A group of Taiwanese schoolchildren parody my poem "A Defense of Poetry."

more ubuntu, less duende

Duende.1.1: a modernist, tactically vague aesthetic descriptor whose effective purpose was to attribute a non-categorical, non-assessable, non-confirmable and ostensibly occult quality to a work or author, in order both to mark that work, author, or affiliated group for social distinction and to legitimate the fetish of author, text, technique.  Descriptors like duende are pseudo-concepts created in the struggles for recognition within literary communities.

Duende.1.2: that quality of any artistic group enthralled by its own artifacts, objects, actors and battles for distinction whose presence makes it difficult for that group to cultivate genuine warmth, affiliative emotion, ethical activism, love, interconnectedness, cooperation. 

---------------------------------------

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished....

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1999

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu - the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality - Ubuntu - you are known for your generosity.

We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.

- Archbishop Tutu, 2008

A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

- Nelson Mandela

Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Ubuntu!

- Boston Celtics, 2007-present

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a nobler morning..., in the sentiment of love. This is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive....Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions....Let me feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the world is the better for me, and to find my reward in the act....It is the symbol of the power of kindness.

- Emerson, "Man the Reformer," 1841

"have I not taught from the very beginning

that with all that is dear and beloved

there must be change, separation, and severance?"

 - DN 16 PTS: D ii 72, v. 58

congratulations on being here

Celebration "is" ."selfrestraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating is awaiting" .is. a per.son’s .body a large mob.ile collection. of molecule. we congratulate. id.ea of body.

Who can.'t, "a wo.rld is wor.lding," rehearsing. that .we a.re. "here." 

We congrat.ulate. "th.at the.re a.re be.ings at all." th.e not.ion of hereness. of here. 

A, boulder,'s a large, part.icle. We congratulate. an accident. of boulder.

We congratulate a Vermilion, River. We kayak. We congratulate a bridge, thanks, that you carry, us, the bridge, for holding, I saw them the, mo.ving babies, we mean, it even today, the Mill St, bridge at Pontiac. Illi.nois. And, also, that guy who, honked, you, honked, your honk, reverberating on the dam wall, thank you, we're in y.our, mid.st.

 

All, of the daughters, in the waters, all, of the brothers, with the others: you, are con.gra.tulated: thanks.for h.old.ing love tho, you do.n’t think of it, like that, maybe. My youth I, congrat.ulate, you, for, depositing my selves, in this, “time place,” I congratulate, the waters, of Evergreen, Lake, for supporting, the weight, of many hundreds, or maybe thousands, of those medium geese, who are, little little, meat boats. We congratulate, the geese, thems.elves, for having, such little he.arty legs. You’re all, scaly and nude. and knobby legged. Yo.ga, because, yo.u are, in this whirled, I congratulate, you, and all your, lovely te[ache]rs. I congrat.ulate ants, for being cute, I have never ever seen, an ugly ant, even up close, in those photographs, by E. O., Wilson.

 

I congratulate Clio, Byrne-Gudding, d[a[we]][la]ughter of G.ab[e]riel Gud.ding, a.nd, Ma.iréad Byrne, you have done, so well in yr 12, yrs, sis.ter, of Mar.ina, Byrne-Folan, for you, as we.ll as Ma.rina, a.re a, ch[isle]ld of letters, of ladders, child of answers, of elbows, child of apples, of bellows, child of rivers, of otters, child of sunspecks, of waters: child of tendons, thin, springing, both the tendons, of her ankles, and the tendons, of the allosaur: I congratulate, Clio and the arrangement, of things, that made her. You, are a child, of that cloud and that cloud and that cloud. You, are a sister, of that chicken and that chicken, you are a sister, of a sister. You, are a child, of fat and wheat and wide fish. You are, in no way, related, to any dogs, but all cats, at once. Child of purple, child of cool canal.

