Greenberg studies a Kenneth Noland

What is the proper way for an essay to begin? What if it’s short, without sources, and on a blog? What if it has a lede?

Clement Greenberg was an art critic and thinker working in the Unites States in the middle twentieth century, and I bring his name up because of the idea he helped foster known as medium specificity, which stresses the accountability of a work according to the characteristics of its given medium—for instance, that a painting should exhibit skills and awareness of the two-dimensional plane, of color, maybe, rectilinearity. Equally, in which case, a painting should not rely on the characteristics it shares with any or all other mediums—say, story. It is an idea that compels the rise, in painting, of Abstract Expressionism, abandoning representation of three-dimensional objects (people, streets, birds, flowers, etc) and, altogether, the three-dimensional plane, in favor of emphasis on flatness, line and color. A painting should not have a subject other than itself, one might say.

Greenberg described this notion as it was situated historically in his essay “Modernist Painting,”which I have taken from Art in Theory: 1900-2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood:

“Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium [of painting], using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledge only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly…

…The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness under the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved—the dialectical tension, to use a fashionable but apt phrase—was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all pictorial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way, and Modernism’s success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.”

The applications of this thinking to poetry are myriad and profound, ranging from a defense of the rejection of narrative to the experimental use of word placement on the page, but I wish to apply this idea to something a little broader and more ambiguous, which is our contemporary state of curatorship.

To be sure, I am speaking of the media deluge through which we swim and, more specifically, our behavior within that deluge. On an individual level, the media landscape can take many different forms, weighted toward densities of and emphasis on different types of media. For one person, the deluge is full of news. For another, funny videos. Another, recipes. And for most us it exists behind all of that in advertising, in a murmur of Helvetica and The Rule of Thirds, from which there tries to jump something that wants to ride your mind back into significance.

While these agents have arrested our attention for a long time, what is new is their sheer abundance, the technologies and motivations we have toward recording, collecting and delivering them. History is no longer something to remember but something to simulate. Or more importantly, it is something to organize.

The burden of this task is answered in the immediate by the concept of medium specificity. As I said, I believe this burden is new, and part of the excitement in the information age, in the industries that have sprung up within it, is the feeling that all the worlds treasures have just washed up on your own private shore. The first thing we must do is name its constituents and parts, and we do that by understanding kinds and the characteristics that define them. We put the rings in a box and hang the necklaces on a branch. If it were a painting, we would decide so because it is flat, rectangular, and with line and color. Our first act is a metaphysical one, a categorization. Our second is evaluation. We choose our finest of each.

We are surprised into these tasks, but even in this beginning stage come under threat. We do not know what characteristics are true definitions, and, I think we err. After awhile we begin to see, not forms, but themes, and the themes become seductive, in the end, the exclusive reason we choose to watch, read, listen to, or look at something.

Let me tell you something about me. I like giraffes. I think they are funny looking. I have several figurines in my house. I have a documentary. I have shopped for giraffe stuff. Such behavior, in moderation, is an amusement of the privileges we have. But it has an insidious force. When I am shopping for giraffe things, when I see them in shops, I do not see the real objects of the world. I see a giraffe. I am no longer capable of proper judgment.

There is a reason we have this inclination. The tension between theme and form is a tension precisely between the mind and the universe. The mind finds form too pixelated. There are simply too many forms in the universe, and it overwhelms our ability to assemble a plan. To help ease the data load, the mind creates themes, personal relevance, narrative. I like giraffes not because of their form, but because of there place as part of my identity—they are something I express about myself, and that is a theme. Perhaps the theme.

This is the environment into which the media deluge swims, and the media deluge is the inhabitant that most demands our ability to see its forms. That we wish to order things according to who we are, what we say we like, what we support as politics or ideology, even what we support as aesthetics, is natural and not without its virtue. But such themes make the qualities of a form less present to us, and we lose our rigor. We lose the capability of judging a piece of media, a message, by its quality, by the seriousness of its attempt, by its legitimacy within a field, its appropriateness. We stop seeing that it is a message at all.

The true danger of this oversight is that we relinquish control. We are set to amass in demographics, regions, in audiences and trends. We react softly to the deluge and let it shape us so long as it promises to show us who we are. Perhaps it will take us somewhere good. But we won’t know, because we won’t be able to see it.

Fantastic exploration of the profane, abject, and vulgar via forced sonnets that feel rather like a corpse being stuffed back into a live body. One of the best displays of the excising of language, based on language cliches, ephemera (advertising, phone messages, etc), and their frenetic reworking–language as excrement, the sloughed off. Not to mention a study of onanism, a more physical-feeling solipsism. Julia Kristeva eat your heart out. Paired finely with moments of startling imagery and sound: “Cup full of athlete, / Spilling. Huffing mouth-to-mouth at a carrion / Heap, petting these bunnies to pieces” (“Whether My Head Or This Wall Will Be first To Surrender”)

On the negative slope, either the poet or the reader gets a little well baked in this. Not sure the commitment to the form and mood and even the theory sustains the entirety of the collection. Or maybe I’m just TV-A.D.D., but I found myself getting eager to finish as I approached the end. Subtle issue–collection is still worth every penny you pay.

