disaster there and at home), most recently supplemented with the charge that congress is trying to "micromanage" the war (a perfectly crafted luntz-esque soundbite). by contrast, the democrats have been all over the place -- from non-binding resolutions of disapproval to various means of limiting the funding, to caps on new troop levels, to whatever hare-brained scheme they'll come up with tomorrow.

the only solution to my mind, the ONLY way to get the bush people to own up and change their utter failure of a policy, is to revise, revoke, rescind either the 2001 or 2002 AUMFs (authorization for the use of military force).

while over at znet stephen lendman paints a rather grim picture of why this won't happen and cutting off funding is the only way (tho that won't happen either), dave lindorf says otherwise at counterpunch. and in no uncertain terms:

The only way to stop the ongoing rape of the Constitution is to change the laws that have been used as legal cover by the rapist-in-chief and his accomplices.

strong language, nevertheless equal to the direness of the situation. because while lendman is probably correct realistically, lindorf appeals to the optimist/idealist in me that thinks if you went to bush and said your AUMF expires at the end of the month, and if you don't come back to us with a reauthorization then your funding is cut off too, this might just work.

mistakes were made

from this morning's nytimes:

Under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted Tuesday that he would not resign but said, "I acknowledge that mistakes were made here."

i mean that pretty much sums up the past seven years, doesn't it? of course it took six years for these guys to even admit mistakes, but notice how this statement operates: "i acknowledge" -- i am the one who has authority to speak on the matter; "that mistakes were made" -- the passive voice enables the mistake-makers to remain unidentified and unacknowledged, and thus responsibility for those mistakes remains untaken; "here" -- as if this were simply a local, isolated case of complete failure, corruption and lies on this administration's part. in short, gonzales here acknowledges nothing; what he offers is an acknowledgement that acknowledges nothing, an admission of no blame, no accountability and no responsibility.

for anything. these guys have not done a single thing right in seven years, and their hubris remains unmitigated in the face of persistant and catastrophic failure. they are killing this country. here's an excellent three-year-old backgrounder by eric lind for the nation.

AWP

AWP is the annual convention of the associated writing programs, which is the trade association of academic literary professionals. that is, poets and writers in english departments at universities, as distinct from the literary critics (who meet every year at the MLA).

at least, such is my understanding. there are of course poets and poet-critics who go to the MLA, but the MLA is where you go to try and get a university teaching job. socializing and networking aside, that's what it's about. the panels of critical papers are entirely perfunctory; there's no reason to give a paper at the MLA unless you're interviewing for jobs. you're far and away going to get a better hearing of your paper at a smaller and/or more specialized conference.

now i've been to paradise (MLA), but i've never been to me (AWP). and i can't for the life of me really figure out why someone would go to the AWP: it's not about getting a job, and the panels are (like at the MLA) thoroughly perfunctory. i can see if you are a publisher, because the bookfair is probably pretty extensive and representative of the literary publishing landscape at present. so anyone who can tell me something i'm missing -- again, socializing and networking aside, which is a very real and compelling reason for going to something like this, perhaps ultimately the only one -- do let me know.

in the meantime, there's nothing but a good ol' fashioned post-AWP poetryblog dust up! josh corey, following up on kasey's suggestion, discerns a "clash of cultures" (shades of samuel huntington?) between two constituencies:

The first is what I think of as the culture of affirmation; the other is the culture of solving artistic problems. The former, larger group consists of people who are most urgently concerned with confirming their identities as writers [....] The second, smaller culture consists of people who, though hardly free of the anxiety and desire for affirmation that constitutes the affect of the first, are primarily concerned with questions about what they'd like to accomplish as writers and how they should go about doing it. [...] Put simplistically, the first culture concerns itself with becoming, while the second assumes its being so as to get on with questions of doing.

as reginald shepherd's takes on this in the commentbox correctly point out, this clash is clearly posed in terms of a progression in which the second group is more advanced than the first and is thus fraught with all kinds of class conflict -- sufficient enough to send one seth abramson into a full-on rage against the poetry elite machine!

what's more interesting though is how josh seems unable to articulate his own place in the dynamic he proposes. for example, the AWP panel (scroll down) josh sat on...

Ballroom D 2nd Floor
F105. Post-Avant: Strategies of Excess. (Jed Rasula, Johannes Goransson, Anne Boyer, K. Silem Mohammad, Joshua Corey, Lara Glenum) Certain contemporary poetry flies in the face on the well-worn strategies of elegance and eloquence. Such poetry is invested in strategies of excess, violence, and aberrance. Opposed to the New Critical "no noise in art" dictum, these poets oppose the functional and the tasteful and revel in extravagance. Six writers inquire into the nature of these post-avant modes, from the grotesque to flarf to the postmodern baroque.

...reads to me as the consummate statement of "people who are most urgently concerned with confirming their identities as writers" and belongs squarely in the first of his cultures.