 

For Clio, and the distance to her, and the ac.cident, of her, and the int.ention of e.very mindhe.art that ma.kes, we congratulate J.ohn Mui.r, the pays d'en haut, mud as a colloidal fruit, the river as a lung barn, angry people, seven little bit, seven clam river, theoretical hull speed, that we clean the toilet, the mantle, the honey cell, the ladle, a columnar crown, the fouled animal, bird work and culvert fuss, bilge arts, bioaccumulate, echinodermata your sister. We hoist Clio. We hoist house and unhouse: your unreadable library. "All that is beloved must be changed, separated, severed." Whatever causes the weapons to sparkle. It is remarkable that there are stupid maidens. Camp on the muddy feather too. Be sad as in a zoo. As in a leaving outward. Potamalalia, outmouth. The horses touch our gravel. Riparian accipiters. Franz Joseph rifle. Accepting misfortune cheerfully in the pleasant saloon. All of it. Peristalted. 

 

       The globe
       's a fruit, a hive of pity : invited to demand, peppered
in moth, smeared
       in wind
 
The globe's a fruit + a hive of pity
: lacquered in sun, stitched in genital 
against destruction
 
                                     where living
                        w/ brightened mind
                                           is enough 
                            an exit for sorrow

                                so congratulate
                                           the worx 
                                  of compassion
 
what is this basket     of horses?
                                                         [it ‘s a world]
 
what is this bedaisy’ed
casket of gristle, stowed
in skin?
                                                         [but a body]
 
if we, are each, a novice and continue to sleep
 
our days a stream of morals, a string
 
of what use is this childhood
if we just assemble love
around us
                                to die from it
                                or watch it die?
 
 

We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

- John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony

happy birthday, Gandhiji 1869-1948

Kabira kharā bāzārameṅ, liye kuḷhārā hātha. 

Śiśa utāre, bhuīṅ dhare cale hamāre sātha.

Kabīr says, "I am here calling you, but I have an axe in my hand. 

Only one who is ready to chop off his head and throw it in the dust can come with me."

internet as agglomeration of kindnesses

Herodotus on Laughter

There are three kinds of laughter, according to Herodotus:

- Those who are innocent of wrong-doing, but ignorant of their own vulnerability.

- Those who are mad.

- Those who are overconfident.

I like this because there is often something really wrong with laughter. But these are all reflections, more or less, of one of category. Those ignorant of their own vulnerability are by nature overconfident. Those who are mad are by nature ignorant. Those who are overconfident are naturally not mindful of the inevitability of damage incurred by all creatures. 

Herodotus nowhere, as far as I know, offers this list as a formal hypothesis about laughter. The list was compiled by Donald Lateiner and published in 1977 in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association. I think Lateiner is just trying to convey a sense about how Herodotus characterizes laughter in his histories (usually with hubris).

What about the sometimes salutary function of laughter? I mean, Freud asserts that laughter democratizes, it censures power, status, privilege. Northrop Frye in "Mythos of Spring" claims the comic mode drives literary plots toward societies characterized by forgiveness and inclusivity and that it tends to resist arbitrary and rebarbative law, expelling unsuitable and irritable people. Mikhail Bakhtin went so far, in RAHW, as to suggest that laughter prefigured not only the Reformation but the Enlightenment. 

So it can work in a salutary way at a social level, maybe. It can also work at the level of moral cultivation in its ability to help a moral agent craft an attitude toward suffering that is elastic, wholesome, and emotionally competent. 

In a roundtable discussion about humor with Rachel Loden, Kasey Mohammad, Silliman, D A Powell, Ange Mlinko, Gary Sullivan, Maxine Chernoff, and George Bowering, at Jacket, I write about this more ethical component of laughter -- and I wonder how much of this is true:

"If damage, flaw, hamartia, is a given, I think humor is a means of dealing with damage by appreciating suffering as just another form of change.

79

Humor seems to be a method of equanimity. It seems to be a means of practicing and exercising that kind of equanimity some people call detachment.

80

Seems to me the clown and the saint are really close in having this detachment from their own wounds. (Doesn’t the Yiddish word “zelig,” as in the Woody Allen movie, mean at once holy and silly?) The ability to “be at home” (in re Singer’s quote above) is what we see in Zelig, 

and it speaks, to my sensibility, to a kind of ability to “be at home” in an existential sense too: if we are all damaged, including the tragic protagonist bound in his “hamartia,” the problem of humor amounts to what we do in the face of that imperfection and damage. If we can be silly in the face of it, we can be holy. Seems to me that blatantly flawed people, whom William James called “sick souls,” have been forced by circumstances to get some distance on life, to appreciate constant change as both a benison and a fact.

