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People can live in inhospitable places in two distinct ways, by changing the local environment, or by carrying a suitable environment with them. . . . The creation of a self-sustaining ecosystem, or biosphere, on a lifeless planet is called ecopoiesis.
-- Robert Haynes, How Might Mars Become a Home for Humans.
Few things threaten boredom more successfully than the poetry reading. Hunched over the microphone he's too afraid to raise, the poet mumbles or strides through the pages. If the light is right, shining from behind the speaker, you can sometimes see, through the verso, how closed-packed the text is, how large the face, how much is left.
Men deft men mental men of loving men all men
Vile men virtuous men same men from which men
Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said
(from The Men)
Lisa Robertson! Avatar! My self, my hypocrite poet!: for what, one imagines, could be farther from the tremendous, her poiesis, than the trivial isolationism of contemporary liberal poetics? Isolationism not on the world stage — the liberals have not entered the Matrix with neo- for nothing — but in the world itself.
Talk about the progressive isolationism from the world: it is the non-impact cotton, the fair-trade coffee, the gas-sipping hybird — all noble technological creations — that dominates, to the boredom of readers everywhere, the creation of poetry. Tread lightly on our language world, the contemporary poet begs her companion. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photographs: this is tacked up by tedious MFA graduates — and yes, it is them, if the biographical notes are true — at the trailhead to poetry, so that what we hear at readings sounds like this:
The painter is beautiful because he can see the sway of a woman in a water snake. He names a painting Hope and means with child.
The cult of the "vivid" image — and the arch archaisms — is alive and well, if as harmless as a PBS totebag.
Here's another, in case it's not clear — this from Cole Swensen, in The Glass Age:
Landscape was also invented in 1435, when Robert Campin painted his home town and the fields beyond as seen through a window just behind the Madonna's right shoulder.
The space in paintings is not paint; it is space.
Swensen's book is a sourcebook of this kind of poetry, or perhaps its apotheosis, lofted to some tremendous height: poetry so dull, so begging to be read by a fellow dullard, that it might as well be boiled down to a bibliography. Take nothing but pictures, demands Fabri, leave nothing but footprints, suggests Swensen — the latter, presumably, so that one can primp at a faculty meeting.
It would be unkind to academics to call this kind of verse academic: academics are capable of lively prose, of thought, of honesty. Here, in the land of liberal poetry, the poetry of the suburban kitchen, the poetry of the prints beneath the tracklights as the Sun sets over Brookline, nothing may be touched, nothing may be disturbed.
Americans break things. That's what we do. Writers like Fabri and Swensen have not only forgotten this, they've rediscovered it and are horrified. The past — preferrably the past as seen through the lens of a Mirimax film — must be locked away, the present turned into the arena for a worship of dead forms.
Not poetic forms, of course: every typographical, every rythmic tool of the present day is necessary for the liberal poet for the same reason that Mirimax presents its recreations in the most precisely calibrated colors. Everything must be seen through the screen of the New: a protective screen, stamped by equally third-hand Jonathan Culler readings of French theory.
It's enough to make you long for the frank fucking of Marilyn Hacker's pretty pretty songs: a creation whose genius is more than equal to the foolishness with which she is ignored by anyone who wants to write well. Nobody fucks in a Fabri poem, or a Swensen poem, except across a membrane of clingfilm. Not for nothing are the Catholic saints, preferrably female, a touchstone of this kind of writing: the tedious reams of Such Rich Hour attest to the attraction of this kind of gendered-genderlessness. "March 1432", Swensen:
so bitterly froze and the floodwaters reached
from the Place Maubert to the Place de Grève undid
half the Marché au Pain. We were stunned. We knew this meant.
It's unsurprising that Swensen's blurb sounds like the seminar listing of a precocious A. B. D.: "Covering a variety of subjects — from the plague and the first dance macabre to the development of perspective and recipes for pigments — the poems in Swensen's new collection are set in fifteenth century France . . ."
It's a seminar, of course, with a missing ingredient: dissent. One hears the slient whisper of the oval-table fascisti in this kind of demanding poetry: the demand of Swensen's work is clear: sit down and let's be quiet while I talk.
Call it the New Domesticity: to parallel the Atlantic Monthly's embrace of women returning to joy in the absence of a career comes poetry such as the above. Or this, where lacking, perhaps, Swensen's jetset lifestyle, Rebecca Aronson in The Georgia Review chooses the interchangeable Missouri:
Near Saint Joseph the fields sigh and corn stands up
against nearly any weather. Our sleep is filled
with still air in which thousands of crickets
ceaselessly rub their bandied legs
I'm not talking about dull poetry, the ill-judged occasion that brings nothing but a quiet sigh from the poet's mother: I'm talking about the dullness of the vacuum grease that lines every letter in this kind of work, keeping out the poisonous air that is actual contact with language. I'm talking about an aggressive dullness, an aggressiveness marked by its passivity, by its parody of womanhood.