UPDATE [march 9, 12:15pm]: in response to anne's comment i include this excerpt from an email i sent her backchannel

he [josh] seems to have no trouble writing himself into the obviously superior position while largely ignoring the possibility that he may not really have distanced himself from "that older, now disavowed self—the self which desperately sought affirmation from sources high and low to confirm his or her identity as poet" at all.

and i felt this real contradiction to manifest itself in the very panel he was on, which appears -- to me at any rate -- to be partly about flarf and partly by flarf poets and supporters. i presume this applies to at least half the panel (josh, kasey and you, possibly johannes too tho i don't really know his work), while lara seems to being coming at it from the gothic and, yes it's true, i'm not how jed rasula fits into this panel. ("affirmation from sources high"?)

now if the panel, as it appears to me on paper at least, is in fact at least half about flarf and by flarf poets and supporters, this seems to me the consummate gesture of confirming one's identities as writers. i mean, it's quite an imprimatur from the academic literary establishment for the AWP to host a panel on your writing -- with you as the panelist. [...] again, i readily admit lack of familiarity with AWP culture, where perhaps this kind of thing, poets talking about their "craft," is de rigeur -- but to me it's one high-profile bid for self-affirmation.

which is not inherently a bad awful thing, because -- of course -- we all need affirmation and validation as writers. and we satisfy that need in various ways. (or else it goes unsatisfied and creates very very angry people.) my point was to criticize josh for setting up a simplistic binary that would place him largely in a position above or beyond that need.

and to which i add that when josh writes that "maybe the best that can be hoped for is to speed the transition from one culture to the other, while having the wisdom and courage to recognize that the desire for affirmation never really goes away, and the contempt I might feel for someone's naked desperation or emotional neediness or obsessive logrolling has its origins in the wince of self-recognition," he does gesture toward recognizing his own place in his dialectic; but that speedy transition ("with all deliberate speed"!) contempt and wince speak volumes.

to be clear: it's about the nobodys and the somebodys. (hegel called it slave and master.) the nobodys must spend all their time and energy frenetically trying to become somebodys, while the somebodys can spend their time in the more noble pursuit of "solving artistic problems" while wincing at the contemptuous little nobodys (who look all-too like their former selves).

identity claims within this dynamic are inherently competitive: every "i am somebody" here reinforces an "i am somebody too" or an "i am nobody" there. ("don't be the last one on your block to be somebody!") i prefer a dynamic that begins "we are all nobody" and reaches out and within that "we" to a series of "you"s -- "you are somebody," "you are somebody," etc.

UPDATE II [march 9, 7pm]: in response to kasey's comment i include what i sent him by email

hey!

if you have the time and inclination to elaborate that's something i'd like to hear. for what it's worth i don't know what neo-calvinism is so any parallels there would be coincidental. on some level i was thinking something more like zen. or wittgenstein (TLP 6.45).

UPDATE III [march 13, 11am]: in repsonse to al, i include an email i sent him:

mea culpa, you're absolutely correct! my comments were far too unqualified, as you and juliana spahr and steve mccaffery and marjorie perloff (and others i'm surely leaving out) have done a great deal to raise the level of poetic discourse at the MLA and make it a place hospitable to poetries that other literary institutions neglect. (i even gave a paper on coolidge at one of those perfucntory panels too!) still, it's such a sprawling affair and with concurrent sessions and 15 mintues per presenter it does end up feeling like the panels are anything but the real raison d'etre...

on torque

ron seems to have dropped the gauntlet before us "younger" poets again, this time with respect to a quality of writing he first described over 20 years ago as "torque." i posted my understanding of this term over at kasey's blog last week:

i almost always think of torque in terms of twists or turns in normative syntax or grammatical sequence, which one can conceive of as following a kind of trajectory or vector: in its most basic form, subject-verb-object. english sentences quite commonly turn on this structure, and so torque would add twists into common or normative turns of phrase.[...] hence, to use chomsky's famous example, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" -- owing to the fact that it fits seamlessly into normative english syntax -- has far less torque than "Furiously ideas colorless green sleep."

after elaborating his sense of the term at the time and what occasioned him to think of writing in this way -- as well as offering the examples of clark coolidge, leslie scalapino and peter seaton as writers who each offer highly individualized demonstrations of this quality of writing -- ron offers the following assessment:

torque, as such, has generally become less important among younger poets. To the great detriment to their poetry. I can’t really think of anybody under the age of, say, 40, whose work is as syntactically marked as distinct as that of Scalapino, Coolidge or Seaton – their writing is unmistakable. In a sense, the disruptiveness that one senses around such work has continued – one sees it in both visual & conceptual poetics.[...] But this is disruption not at the moment of a syntactic turn, but merely at the level of the text as idea. It is not too much to suggest that, in this sense, torque largely has been marginalized. Why, precisely, and what that means are questions we (I) need to be asking now.

now my first instinct was to say this is ridiculous, that torque has hardly been neglected or maginalized by poets of my generation. two periodicals of the early-to-mid 1990s, edited by liz fodaski in new york and darren wershler-henry in toronto, titled themselves torque. in fact, i could scarcely think of a single fortysomething writer -- whose writing has, in any significant measure, found the example of language poetry productive -- who has not also carefully considered the function of torque in their writing. (and there are many.)