81

I mean, a clown is someone who purposefully and theatrically makes a show of debasing herself by showcasing that innate damage: a clown takes on and “owns” her own flaws and wounds — and flaunts them so triumphantly that we, the audience feel on the one hand, superior to the clown and on the other we vicariously appreciate the courage of that clown for being so triumphant and skillful in the face of said flaws (big nose, funny moustache, whathaveyou — yet funny, awkwardly brave, and finally buoyant). In the case of a verbal clown [humorous poet], that “flaw,” that damage, comes in the form of buoyant nonsense, anarchic satire, tawdry rhyming, or incessant non-sequitur:

82

In other words, maybe humor is a triumphant display of detachment toward the inevitability of damage.

83

It’s a simultaneous owning and detaching from one’s flaws (and the fact that they are inevitably and incessantly incurred) that I think makes an inspired clown useful."

I like that we seem to live in a world in which this kind of laughter also seems possible. 

how to write better poetry

Ride your bicycle. Wend in stuff.

Watch a documentary - The Future of Food

Consider Jean Dubuffet proponent of art brut who said "it is usually by racing on stilts that you learn to ride a bike by sailing on a pitching sea that you become a fine dancer by playing the flute that you learn to paint" -- Letter to Jacques Berne, 17 March 1947, Prospectus II, p. 248 and Prospectus IV, p. 110

 

Eat well? Know who Norman Borlaug was, died Saturday in Dallas. Know we all get to contribute to the ruination of kitchens, we can each continue to ensure poetry helps nothing, you too can alienate your poetry from the real by playing a sacred heretic*, I too can forget as Norman Borlaug did that good volition divorced from properly living in one's body can cause the destruction of subsistence farming, genetic security, food diversity, energizing nutrition, familial seed stocks, replacing them with gm, insecticidal genomes, monoculture, first-world chauvinism, national debts, cancer, poisons purposefully in fields. Put your poetry to use

Okay these are wild plums from the roadside outside Viroqua, Wisconsin. Hallie Ashley stopped her car and got them from a bush there

Nebraska and South Dakota and 8 other states have passed constitutional amendments to ban non-family-owned farming. Do not fail to ride your bicycle, it helps

-----

*Requisite Bourdieu or Simone Weil Commentary on the Weberian notion of  "sacred heresy":

"...it is a structural law, and not a fault of nature, that draws intellectuals and artists into the dialectic of cultural distinction -- often confused with an all-out quest for any difference that might raise them out of anonymity and insignificance, [and]....continually liable to degenerate into an anomic quest for difference at any price." PB, TFoCP, p. 117, "The Market of Symbolic Goods"

"The system of 'selection' objectively employed by the different groups of producers competing for cultural legitimacy are always defined within a system of social relations obeying a specific logic....As the field of restricted production closes in upon itself, and affirms itself capable of organizing its production by reference to its own internal norms of perfection -- [it excludes] all external functions and socially marked content from the work...." PB, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," as found in TFoCP, p. 140

mind of boundless love

Puññameva so sikkheyya
āyataggaṃ sukhudrayaṃ

Dānañca samacariyañca
mettacittañca bhāvaye

Train oneself in doing the good that lasts 

and invites happiness

Cultivate generosity, a life of peace
a mind of boundless love

Itivuttaka 1.22

[photo - the New Delhi police force sitting a ten-day course in Vipassana meditation. 

Their female Chief of Police, Dr. Kiran Bedi, third from left, front row.]

new essays in moral philosophy

Very helpful collection of essays in moral philosophy edited by Cheshire Calhoun. This book and two others serve as texts in the senior seminar I teach this semester, our department's capstone course for students in the major. Decided to teach the class as an ethics course. To what ethical use do you put your degree in English Studies? How will what you learned here morally benefit yourself and others upon your graduation? 