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I want to talk about time. It’s a complicated subject, no doubt. It’s complicated specifically with a number of entryways, but I want to cut through as much of this as I can and get down to this: we are all going to die. I don’t mean each of us, individually, in scattered hospitals or nursing homes at whatever our “chosen”…”time,” but rather, that we are all going to die collectively–humankind, is going to die, perhaps all life on planet earth, is going to cease existing, and there is an increasingly solid agreement that this is going to happen sooner rather than later.

To me, and to many, the likely cause of this death will be environmental destruction. But in the past, especially, ten years, a very clear and present ( ) paradigm has shifted. Let me list quickly for you a number of items that have occupied recent thought:

1. Increasing awareness of our extremely complex and absolutely devastating practices against our planet and its ecologies. This has just been posited.

2. A severe economic crises that threatened (threatens) the entire mechanism that moves our people and resources around and within one another.

3. Similarly, a move of the centers of production as far to the other side of the world as possible. The fallout, good and bad and otherwise.

4. A holy/culture war. Several fronts. Foreign and domestic.

5. An explosion in information and computing technologies such as to create an “information age” or a “knowledge economy.” Subsequently, an intense media saturation, an overturn of entire communications behaviors and institutions, and lastly a satisfaction we have, perhaps, never known, at least in terms of abundance.

These are all well known concerns, and not all are bad. But the question I am very tempted to ask is if the combination/proximity of these concerns are, not, without, but with very little, precedence. I think most would say yes and agree that there is a sizable angle of change pulling beneath us.

I don’t mean to be getting incapacitatingly freaked-out, but rather to steer these emotions toward a subject we all might profit from understanding better, which is how the sense of change and the risk of its failure disrupt our sense of time.

Let me tell you a “when my Grandfather died” story, which goes like this:

When my grandfather died, I had a hidden joy. Not for his death, his death terrified me–rather, for the disruption it caused. I was out of school for about a week. Every boy loves to be out of school, but there was more to this. I was out to be among people and to talk and think. I thought of my Grandfather’s life. I thought of his death. I thought of my parents’ death, and of my own. And packed around this in sheaths were the wet days of that week. All the ceremony, the family, the eating and stories pulled fine threads through the week and held it there as though up, briefly, to be observed. In this suspension, action is impossible. Of course, there is much to be done with a funeral, which is something I do not understand because I have, thankfully, never had to manage one. But everything else that tugged me forward with the promise of letting me touch it sat idle, in an eddy, limning the gate through which I eventually returned to my life from that interim. Every death I have been near has caused this reaction, but more so, every significant change. Surrounding it are these days.

But I feel we are now perpetually in this state, even as we push forward and design and build and trade. Perhaps it is even the exact opposite, that the present feels to us unloosened and gliding the convection of our activities. Because of our prolonged cues. It is the environment in which we live. Perhaps I speak mostly for myself, but it is a sense I have felt from my peers as well, and the best I can describe it is as  a kind of despondence, an acceptance of a much more limited set of ambitions. I do not need to speak about the dangers of this kind of state of mind, but I do feel it necessary to say how unfortunate it would be that we cannot use all the good we have made, not only to rescue ourselves but to realize something better, simply because of our lack of will.

Chronic: Poems by D.A. Powell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this, and I did at first. His talent is irrefutable, and when I felt him in more designy shoes, as in the more formalist poems in the opening pages, I connected more. But once he started engaging his subject matter, mostly, environmental and health devastation, I found the poems to move much less certainly, much too conscious of and forcing themselves toward the larger thematic concerns of the collection. Perhaps I’m biased against strong subjects in collections, but I’d almost rather read an essay than poems on these topics.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a bit of a rush, but I want to get this quick review off to you. Modern Life is the third in Harvey’s collections of poems and is most notable for the two sections, “The Future of Terror,” and “The Terror of the Future,” which anchor the book like two firm columns running through this seven sectioned collection. Please pick up a copy at Graywolf. Like much of Harvey’s work, the book as a whole is extremely organized, with a parallel section structure that runs roughly like this:

Intro
The Future of Terror
Art section I
Robo-boy section
Art section II
The Terror of the Future
Closing