but then i had to backtrack and realize that this was missing ron's point. that is, he does not really mean what he says, that torque is not important for us. and indeed a curious thing it would be for someone always insisting on "ambition" and "the new" to insist that none of us explore torque as thoroughly as coolidge or scalapino or silliman. rather, i think his claim is that none of us have done so in as distinctive a fashion as coolidge, or scalapino or seaton.

this ends up being an interesting observation. and again, it may say more about ron than it does about us. if stein, the dadaists and futurists, certain new york school experiments, and language poetry opened up whole new syntactic landscapes, ron would i think always insist on further new discoveries rather than thorough, systematic explorations of those original discoveries. this latter kind of work is left for "minor" poets, or a mere j.s. bach.

it may be true that none of us 40-somethings write in as immediately recognizable and consistant way as certain of ron's peers. but i hardly think this works "to the great detriment to [our] poetry." i hope to offer some examples that will show this in the near future...

dietrich's ecclecticism

adam sends this link to a podcast of favorite tunes by john dietrich of deerhoof, a band i've recently discovered (thru adam) and immediately like without having delved to far into the recordings.

i have to admire mr. dietrich's taste which is far more ecclectic than even my own. of the 22 artists/titles listed i have knowledge of only the following 7:

1. fiery furnaces - i thought blueberry boat was a strange and largely unappealing uptake on 70s rock-theater.
   
2. bill dixon - clearly a modern trumpet master - why are there so many saxophone gods and so few trumpet gods?
   
3. us maple - noisy, right? i think i would like & need to hear more
   
4. bartok - dunno what "tale" is but his 6 string quartets are some of the best music of all time
   
5. satie - is it possible his reputation is far greater than the music actually warrants?
   
6. marc ribot - i still know only through his masterful work on the classic mid-1980s tom waits albums - what's his one leader date to hear?
   
7. patty waters - vintage ESP era improv stuff, right? never actually heard tho.

otherwise i'm stumped, any and all help appreciated...

libby verdict

the fine folks at mediamatters doing their homework once again.

"Libby's guilty verdict: Media myths and falsehoods to watch for"

On March 6, a federal jury found former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby guilty on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal investigators. In the wake of this decision, conservatives and other media figures can be expected to revive and advance numerous myths and falsehoods regarding the CIA leak case that have circulated throughout the media since Libby's indictment in October 2005.

read the full story.

i.e. reading

photos from the i.e. reading in baltimore this past saturday courtesy of series host michael ball (from left to right: sandra miller, ben doyle and yours truly). a fantabulous time had by all!

cost of war

i just noticed my cost of the war counter has now gone over the $400 billion mark. is this making the news at all? not that i've heard. the $300 billion mark seemed to get a lot of coverage. ho hum...

official verse culture

adam fieled's musings prompted me to dig this one out of my sent mail folder -- a letter to the editor of the new york times book review that i guess they are not going to print...

--------------
from tmorange
to books@nytimes.com
date Feb 14, 2007 12:40 PM
subject David Orr, "Frost on the Edge"

Dear Editors,

David Orr warns us ("Frost on the Edge," February 4) that when the poetry world is divided into opposing experimental and mainstream camps, we risk oversimplifying if not altogether ignoring a major American poet like Robert Frost. True enough; but Mr. Orr does not appear to realize that, like the majority of institutions and players in the field of poetry today, he stacks his deck in favor of the mainstream.

While conceding that Frost's reputation "seems to require periodic reputation-buffing essays from the [mainstream] likes of Randall Jarrell and Seamus Heaney," Orr aims his admonishment primarily at experimentalists. He muses that "had Frost's journals contained... a series of sympathetic and incisive observations about Gertrude Stein's 'Tender Buttons,' he possibly could be made to fit into the American experimental lineage."

Wishful thinking. Frost wrote his daughter Leslie in 1934 lamenting the "aspiration toward brevity and undersaying rather than oversaying [that] has led to the poetry of imitation implication insinuation and innuendo as an object in itself," continuing: "Hart Crane has gone to great lengths here....I suppose Gertrude Stein has come in confluently to encourage the intimators or innuendots. A little of her is fun, but
goes a long way." While not altogether dismissive, hardly the stuff of "sympathetic and incisive observations." Crane of course is another perfect example: a misunderstood experimentalist of his time now widely praised by poets of all stripes, yet recently savaged by William Logan in these very pages.

Usually, the institutions that overwhelmingly support mainstream poetry -- the major trade publishers, the elite print media, the public and private funding agencies, the trade associations, the university degree-granting programs and their faculty hiring committees -- are far more subtle in their disdain for the experimental, a disdain that is naturalized so as to deny both its aesthetic and its ideological underpinnings. Orr himself, unwittingly perhaps, is a party to this: when describing the opposing camps throughout his review, only the word "mainstream" appears in scare quotes, implying that somehow this word is inappropriate or does not apply. Naturally.