Its TOC:

I - An Ethics for Ordinary Life and Vulnerable Persons  

 

1 Virtue and the Skills of Ordinary Life    

Marcia Homiak    

2 The Household as Repair Shop    

Elizabeth V. Spelman    

3 Taking Care: Care as Practice and Value    

Virginia Held    

4 The Future of Feminist Liberalism    

Martha C. Nussbaum    

II - What We Ought to Do for Each Other  

 

5 The Scope of Moral Requirement    

Barbara Herman    

6 The Moral of Moral Luck    

Susan Wolf    

7 Common Decency    

Cheshire Calhoun    

III - The Normative Importance of a Shared Social World  

 

8 Resentment and Assurance    

Margaret Urban Walker    

9 Genocide and Social Death    

Claudia Card    

10 Demoralization, Trust, and the Virtues    

Annette C. Baier    

IV - Achieving Adequate Moral Understandings    

11 Kant on Arrogance and Self-Respect    

Robin S. Dillon    

12 Diversity, Trust, and Moral Understanding    

Marilyn Friedman    

13 Globalizing Feminist Ethics    

Alison M. Jaggar    

14 The Idea of Moral Progress    

Michele Moody-Adams    

V - The Dramatic and Narrative Form of Deliberation and Agency    

15 The Improvisatory Dramas of Deliberation    

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty    

16 Narrative and Moral Life    

Diana Tietjens Meyers    

VI - Emotions, Reason, and Unreason    

17 Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant    

Christine M. Korsgaard    

18 Emotional Rationality as Practical Rationality    

Karen Jones    

19 Killing in the Heat of Passion    

Marcia Baron

william james to teachers -- on meditation

We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression. "I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension, overmotion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.

I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of a better set of personal ideals.

fr. Talks to Teachers, chpt 8, "The Laws of Habit"

the poem of lovingkindness - kariniya metta sutta - as read by thanissaro bhikkhu

one of the things remarkable about this ars vivendi

is that it was the first such tradition to practice extending a deliberately loving attitude

toward other creatures, other species

related to this hymn/poem is the 27th section of the Itivuttaka Sutta

read here by sharon salzberg

in a 1' 51" audiofile

entitled "The Development of Lovingkindness"

- the Itivuttaka considered by some to be one of the earliest suttas in the theravāda tradition 

video podcast of paul fleischman, vipassana teacher 

in the tradition of sayagyi u ba khin (as taught by s n goenka)

germany december 2007

the topic - how a practice of vipassana orients a practitioner 

in both the causal momentum of recent and past action (kamma) 

and in the chaos of what arises moment to moment

Ajahn Candasiri  b. 1947 Edinburgh Scotland 

senior nun in Thai Forest Tradition ordained in 1979 

reads Padhana Sutta: The Striving

these suttas are over 2,000 yrs old. 

"Mara" as mentioned here is the personification 

of the various mental formations that can haunt a meditator 

drawing him or her away from the attempt to strengthen the mind 

& purify the heart

[translated here a little differently by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

Audio files of dhamma talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, arranged by topic. Simple. Clear. Skillful.

An American from Ohio, Thanissaro Bhikkhu is a translator of Pali. He ordained as a Thai forest monk decades ago in the kammaṭṭhāna tradition, an austere monastic tradition devoted to constant meditation.

He is fluent in Thai and in fact has talks you can listen to in Thai.

Here he reads from various suttas, including the Kariniya Metta Sutta, the hymn of lovingkindness.

friendship - skillful shaking

Upakāro ca yo mitto

sukhe dukkhe ca yo sakhā

atthakkhāyī ca yo mitto

yo ca mittānukampako

 

Etepi mitte cattāro 

iti viññāya paṇḍito 

sakkaccaṃ payirupāseyya 

mātā puttaṃ va orasaṃ.

the friend who is helpmate

the friend in happiness and sorrow

the friend who gives good advice

the friend who sympathizes

 

these four as friends the careful have

and cherish

as a mother her own child

dīgha nikāya 3.265

About ten years ago while a graduate student at Cornell I studied Pali with a linguist of southeast Asian languages, James Gair, co-author of A New Course In Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha.

I retain little of it now but recall a string of sunny mornings in Jim's office under the eaves overlooking the quad, light coming ovoid through the round window as I combed my pencil through the suttas while being corrected and encouraged by Jim, cheered by the smiles in his giant beard. 

The Buddha spoke a great deal about friendship, even once admonishing his secretary Ananda when he remarked that half of life was about friendship: "Do not say that, Ananda, do not say that. The whole of this holy life is about friendship." 