Poems in the TofF and FofT sections follow a similar rigid organization, as Harvey describes in the notes: “the poems “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” were inspired by making lists of the words in the dictionary between “future” and “terror.” They are not strict abecedarian poems because they are not acrostics, but they do mimic the abecedarius’s alphabetical footsteps. The words “future” and “terror” act like “A” and “B”–they were the markers that mattered.” And one feels this alphabetical counting strongly, moving forward in the TofF section and backward in the FofT, which has this cumulative, somewhat bewildering effect on the reader’s sense of time, especially as we seem both in some imagined future and some imagined present. This is the core strength of the collection, I believe, in that Harvey seems to accomplish what so much science fiction cannot, by bringing her strange universe and her strange futurism to a very private level in the reader. No doubt, Harvey is characteristically challenging, colorful, and witty, and any reader thinking this collection to be a critique of the War on Terror is right only insofar as Miami is representative of America (thanks Jay!). TofF speaks, mostly, from a soldier’s point of view, and FofT speaks, mostly, from a citizen-in-maybe-post-apocalyptic-world point of view (what better place than these parentheses to mention that the sense of apocalypse in this collection is very sophisticated–perhaps, that it’s not even post-apocalyptic or dystopian, but some caffeine-addled dream of the mucus-drenched entanglement of the two). Here’s a taste of The Future of Terror, from “The Future of Terror / 3,” which has my favorite image in the collection, though I will not get to it below (why not here: “Periodically, we started projects: one man / made dents in the shape of stars on the inside / of his P.O. Box with a Phillips head screwdriver.”):

[...:]
Our protestations sounded like herons
on the hi fi. Even armed with invoices,
it’s human nature to proceed inch-meal.
We were a sad jumble of journeymen and here’s
the kicker: a few of us had never been love.

And here from “Terror of the Future / 9″

The teacups tied to strings along the walkway
stayed silent, had no warning songs to sing.
We shook talc onto our tastebuds
and watched the skyrockets, starry-eyed,
until night blacked them out like a giant
malevolent Sharpie.

While the projects of these two sections provide the most ostensible place to go for meaning, they are not in fact what I most enjoy about this collection. Like many things, I think there are many great moments in these poems, but too often I feel the form a bit clumsy, and while I like stepping alphabetically up and down the aforementioned feeling this evokes, I prefer Harvey when she is a bit freer to design her poems according to image. Which, let me mention, Harvey is a design poet, something I like to fancy I am. I don’t mean she’s a formalist by any means, but time and time the meaning I get out of her work is a direct result of the way she designs things, her counterpoints, juxtapositions, transfigurations, etc., and, if you would be so kind as to remind me next week, I’d like to get into this idea more thoroughly: poetry as design (as opposed to poetry as testament).

The geometrically true center of this collection is in the Robo-boy poems, and as the blurbs on Graywolf’s site suggest, this is very involved in this sense of fragmentation, of being in-half, a monster, half-human half something else, missing something, etc. Robo-boy, by the thorough involvement by the poet in hashing out several poems on him, develops the strongest sense of character, and in this way is perhaps the lightest reading of the book in the clarity of concern the poems have. He’s somewhat hapless and pitiful, but loveable and very relatable in pretty standard ways–we all feel his sense of estrangement, his robot-among-humans confusions. But by no means are these feelings limited to this group of poems. Rather, they are extremely pervasive throughout the collection and, I think, the strongest meaning in the book, our collective contemporary state of estrangement, both from the governing principles of our societies and institutions, and, sadly, from each other. Hence the title Modern Life and not Future Life.

Harvey has a great accomplishment regarding this latter notion, in that, throughout the remaining prose poems, she is able to write pieces playfully surreal, creating what feel almost like installations on the page, and others that are much more deeply personal, direct addresses, matters of romance, perhaps, or certainly intimate human connections, which are especially prevalent in the closing section, whose emotional tenor is satisfyingly amped. The variation makes for peppy reading.

Let me close this by giving two examples of the prose poems, the first being this kind of “installation” poem, and the latter being this more intimate one. From “Waitressing in the Room with a Thousand Moons:”

The moons desperately want to circle something, so when a dish comes out, they dive-bomb it, bump into each other and a dusting of moon-rock falls into the food. They know the plate won’t be a planet. We’ve been here for centuries and not once has a planet come in. I guess they do it just-in-case. Having lived most of their lives too close to everything, their sense of perspective is poor.

And, “You Know This Too,” in entirety:

You Know This Too

The bird on the gate and the goat nosing the grass below make a funny little fraction, thinks the centaur. He wonders if this thought is more human than horse, more poetry than prose. Sometimes it’s hard not to abandon the whole rigmarole of standing at the counter–using a knife and fork to politely eat his steak and peas–to go outside and put his head in the grass. But what his stomach wants, his tongue won’t touch; what his mouth wants, his stomach recoils from. Through the restaurant window he sees flashes of silver and pink in the river. It’s so clogged with mermaids and mermen, there’s no room for fish. And under the bridge, a group of extremist griffins, intent on their graffitti–Long Live the Berlin… The spray paint runs out and while they’re shaking the next can in their clenched claws, the centaur spells out Wall on his napkin, and sketches next to it a girl in sequins getting sawed in half.