Can someone smash the glass in the emergency casing of our hearts? Perhaps it's why some of our best poets are gay women, or read like them — closest to the demands of submission in the airwaves, they are the first to piss on the seminar floor. Anne Carson, our uneven Edith Piaf of the avant garde, at least can write
It's good to be neuter
I want to have meaningless legs.
and not have to make it an extended meditation on the fifteenth century so as to reassure the male reader that God's in his heaven and all's right with the degreed and credentialed poet.
Language hurts. Language is not about being smart, because language smarts. It smarts because when it is used — as opposed to quotated in between the heavy sixty-six and ninety-nines of the Iowa series, or the ceaseless flows of message-board workshops (password protected and anonymous so that their users can dream of one day claimed to have fallen, whole, of Zeus's skull) — when it is used it is a genuine contact with an alien world. Here is Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, who understands this well, who thinks as a human being with a death-date measured out:
He calls it their stage, which echoes our first misrecognition of unity. Instances
of false unity, he calls the imaginary, and he locates in them sites of her dreams,
out of which she is able to want him.
("The Swan", I Love Artists)
There is a response to this: the response is that I demand a poetry of action (a — god forbid — écruiture masculine) but that there is room for a poetry of contemplation, a poetry of the intellect.
The antistrophe — as an intellect employed — is that thinking hurts just as much as love. It hurts because thinking is the only release from the animal condition of death, and no immortality is cheap. The kind of thinking in one of Swensen's pieces — in contrast to Carson's insane essays and epic poems — is ersatz, what in the philosophical literature is referred to as a zombie-thought: stripped of any phenomenology, of any qualia, of any what it's like to think.
This is not the cooked versus the raw: this is the edible versus the Denny's menu photograph. You don't have to kill and eat your food for it to sustain: as Lisa Fishman's new book, The Happiness Experiment makes clear, you can create a living world with the quiet words and syntaxes just as well as with the splatterings of Juliana Spahr:
Then find the accounts of the body
in Anais Nin's two volumes
One for pleasure, one for sorrow
Then sing for your supper down among the willows
weaing many buttons
on your two white blouses ("Instructions/Confessions")
There is such an infinite space — despite the tonal similarity — between Swensen's and Fishman's citations, between Swensen's corsets and Fishman's blouses. It is the infinite space of daring to do: daring to create. Juliana Spahr, of course, is herself a phenomenon, her writing an amplification-unto-pain of the writings of someone like Inger Christensen.
Which brings me, of course, to ecopoiesis. Not ecopoetics, the creepily violent Iron John-derivative masculinity of Gary Snyder, but ecopoiesis, the creation of life in a hostile environment. The violation of the inhospitable state of language by the introduction of the poet-as-extremophile.
extremophile — the bacteria that live the extrodinary pressures of the ocean trenches, in sulfuric acid, in the pores of mineral gems. The bacteria that one day — if the human race outlives its own violence — with which we'll bombard the surface of Mars, erasing the pristine inhospitability to build our shopping malls and hospitals on a foreign landscape.
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It's the shopping malls that the Smokey-the-Bear poet has highest in mind when he writes: an understandable distaste for the landscapes of the highway rest stops along the New Jersey turnpike that turns from a distrust of intervention to an exaggerated sense of the world-as-virgin:
As Albertus Magnus instructs us
that shade is dearer than fruit and the trees be not bitter ones let them
not be
bitter please
pass me the sun
("The Evolution of the Garden", Such Rich Hour)
noli me tangere taken not as plea — for the intervention of the true poet is always fraught, is never simple, is never light — but as command. In the end, it is a metaphysical freight that Swensen's kind of poetry carries, a notion of the Noble Savage or American Samoan, even, that could only be corrupted by direct contact with our dirty, guilty fingers.
It is not to say that we are not guilty: our guilt and our resistance both is found in our language, and to ignore this is as much a fallacy as a disinfected disengagement. What a writer such as Lisa Robertson understands, though, is that the grit of human contact is a mark of authenticity that cannot be avoided:
This is where I speak from the juicy mouth of a man or boy devotedly saying I am, I am, and it is a song. This is where I tear the cloth. This is where the word falls out in the form of a dog, a black dog, a dog that seems to speak, and what the dog says is poverty is sap. So I lick it up sweetly. Now what do they want. What's sucked is hydromel and I lick them as they smoke and these are syllables these are last things plunging and my brain adores the form of the world with a decorous amplitude. This is poverty and it's as false as the poem.