Jim taught me to really look closely at Pali etymologies. And the etymologies of a few words in this passage connote something really beautiful. At least to someone with my limited knowledge of Pali.

The first word "upakāro" means one who serves, helps, supports, but its etymological parts suggest something fascinating, especially when paired with a word that comes last in the stanza, "mittānukampako": upa, on, upon, up, and kāroti, an irregular verb, to make, build, to erect, kāro being one who makes, builds, supports, an upakāro then being somewhat like one who is built upon, as well as one who builds up: like both a foundation and the builder of the structure sitting upon the foundation.

The next phrase describes a companion in both happiness and misery: "sukhe" [in happiness} "dukkhe" [in misery] ca yo sakhā [sakhā - companion].

And "atthakkhāyī" is showing how to achieve something worthwhile: someone who advises well, but also someone with whom one can achieve something important. 

But it's the last descriptor for the skillful friend in that stanza that I find really intriguing: mittānukampako. 

Narada Thera translates "mittānukampako" as "a friend who sympathizes," but the word is etymologically richer than that and it resonates metaphorically with the etymology of "upakāro," "one who is built upon" or with whom one builds. According to Rhys Davids & Stede's Pali-English Dictionary, the root "kampa" means "shaking," and "kampaka" is one who shakes or causes to tremble. "-nu" is not a negative, but an enclitic that joins two kinds of roots. So the word more or less means "one who trembles with you." And one who causes you to tremble. Beautiful. It productively contrasts and resonates with "upakāro," support, foundation, one with whom one builds.

The purpose of a good foundation is to transfer energy/trembling into the earth (khama), and to do that it must be both anchored and responsive. So, holding both "upakāro" and "mittānukampako" in mind, maybe this friend is ideal who can vibrate, shake, resonate with us, moving us and being moved without crumbling, unmoving yet responsive. The person upon whom one can build is at the same time one strong enough to tremble with us. Thus Thera's "sympathize," to suffer with. A skillful friend has learned the capacity to suffer with, to not retreat or become unanchored from the friendship even when shaken, and maybe is in fact one who can offer herself or himself as someone willing to be shaken by us, or to tremble with us, without being shaken.

Old MiPoesias Interview on Creative Writing Pedagogy - revised


MiPoesias: Revista Literaria

revision of old interview on teaching

with Angela Armitage


For VOLUME 19, ISSUE 3 ISSN 1543-6063

 found in non-revised form here 

 [I've wanted to revise the tone and content of this interview for several  years now].

You're a professor of English at Illinois State University.  Presumably, you teach writing workshops.  For the benefit of our audience, what, in your opinion, are the most common mistakes made by aspiring writers? How do you help them to improve their craft?

It's a great privilege to get to teach something as potentially important as creative writing, specifically poetry writing, which I increasingly teach as a mode of ethics. Because of this, the words “mistake” and “craft” don’t come out of my mouth. Those categories have no place in my pedagogy: I strongly feel these are terms of schooling -- schooling in the Illichian sense, in the sense that “schooling,” as opposed to education, destroys souls. So, I try to disabuse students of the notion that the categories “mistake” and “craft” can have anything to do with writing. Lot of these kids come in to our classrooms very shut down. I really feel they don’t need a teacher talking about mistakes. “Craft,” though a wonderful idea, is what German novelist and linguist Uwe Poerksen calls a plastic word: it connotes far more than it denotes, such that it has become more a tool with which to yield power and status and less a word that communicates, aids, teaches.

In fact I tell my students to welcome the experience that they had initially labeled “error”: do not try to avoid error; embrace it, use it, transform it. All rocks are broken rocks: once a young writer twigs to that insight, she’s home free.

So though students and I do talk about the how of writing, the thing I find they most seem to need to hear is that who they are, what they are, how they are -- right now -- is sufficient.

They do not need to be anything extra in order to write something that will surprise them and be surprising and useful to others. I have found that many of them need to hear it’s okay to toss work out, it’s okay that a lot of what they write might in fact bore them: my job is to help remove the pressure from them, not to increase it with notions like “mistake.”

Without exception they delight in hearing that poetry is not some kind of precious speech uttered by special beings. Once I realized that my whole life was more or less one continual mistake, I let go of the entire idea of mistake, or have tried to: and I encourage them to do so as well. To help with these modes of being and writing, we read essays by Epictetus, C. S. Peirce, Gertrude Stein, William James, Emerson, Baraka, and Bernadette Mayer, among others, on these matters. Also, we laugh a lot.