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So I have been working out this poem, which is part of a series of lyrics, where the speaker’s central concern is a desire to become a monster. It’s slightly off territory for me, not so much that it is macabre or sci-fi or anything like that, but that the speaker must, in order to want monstrosity, be a lovely fellow indeed.  He is a public speaker (something I do, oddly, write a lot about, though I am not much of one myself) and it’s pretty much gold and wind pouring out of his mouth all the time. I suppose some of this is beside the point, but my question for you is, do you ever feel any kind of desire like this, to be a monster? Try and think for a minute beyond childhood fantasy or the slightly more adult desire to have, say, special powers, some kind of hybrid prowess, like a cheetah’s speed or a bird’s ability to fly, or, as evidenced by this rather creepy picture , mechanical (hydraulic) strength and computation, and try to think of some moment where you have more desired to be so fully off the grid that the very nature of your body is in question.

To me, this is true monstrosity, a discomfort with oneself, a feeling of a foreigner controlling parts of you. This doesn’t really sound all that pleasant, really, ever, and as I was working this poem out I was asking myself a lot about the legitimacy of the speaker’s want. A lot of it is wrapped up in this want for ruin, to break out of the palace, and in some instances of this in mythology a kind of monstrousness gets evoked by the hero (the Buddha was a prince, and you could say his enlightenment was the introduction of some foreign element, something that made him less human, which, of course, is up for debate). But I still don’t think a desire for ruin, for change, necessarily lead to this idea of the monster. What does, however, is drama, and let me caveat that I am about to define the monster in an extremely loose way. Loneliness, isolation, ill-feelings, etc., are all marked by a kind of imbalance, in whatever form, and here there is a strong correlation to the monster, whose oversized or multiple arms or incredible strength or infrared vision or whatever else throw him straight through and beyond the standard deviations (digression: what I find so compelling about a character like Frankenstein is this attempt at becoming human, and that what keeps him from being so is not so much one given thing but a serious of very subtle errors or constraints that accumulate into one egregious whole. Frankenstein is really just a bit tall, square, and dumb, but that is enough to keep him from being human), and perhaps when we feel “out of sorts” ourselves it is precisely this sort of feeling that we are having, this being acutely marginalized, this being so beyond the reality we see around us that we can’t possibly be a natural inhabitant. So we feel monster sympathy, Frankenstein is lovable, as is WALL-E, as is Spock (okay maybe not lovable). We sympathize because they are outsiders, by their very nature, and we have flirted with that sort of permanent banishment, at least in the way we feel we are treated. I guess there’s also this whole uncanny valley thing, but damn it that’s for another time–what I really came here to show you was one of my favorite Lorca poems. Pick him up anywhere, really (feeling link lazy), though this translation is W.S. Merwin (I guess you should now the poem is by Lorca of the Federico García variety). I think the relevance to all this monster banter will be apparent.

()

Cancion del Naranjo Seco

Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

¿Por qué nací entre espejos?
El día me da vueltas,
y la noche me copia
en todas sus estrellas.

Quiero vivir-sin verme.
Y hormigas y vilanos
soñaré que son mis
hojas y mis pájaros.

Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

()

Song of the Barren Orange Tree

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all it stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.
And I will dream that ants
and thistleburrs are my
leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Let me tell you, I got married. Twas lovely and deep and long, and I’ve been travelling and generally on a hiatus, but let me cut right to it: I’ve also been watching a lot of BBC Life and Planet Earth, and the long affairs I’ve had in their various wildernesses brings me to our engagement. Here is a clip from Planet Earth, an immense landscape and drama.

