There must be something extraordinary going on in your face

The title of this post is paraphrased from a Rebecca Wolff poem, which poem is discussed in passing below.

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DJ @ 1

It occurred to me last night that we've missed the official birthday of a certain site known as Disruptive Juxtaposition. One is a cute age. A year ago I was making my first posts on DJ, which are archived and available for browsing. Although I'm as embarrassed and proud of them as I am of my actual baby pictures, which will not be posted on this site, so help me God. I didn't know a year ago what this space was going to become or become good for. So I marked the passing of Jerry Orbach of Law & Order fame, gently excoriated a book of poetry criticism (and in so doing earned by first blog comment, written by the author of that book), and generally tried to advance these theories of post-postmodern poetry and art that I have bouncing around in my head.

To that end,

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A RETURN TO POETRY!

Check out Joan Houlihan's article "Three Invitations to a Far Reading" in Contemporary Poetry Review - which I think is sometimes spot-on but other times is based on dangerous assumptions. For example, when she says that much of what's hot in contemporary poetry is unreadable, lacking clear signs of organization or intelligence, she's using very traditional ideas of what "organization" might mean. It's dangerous for her to suggest that reordering the lines of the poem will result in better poems. It seems to me that she's committing an error when she says that she can take any one of the poems written by these three new poets and can re-order their lines to get something just as good. See what she does with Rebecca Wolff's poem "Don't Look In the Basket", reordering the lines according to what she sees as resulting in the more coherent poem. (The relevant section of the article is about 7/8ths of the way down the linked page.) When she reorders the poem into her version, I don't think she's giving the poem enough credit. For example: ending the poem in Wolff's way - "A long and rambling conversation" - is much different than ending it Houlihan's way - "There must be something extraordinary going on in my face." The effects are profoundly different, and imply very different intentions, and even with the exact same lines in each version amount to completely different poems.

Now, this is exactly what we do in poetry workshops: one of the standard ways to comment on a poem that isn't making sense for you is to draw arrows all over the page - "This line should go here, this stanza should come next, ditch this line altogther" - in so doing you're making a narrative out of the poem. Not "narrative" in the sense of "narrative poetry", of course, which has a narrator and some aspect of a story about it, but rather "narrative" in the sense of a logical order of ideas. And Houlihan isn't wrong to want to do this. Certainly, I'd be the last one to defend "Don't Look In the Basket" as a worthy poem that doesn't need profound reworking. It isn't profound and it needs reworking.

Still, I think that Houlihan's critical technique - which is basically to say that "It'll be just as good if not better by reordering it" - leads her into logical trouble. Because this criticism collapses when you apply it to older canonical poetry that is difficult and loose and allusive: would she reorder one of Berryman's Dream Songs, or bits of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" or "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"? These pieces have internal order that isn't immediately apparent; I'm glad that she wasn't Berryman's or Whitman's editor: we the reading public wouldn't have had been given the requisite time to divine patterns of meaning that were new to us but certainly present in the text. I realize that Houlihan isn't talking about canonical poetry; she's applying her critical technique to this new strand of contemporary poetics which seem defined by an altogether higher level of fragmentation and channel-surfing-ish-ness than even the High Priests of Postmodernism could have managed. The "disregard for the reader" she senses in these poems is something I feel as well, and it does feel a world removed from the difficulty of other, older work.

For me, it comes down to this: I'm as inclined to jettison such work as these three "Far Poets" as Houlihan is. I am, however, intrigued enough in the idea of "far reading" to hesitate before I through these poems out the, ah, airlock. (Had to continue the "jettison" motif.) I want to give these poems a bit more benefit of the doubt before concluding for good that they aren't providing anything of human emotion in them.

Suffice it to say, to put it another way, that the work of these Far Poets seems quintessentially postmodern, and we're past postmoderism. We have been since at least the 80s. Onto Post-post. Onto making meaning. Onto being concerned for the reader as well as the self.

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BUT SOON I MUST LEAVE,

because I go back to B_______ today. It'll be nice to see the people there. Good people there. But I'm glad my days there are numbered. It's time to move onto other places and vocations. To Realize Ambitions!

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BUT FIRST:




Jon during his time at Boot Camp in Chicago. Possibly it was during his Gunnery School Training. I don't honestly recall. I feel terrible about this. We weren't close enough with the facts of our biographies as they took shape such that I can instantly recall where and when this was taken.

This is getting to be a long caption.

I feel able to share it because he sent it to me over a year ago, and as such I don't think it's an invasion of his privacy or anything.

Oh: it's dated 4 February 2004.

When I first opened it I burst out laughing; his expression is out of the ordinary. He's doing what you could call hamming it up. He was a ham.