Talk to me about form.  One of my professors recently said that she believes in free verse as the "strictest form," pleading her case by way of Charles Wright's use of blank space.  Another professor, speaking of Jazz, mentioned that it isn't until one's learned all of the theory that goes along with music that one can dump it and simply jam.  What do you think of these arguments, and furthermore, do you think that students of poetry should be taught to eschew or adhere to form when learning to write poetry?

I think one tends to hear the same things repeated over and over about "form” -- whether it’s the old canard that you must know the rules before breaking them, etc.

I feel quite often those who develop a violent and dismissive critical apparatus around the idea of “form” are doing so with an implicit and masked agenda about content. Take notice, as Jed Rasula does in his great polemical history The American Poetry Wax Museum, of the demographics and politics of those writers who advocate for the “formal”: they are in fact advocating for certain suppressed (and suppressive) content. 

Rubén Darío said it this way, “Art is not a set of rules but a harmony of whims (caprichos).”

A useful book on this matter is Michael Magee’s Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing. It’s a groundbreaking book in the Modern & Contemporary Poetics Series, University of Alabama Press, series editors Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. So, in the pragmatist spirit of Emerson, in the spirit of John Dewey and of William Carlos Williams, in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and William James -- and countless others -- I say it’s true that one knows by doing -- one understands in doing, through doing, and one’s understanding is dynamic and ever changing, skeptical, riding the truth as it shifts. What is the “form” of fire?

I feel what some often label “form” is merely the attempt to pre-figure and thus avoid the very wrestling with writing itself.

 

Your call for poetry in this edition of MiPo encouraged "strange poems."  One might argue that all poetry is strange; but given that so much contemporary poetry tries hard to be deviant, how do you identify a strange poem versus a mainstream, or "graduate school" poem? What is it that makes a poem strange?

You’re right. Asking for strange poetry is like going to Ben and Jerry’s and ordering cold ice cream instead of, say, vanilla or maple fudge. I cheated.

As far as your statement that “so much contemporary poetry tries to be deviant,” I’d just like to say that though it’s art’s job to be strange, whether it’s ancient art or contemporary, I’m not really sure that writers are trying to be deviant: they’re just doing what they’re doing.

The purpose isn’t to be strange for the sake of strangeness. The point is to slow down the perception of the reader, so that the reader is not experiencing the poem automatically. Once our perceptual habits become automatic, we’ve dampened our innate capacity for wonder. So, one enstranges language not to put on a gratuitous display, but to allow again for wonder, to make, as Shklovsky says, “the stone stony again.” Shklovsky says it better than I do, Angela: if you haven’t read his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” check it out.

Not really sure what you mean by “graduate school poem”: I’ve seen some straight-up geniuses both inside and outside graduate schools. Sometimes I think we adopt the practice of dismissive labeling as an all too common part of poetry culture. But the fact is each community has its own socio-aesthetic peculiarities: this is important because the local naturally resists rebarbative and dismissive labels imposed by dominant or subaltern cultures. I think where most communities fail in their culture work is where they subjugate the local and political and social aspects of their own work while simultaneously projecting their now “denatured” aesthetic as a universal one. In short, they forget or fail to realize that the social and the aesthetic are inextricably and intricately linked -- such that they feel that the way they see the world is the way it ought to be. The upshot is tepid work and a violent critical apparatus: what some call formalism. Too, it's important to note that some of the most formalist work I've encountered is found among post-avant practitioners. If there is a universal, said John Dewey, it is in the local.

On odd poetry: do you think that bizarre or surreal poetry is good for its own sake, or is there something far less odd at work in that sort of poem that makes it so compelling to the reader? 

You ask about Surrealism. I don’t know much about it but I do know that first it’s not a synonym for bizarre. The cultural inception of surrealism was to say more, not less, about the real. Its purpose was and is to open up the real: it was not considered a mere exercise of the bizarre for the sake of the bizarre.  

I’m of the mind that nothing is good for its own sake: I believe strongly in the salutary effect of linking value to use-value, which I guess I conflate with Benjamin’s cult value. I think it’s true to say that we write for others, as a gift. I feel that since all of us are “here” we should serve others as best we can.