My question: Planet Earth and BBC Life bring vast audiences amazingly remote and unique phenomenon in stunning (as the parlance goes) hi-definition, technologically advanced media. Unlike some of Attenborough’s other nature programs, Planet Earth and BBC Life are in fact relatively thin on really detailed information about biology and ecology, opting instead for what feel like constant introductions to some of the most unique and artful and dramatic events and individuals on the planet. I think this is a very intelligent approach, and I think this because I think it is savvy and fits exactly today’s audiences’ needs. I know much of this is another conversation about the difficulties of something like Infinite Jest, where the hi-def and the dazzling in mass media are narcotic inhibitors of some other, more wildly enriched, deep and clear and true existence (stunning indeed). But where most, in my mind, manifestations of this trope provide no real other alternative than something, at best, imagined, or more often relegated to a small sect of either enlightened or simply unwilling individuals and their microsociety (think of any dystopian sci-fi), BBC’s groundbreaking programs not only provide an absolutely real alternative, well, they are completely about them. Now the content here varies. One can certainly say, if having watched any of the features on the birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea, that the subject perfectly folds into the medium’s “dazzling” qualities. And maybe this is why such features, specifically, are the most widely known–because the subject of them is so well married to the medium. But when I watch that wolf hunt, I feel something different, that immense landscape, the cold and the wind and the absolute shortness of time–and that is its own kind of reassurance to me. I envy that landscape for its simplicity, its blunt rules, even as I feel them most deeply because of the abundance of the world I live in and the access it provides.  It’s a feeling that I recognize, that comes to me in books, but more so, anytime, basically, I am alone and out of doors. And above that, all of this, content and desire, tastes and opinions and associations and the wonder of it all and having to make one’s way through. So I hold these nature programs as one of those things, as a unit in my cultural currency, even as I am conscious that my literateness and sophistication bely a world that has little difference from the animals I watch, in both’s subjection to vicissitudes, the take and have taken. So I am left with a peculiar sense–that I am glad for the candy and glad for the lesson as well, but also, that I am hopelessly lost, that both must always come paired. It’s a question of authenticity as it exists as a noun, free of that which it describes. I suppose.

Or perhaps the real irony is that, if you are conscious of the high technical quality of these programs, you are also conscious that such advances mark a very particular point in time, ours, now, when no doubt nature is in peril. This could be, in essence, a funeral. I don’t think we want to think this, and I’ll leave it at that–as the great problem not by BBC’s programs, but certainly brought forth through them. In the end, I think we are better for watching such testaments, that they might, indeed, live within us, be something that amazes us still.

And it goes as such: television is inherently ironic. Wallace does much to explain the technical medium of television and how it leads to irony, and he cites several early and contemporary examples of profuse irony within television’s content itself, not to mention its effects, raison d’etre, and basically anything else one would want to know, but I will save all of that for tomorrow when you read his essay. Also, this essay was written almost twenty years ago, and given how forward-looking Wallace is, one does well to pick up on his “forecasts” and see how television now has become even more ironic. Granted, I don’t watch a lot of television—Lost is basically it—but I am a young U.S. citizen, born within television’s historical boundaries, and I feel I know it as intimately as the next person. I certainly have watched a lot of television. And what I see is an almost bombastic deployment of irony. There is the obvious irony in “reality television,” (American Idol somehow holds both number 1 and number 2 in Nielsen’s rankings), where YOU are both the star and the audience, but there is also the irony, quite differently rendered, in shows like The Office, which is essentially one long telling of the joke “no one really behaves like this, but wouldn’t it be great if someone did?” Both shows are way complicated, and I’m really just using them as reductive examples of basically million horsepower irony transmissions (a clean double entendre for you there).

These are obvious places where irony works, but I think people (and by this, I mean the people I talk to, which is granted not a representative slice of America) tend to watch ALL television in a kind of ironic way. The other example of this sees equal counterparts in pop films, as well, but in TV it surfaces in shows like House or 24, which are also complicated and have their own, perhaps, ironic humors written into their code, but which are ultimately sincere. More importantly, hyperbolic. Just think of the deafeningly loud clock ticks that are the hallmark of 24—it’s maybe one of the most over-the-top sales pitches for suspense I’ve ever encountered. And the general feeling I have is that people enjoy hyperbole because 1.) it isn’t really asking them to believe it, and 2.) it’s exciting to watch how ridiculous the hyperbole can get, how much technology can be deployed.

And Lost pretty obviously falls in this latter category, except it does hyperbole so well, with such commitment, that it makes any show not about deserted islands, smoke monsters, quantum mechanics, time travel, ghosts, submarines, multinational corporate conspiracies, human fertility, utopian science cults, assassins, torturers, drunks, spinal surgeons, con men, fugitives, heroin addicts, codes and lies and black stones and white stones and planes-ripped-in-half-mid-air seem about as serious as Teletubbies. However, where I can watch a show like 24 ironically, and be somewhat amused, if hate myself a little, it is absolutely impossible to do with Lost. I mean, I know they are kidding around, they must be, no one can take this shit seriously (not even the producers and writers, if you watch their somewhat irreverent features), and yet, for some reason, I am compelled to believe. And by that, I don’t mean believe the show literally, but rather, believe that the show, through its bombast, is trying to touch something deep and core and human in me that is like the single golden eye hook through which time and history and all of humanity slides at the very center of my being—that the show is trying to connect me. Now let’s be very clear: I am not saying that the show is successful at this, at inducing some kind of religious (vis. religion, from re-ligio, linking back) experience in me. In fact, enough about the show prevents it: mostly, by being mediocre: that the characters and their situations in no way exhibit anything like verite, that the dialogue is so awful I feel embarrassed even tolerating it. Rather, what’s important here is that the pursuit for “religious” experience, for connecting viewers to a deep, cosmic order, feels genuine, so that an ironic viewing of Lost, and this is where it is unique, seems profane. The hyperbole must be dealt with as an earnest assessment of the way things are, and frankly I think our culture is a bit surprised by this.