(from The Men)
Language hates us, language resists us, language, as Noam Chomsky demonstrated to an academic world whose antihumanists such as Judith Butler (despite her other excellencies) continue to resist, is not man's cozy creation, it is a work of nature. The same nature that battered New Orleans batters us daily in our Universal Grammars. What but the mind, and that deepest creation of the mind, the poet, is able to survive the inhuman branchings of syntax, the poverty of semantics?
I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY, THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR, BE, SAY, WORD, TRUE, DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, PUT, GO, THERE IS, HAVE, LIVE, DIE, WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT, WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE, TOUCHING, NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF, VERY, MORE, ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCH, GOOD, BAD, BIG, SMALL, LONG, KIND OF, PART OF, LIKE, THIS, THE SAME, OTHER.
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How can we live in the interstices of these brute, inhuman syllables? Life like this requires courage, but it also requires trickery: Achilles and Odysseus, those two emergents from a sea so alien to the experience of the human that Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind believed that the authors of these texts were schizophrenics, perceiving their own thoughts as couched in an alien — divine — mentalise.
Whatever the truth of Jaynes' beliefs — rejected by colleagues at Princeton and the community at large, his book maintains a continuous popularity with those who have encountered the ancients on their own ground — it is clear that the origin of these beliefs is not fantasy but experience. The nascent human I, whether in the individual or the species, confronts the terms that every great literary work, but also every spreadsheet, every registration form, every prescription sheet, is couched in not as self but as inhospitable other.
A home must be made on the surfaces of language, inside its syntax and its semantics, and this is where, with a hindsight berift of the usual communal demands of politeness that pervade the landscape of the English-speaking world of poetry, we will recognize what is great and what serves the ephemeral neuroses of the winning side of a widening class divide.
Return to Fishman, in "Oscura Selva"
The child has one body, including the mother's
Robin-body in the Rose-water, who is richer
than the owl, who is who?
The child has one body
and five words to memorize
The Queen is in a rowboat, forgetting her two bodies
Including the mother, an echo's rooms are five
Fishman makes demands of the reader, and Swensen does; it's that Fishman's demands are for the intellect to touch the body, to touch the body as split in the half-silvered mirror of the interferometer, while Swensen's demand is unitary, as inhospitable as its constituent parts.
It's an inhospitability that extends beyond Swensen's overtly didactic moments, beyond the points where she is most obviously imparting information from her syllabus --
Bonnard: Boulevard des Batignolles, 1926. We are standing in a window looking out at windows. The windows on the other side are blind. They are on the other side. To look out is to see; to look in, to turn slowly white. (from The Glass Age)
What is the voice here? Where is it? Indeterminate not in the fashion of Robertson's apostrophe to the Men, where a singular term floats free of reference like a velcro ball in the loops of the mind, but indeterminate because it's uncertain who would ever be motivated to speak in this fashion. The only voice, indeed, that rises from these flat lines is the seminar leader's summary of the reading, and the torque of those final lines is not an organic rise but has the sensation, almost, of panic — as if Swensen is aware, at the last moment, too late to make changes in the proofs, that she hasn't written anything approaching poetry.
There will always be the cry, leave nothing but footprints!, the resident beat of so many poetry readings and publication-credit publishing houses. What tiresome fashion will permeate such a world next? Today it is — what a Martian would think of our culture! — the sterile sexual encounter and the Middle Ages. The rule, as always, will be tread carefully, because you are treading on my heart.
But it's not a heart. I love, with Mei-Mei, artists, and I love MFAs, but just as on a long bus ride there will someone who insists on talking about the bus, the overpumping heart of the academic system will continue to flush out the statistically certaint subset of poets who can talk only about the rosy-tinted credits from his English department seminar and tedious affairs, in the safety of a professor's embrace, that took hold of the pseudoheart.
It's interesting that, for all of Anne Carson's sudden — and much resented, Ron Silliman terming her faux avant — popularity, none have tried to imitate the essays that run through her work. It's not for modesty — see Swensen's oracular pronouncements above — but I think because while linebreaks and word spacing impart an intellectual sheen to trivial content, that same content can not stand in blocks of prose without its essential nature — that of aping, not penetrating, thought — becoming clear.
Take instead this quote from an Anne Carson essay — worth, like a page of Henry James, far more than most books of poetry that purport to engage the mind --
She is the cleanest girl in epic. And his dirt emphasizes that, not to say the brutal opacity of his sleep — whereas she lies transparent: we watch the dream in her head, we know her action before she does, we see her desire prior to itself. Her desire is to find a pretext and travel far from the city, to where the washing pools lie. ("Every Exit is an Extrance (A Praise of Sleep)", in Decreation)