My point is that the normative impulse to dismiss a lot of culture work because of its apparent oddity is the principle mode of quietism. Such dismissive statements about a work’s aesthetics (whether “odd” or “bizarre” or “bad” or “pointless”) are almost without fail masked dismissals of that work’s social action or cultural function.

A while back I read an essay by Donald Hall in which he bemoans the fact that so few writers are “ambitious” and writing “great poems.” It was as if he had quite forgotten, or maybe never knew, that we probably don’t write toward some soi disant aesthetic standard but for one another: we don’t write for the ages, but for people we know. I think the attempt to write great poetry will probably only end in disaster. To my sensibility, categories such as “odd” or “great” are meaningful in only very limited and specific situations. This is an old tension in poetry that has become quite electrified since the rise of industrial capitalism.

What are your thoughts on poetry slams or other spoken word venues?

Well, I guess the roots of Indo-European poetries are based in poetry as spoken word, poetry as benediction, malediction, celebration, contest, poetry as shaming, poetry as enwonderment and praise, poetry as verbal combat, metrical furor, poetry as living instruction or pedagogic spectacle. So: finally, poetry’s gotten back to its roots. It only took a couple centuries after the advent of industrial capitalism, but we made it.

Who do you read? Or, rather, who do you enjoy reading, and what is it about their work that excites you?

Am just now reading The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Ossman with Modern American Poets [Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Carroll, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Robert Bly, John Logan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Creeley, W. S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones, Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg] (Corinth: 1963).

Linda Zionkowski’s Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Palgrave, 2001).

The Writings of Martin Buber, edited by Will Herberg (Meridian: 1956).

Karma and Chaos: New and Collected Essays on Vipassana Meditation, by Paul R. Fleischman, M. D. (Vipassana Research Publications: 1999).

Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems by Michael McClure, introduction by Robert Creeley (Penguin: 1999).

Just finished reading the poetry of about 350 poets who submitted work for this issue.

Conversely, whose writing do you dislike, and what sins have they committed?

The older I get, the less interested I become in disliking things.

Finally, what do you hope to one day accomplish through writing? Fame? Fortune? Revolution?

Fundamentally the only thing I see worth accomplishing is the purification of the mind and heart and the cultivation of a loving mindset toward everything and everyone in this life. One can’t do that simply through writing. But I can say, I think, that the best writing advocates for the possibility of true happiness: happiness free of delusion, distraction, fear. Thanks for your questions, Angela.

A Rationale for Writing Poetry with a Kind Mind

Considering the conflicted phenomenon called Ezra Pound and the performance of reactivity and anger associated with the conception of poet in western letters, and considering the way the notion of the ethical is conflated easily with the agitation for social justice through displays of ill humor and quarreling, it occurred to me that someone should probably ask, as we continue this life's course of writing together, that we do so as people who actively wish one another well.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle posits the basis of all good society and in fact all friendship as “beautiful mind.” Eunoia -- sometimes translated “goodwill” or “tenderness of mind” or even “lovingkindness" -- is the ability to retain the capacity to be surprised by the other.

If the aesthetic is closely federated with the ethical, the practice of verbal and cognitive skills necessarily entails the practice and modeling of dialogic emotional skills such as forthrightnesss, forgiveness, renunciation and lovingkindness. Conceiving the aesthetic as inseparable from ethical questions is especially important for anyone who considers herself a practitioner of poetry writing, a genre culturally perceived as all too often marked, since the Modernist moment, by a clear fetish of isolative emotionalism, reactive expression of affect, monologic narcissism and aesthetic preciosity, over civically responsive and ethical concerns.

This genre is in fact so fraught with symbolic violence, with its social economies relying so heavily on disincentives toward the development a warm vibration, that you kinda havetah wonder if poets in particular shouldn't richly buy into an overt and activist devotion to lovingkindness as a means of proactively countermanding the profound brutality of this genre.