Now, I’m not certain this surprise, pleasant or otherwise, is the reason so many of us continue to watch. Wouldn’t that make us conservatives, socially at least? Rather, I think there is a primary, if somewhat convoluted, reason Lost maintains its arrest on our attention: reference. I see reference in Lost as working in two primary ways: within and without itself. That Lost references everything from King Lear to Watership Down to A Brief History of Time, that its characters listen to Petula Clark and the Pixies, is no secret. But Lost spends equal effort referencing itself, and the subsequent games of recognition and the geometries of parallelisms viewers engage is one of the most entertaining aspects of the show, and the show knows it, so as the seasons have progressed the self-referencing has become more and more ostentatious. Now, both methods of reference are something contemporary viewers can understand deeply, especially as both methods are placed side by side, or, perhaps, even within each other. I mentioned in an earlier post an argument along these lines, that we have unprecedented technologies by which to access the world and history outside of us (internet) and unprecedented technologies by which to access the world and history inside of us (basically, psychology, but also physical technologies, like cameras with essentially infinite memories and networks where we can not only exhibit ourselves, but archive them, this blog, case in point), and that, basically, the boundaries between our interior selves and the exterior world have become a little slippery under the burden of information. And Lost enacts this notion exactly, so the real, true recognition of ourselves in the show is not in the characters but in the show’s mechanics—it’s M.O. is the same as ours.

And let me argue that we are very near, in fact, a very deep irony in Lost. Let me argue that the question viewers are asking about the end is not exactly how the show will end, what “side” will prevail, but rather, what is the ultimate reference? To what do we ultimately owe our experience? In a more naïve sense, this is a question about the first cause of the island, but as I am positing it, this question extends out beyond the limits of its plot and the universe of the script. It is a question about ourselves, what “version” of us is the true one, just as, what “version” of the island is true? And the irony is that, simultaneously, all versions and no versions are the true one. The reference will always be a reference to a reference, and the meaning we garner will be a performative one, an acquaintance with such regress where no first cause exists. Or something like that. Apologies to Baudrillard.

So yeah, I’m breaking form here and doing a close read of some lyrics. For shame. And equally so that this is a clear attempt at SEO shenanigans (since I update this blog so frequently ). So let me just complete such shenanigans: Star Witness meaning, the meaning of Star Witness, Star Witness Neko Case lyrics meaning interpretation awesomeness iPod economy largest city by population how to pirate music.

Ah cheap. But I’m really being kind of profane. This is in fact a lovely, absolutely serious song, and the lyrics are, in fact, better than many poems I have read. Please listen to the album cut at youtube here. Or you can try this live version. I’ll wait.

I mean, she’s just magic, right? Okay so here’s the text:

My true love drowned in a dirty old pan
Of oil that did run from the block
Of a falcon sedan 1969
The paper said ’75
There were no survivors
None found alive

Trees break the sidewalk
And the sidewalk skins my knees
There’s glass in my thermos
And blood on my jeans
Nickels and dimes of the fourth of july
Roll off in a crooked line
To the chain-link lots where the red tails dive
Oh how I forgot what it’s like

Hey when she sings, when she sings when she sings like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey when she moves, when she moves when she moves like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey there there’s such tender wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight
Hey there there’s such tender wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight

Hey pretty baby get high with me,
We can go to my sisters if we say we’ll watch the baby”
The look on your face yanks my neck on the chain
And I would do anything
To see you again

So I’ve fallen behind…

Hey when she sings, when she sings when she sings like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey when she moves, when she moves when she moves like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey there there’s such deadly wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight
Hey there there’s such deadly wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight

Go on, go on scream and cry
You’re miles from where anyone will find you
This is nothing new, no television crew
They don’t even put on the sirens
My nightgown sweeps the pavement
Please don’t let him die

Oh, how I forgot…

Let me begin with a little caveat. I don’t know about you, but I immediately think this song is about a car accident. But I found this clip of an interview with Case where she clarifies that this is in fact about a shooting she saw in Chicago. The pitchfork link is dead, but here is the url regardless and the bit from the interview. I’m trusting it:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/c/case_neko-06/

Pitchfork: From Fox Confessor, on a song like “Star Witness”, I’m guessing there’s a car accident involved but the details are sketchy.

Case: I spent a while on that song. It’s about an actual event that occurred in front of me. It wasn’t actually a car accident but someone being shot to death. That was a real event that happened in Chicago.

Pitchfork: What happened?

Case: It was one of those things where there’s gang violence and somebody gets shot right in front of you, and you live it and it’s horrible. And, of course, it doesn’t make the news because the kid is black. Nobody gives a shit except for his family, and you see how much nobody gives a shit and it’s fucking heartbreaking. He wasn’t even the kid they were looking to shoot. He was just some kid who they mistook for somebody else and they shot him. I saw it happen. I didn’t make the song about me either. The song is pieces of different people but the event is in there.

I feel that I’m in a bit of a tricky position, because I want to see the shooting in this song, and at times I do, but in the end this still ends up being a love song about death and regret and not a song about gang violence, senseless murder, class and race divide, empathy, etc. And I want to recognize what is unfortunate about this, because there is a wealth of love songs about death and regret and a serious dearth of the latter, at least in the realm of folk music (for a really great poem about the difficulties of sympathy across racial lines, read Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”). But, I respect the artistry Case brings to this, the “pieces of different people,” which creates a very tangible sense of assembly to the lyrics, and that is the primary richness with which I most engage them. So I am going to read these lyrics the way I first did, as a story about a car crash.

The title: Star Witness. Of course, this most directly points to the real source of the lyrics. But as we take the title against the lyrics themselves, it’s primary role is in establishing one level of engagement on the part of the speaker. What I hope to get at in this read is the way the speaker of the song, much like he of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” approaches the subject from two very different vantages, namely as the narrator with authorial power and then as the somewhat helpless object of the narrative, the subject to whom the story happens. “Star witness” has a kind of snide irony to it, which is mostly a result of the pop-legal tone of it against the deeply personal content of the lyrics. In this way, the title could be spoken out of either vantage and is really, ironically because of the irony , one of the sincerest moments in the song, since it is the one place where both vantages of the speaker seem to meet. Perhaps this will make more sense as we get deeper in.

My true love drowned in a dirty old pan
Of oil that did run from the block
Of a falcon sedan 1969
The paper said ’75
There were no survivors
None found alive

I think I’ve been tepid, generally, about openings these days, and I will continue with that here. This is to-the-point, quite quickly and powerfully establishes, with a little bit of play, what’s going on. “My true love drowned,” is really the way anyone should start a story. It’s a little confusing, however, because the scene most immediately evoked is one of car repair and not a moving accident, an oil change gone terribly awry, and I can’t see why Case starts with this misdirection except to establish more of a sense of culture, that this was a person who loved cars, that these are the kind of alt country people the story is about, something more firmly established in the third verse. What’s more important to me here, however, is how Case leaps off one final stone from the title, “the paper said ’75 / there were no survivors / none found alive.” The reference to the “paper” and the subsequent language of papers is perfectly in step with the title and establishes the publicness of this event. Also of note is the “falcon” sedan, which foreshadows the “red tails,” and then, more centrally, the “wolves.” More on that when we get there.

This sense of the public works in very subtle ways. Again, I think it gets at the true source of the lyrics (of a shooting), but Case quickly works it into something else:

Trees break the sidewalk
And the sidewalk skins my knees
There’s glass in my thermos
And blood on my jeans
Nickels and dimes of the fourth of july
Roll off in a crooked line
To the chain-link lots where the red tails dive
Oh how I forgot what it’s like

These lines bring us extremely close to the action and the characters. “Skins my knees,” details like “glass in my thermos / and blood on my jeans” are harrowing, fragmented snippets of the aftermath and very strongly resemble the acute, if disoriented, feeling of “waking up” after a car accident. It’s personal the way someone’s body is personal, and yet, there are layers outward from that privacy. First, the sidewalk: we are in a neighborhood. Second, “nickels and dimes of the fourth of July,” which evoke both a neighborhood and a nationhood, this shared event, currencies and parties—it’s a strangely public detail to have so close to “blood on my jeans,” and the effect, for me, as the change “rolls off in a crooked line” is a kind of separation, a feeling of alienation from that publicness, or at least, a feeling of that publicness as being surreal, incongruous. In a more strident way, the values and promises the community and country have established for the speaker, in this moment of terror, are receding away. And to where do they recede? They recede to the “chain-link lots,” which is a kind of end-of-society, the edge, you know, and beyond that edge the “red tails dive.” The image here is really quite magnificent, how nature is standing right there at the end of things, and there’s a danger in that, as though the speaker has crashed right through a wall of societal protection and sees in that wound the unthinking (and beautiful) nature that, essentially, is waiting for her. Or, really, for him. And, in a slightly perfunctory way, this shakes her to remember something important, which I read as her love for this man.