No reason that poets should continue to see themselves as exempt from normative socioemotional economies. Our imaginative, cognitive, and linguistic skills must be founded in an overt and almost activist devotion to the good. It’s an old fashioned and conflicted term, but by “the good” one might mean those actions and attitudes that shape and support the cultivation of goodwill at both civic and interpersonal levels. In fact, I straight up tell my students that to write exceptionally well, to think creatively and perspicuously, it is necessary to have a mind that is rooted in the good and characterized by kindness and tenderness. You don't need to be a jerk to write well, despite the preponderance of modernist examples to the contrary. One could even say, and Pierre Bourdieu really does, that "being a jerk" is a frequently used, and effective, masculinist tactic for artistic consecration. 

On the other hand I think it's probably true that certain writing communities have throughout the history of letters helped in the restructuring of reactive, harmful, automatic (that is to say knee-jerk) cognitive and socio-emotional habits. I would in fact go so far as to argue that the tactical modeling of positive affect styles has been a principle function of certain writing circles throughout the last three centuries (I think immediately of certain positive affect styles modeled by NY School folk, e.g., jubilation, rejoicing, attentiveness, renunciation [of authoritarianism both aesthetic and political in particular]). By forwarding subaltern positive affect styles, these circles have probably time and again exercised the power to re-calibrate an imaginary and reformulate an affective milieu. Because the ideologic binds to us principally through affect and emotion, becoming aware of the functionality of affect in one’s life, and actively cultivating helpful affect states, could be considered a social responsibility, if not a civic duty.

And though it is not a principle reason for doing so, the active cultivation of a loving mindstate will almost certainly improve one’s own writing. My thinking in this is in accord with Emerson’s who writes in “Friendship” that "Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection." Emerson saw in 1841 what social scientists have recently begun studying with hard data: cognition and emotion cannot be separated; an open, vibrant mind is predicated on an open, vibrant heart. It is a fact that no longer can be pedagogically ignored: people learn better and write better within environments that are positive, humorous, and filled with genuine warmth.

Following Emerson, such a mind, a kind mind, is more likely to be sharp and easily concentrated. It is, further, more likely to be flexible, light, ductile, malleable, plastic, and creative. The virtues are inherently dialogic, in the Freierian sense, and a mind that actively practices the virtues will inevitably become invested with confidence, courage, straightforwardness, honesty, wonder, determination, discipline, concentration, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, renunciation, sympathetic joy, compassion, lovingkindness, generosity, and equanimity. Such a mind is willing to take the risks necessary to effectively write and think and act in the face of adversity. Such a mind is better able to retain the capacity to be surprised. Such a mind is better able to remain responsive to the variety of worlds, both textual and actual, that it will encounter. This is the perfect mind to cultivate in the transtemporal worldwide writing seminar and the transhistorical literary commune we sometimes call humanity.

Poetry sometimes forgets about relationships. Because it tries to deal with too much abstraction. And in the end it’s the relationships which are so important. Especially in a world like today in which there is so much disaster and so much fragmentation. I think the notion of relationships ... is very very important. And in fact when you listen to our poets, it might be a good idea to discern who is aware of the importance of relationships and who is not. 

-- Kamau Brathwaite, as found on YouTube

what Rilke sd to do with sorrow

Overflowing heavens of squandered stars
flame brilliantly above your troubles. Instead
of into your pillows, weep up toward them.
There, at the already weeping, at the ending visage,
slowly thinning out, ravishing
worldspace begins. Who will interrupt,
once you force your way there,
the current? No one. You may panic,
and fight that overwhelming course of stars
that streams toward you. Breathe.
Breathe the darkness of the earth and again
look up! Again. Lightly and facelessly
depths lean toward you from above. The serene
countenance dissolved in night makes room for you.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, April 1913, 
from _Uncollected poems_ selected and translated by Edward Snow New York : North Point Press, 1996

Lorine Niedecker Happy Birthday We Love You Still

On this day May 12 the excellent Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903

Craig Arnold presumed dead on Kuchinoerabujima

[An image of Craig's footprint on Sukurajima, in the volcanoes of the Ryukyu Islands, taken from his facebook page. He is presumed dead on Kuchinoerabu-jima, a volcano in the northern Ryukyu archipelago, after sustaining a leg injury and falling from a very high cliff. His brother, Chris, however, is still, as of May 10, on the island and remains hopeful that there is a slim chance Craig could yet be found alive. Technical climbers are needed in order to continue the search for Craig in the area identified by 1SRG as the likely place where Craig fell].