Hey when she sings, when she sings when she sings like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey when she moves, when she moves when she moves like she runs
Moves like she runs
Hey there there’s such tender wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight
Hey there there’s such tender wolves ‘round town tonight
Round the town tonight

And we leave the scene and enter the chorus, which is both a musical and literary chorus. Whoever is speaking seems to change here, to reference Prufrock again, is calling out “let us go then.” The person singing these words is collected, entirely oriented, and seems to understand something of great value the earlier speaker couldn’t have even hoped to have understood. It’s a godlike voice, and the great value of the tone here is the matter-of-fact way it’s delivered. We seem to be watching the earlier speaker run as though by a magic looking glass from heaven, and there is nothing good or bad about the earlier speaker’s state, but rather, that she simply is—the narrative is playing out, the earth is turning, and that’s how it must be. It’s eerily flat in tone, though of course, as it’s sung, it is sweet, sweet, sweet. The inexorable feeling of this is doubled with the latter part of the chorus, “hey there’s such tender wolves ’round town tonight.” A quick note on this, many lyrics I found hear it as “deadly wolves,” but if you ask my ears, it’s “tender.” This is really such a lovely layering as well. I mentioned the “red tails” early, flying at the edges of society, humanity, and now that animal power has, like the chorus, infiltrated the heart of the song. We see the wolves slipping in and out of the streets in that darkness as though they were busying themselves gathering something. Perhaps souls? Maybe that’s a bit heavy, but the inference stands. Now I sort of see this as serving two primary functions. The first, in a more straightforward way, is that the wolves are here to claim the person that has just died/we fear is dead (a little sketchy given the end of the song, but damn if I have time to get into it), the “true love.” Second, however, is that they are catalyzing this transformation in the speaker, the “she” that is running, and we guess that at the other side of this transformation is the “she” that speaks in the chorus with all that wisdom. It’s a characteristically mythic thing for Case to do, and I think, personally, this is when she is the best at it.

Hey pretty baby get high with me,
We can go to my sisters if we say we’ll watch the baby
The look on your face yanks my neck on the chain
And I would do anything
To see you again

So I’ve fallen behind…

Kind of like the beginning, I think this verse’s primary role is to establish a kind of culture, which is so like that found in Raymond Carver’s stories it’s almost uncanny. I’m not entirely certain what’s happening here other than some sort of memory. But it might be read as a last hoorah, a throw-caution-to-the-wind, a running, certainly, and a hiding out. There’s a subdued but deep and pained feeling that the speaker is trying to save her lover, that they’ve got nowhere to go, but she has a plan. The line I really don’t get, and which I think is weak, is the third. I can’t figure out if they are having some kind of quiet fight, which she regrets, or what. The “look” on the face is nothing I can see at all. Regardless, whether this is some limbo flight or a memory of their relationship, it is the only, and, thus, most important actual connection we see between the speaker and her lover.

And the chorus again. How weird. If this were a poem, these three sentences in my read wouldn’t exist.

Go on, go on scream and cry
You’re miles from where anyone will find you
This is nothing new, no television crew
They don’t even put on the sirens
My nightgown sweeps the pavement
Please don’t let him die

Oh, how I forgot…

Notice how this last verse modulates—it really ups the ante musically and practically holds your tears at gunpoint. We’ve run so far we are miles out, perhaps, on the other side of the chain-link lot, finally in that void where nature rules. And the lesson here is that of a kind of natural order, that this is “nothing new.” It’s a powerfully lonely moment in the song, and Case really achieves that by undercutting the previous public quality of this event, “no television crew / they don’t even put on the sirens.” There is no fanfare, no baroque displays of cultural ritual to mollify what is, in the end, something that happens everyday and, eventually, to everyone. It’s a tricky move, but what I really think Case is doing is moving, in this single verse, from the very human “scream and cry,” spoken by that more authorial voice directly to the she who has been running and who now, at the other end of this movement, is only metonymically imaged as a “nightgown [that] sweeps the pavement,” an angelic or ghostly image of someone who has all but evaporated. This is very complex stuff, very artfully designed, but what makes it absolute magic, to me, is that penultimate line, “please don’t let him die.” Case has spent all this time setting up these structures, layering voices, tracking a character as she runs herself physically and emotionally into nothing, and she cuts through all of that with this final, direct plea. It’s so heartbreaking, so steadfast and true. She works for that line and deserves it. It isn’t a caption. She doesn’t just say directly what she was “getting at all along,”–she is enacting a drama of what can and cannot be said, what can and cannot be honestly felt. In many ways, this plea is what the speaker “forgot,” so we feel, at the end of the song, an actual sense of achievement. A release. A forgiving.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
So Disclamor is a weird book, and I have to say my least favorite of Waldrep’s three full-length works, but let me also say that it is the book one who has yet to come to Waldrep should read first. I’ll caveat, too, that I’ve read Waldrep’s oeuvre out of order—this is his sophomore collection, but the final one for me to read. It exhibits many qualities we associate with second collections: there is an anxiety over a more thematically bound project; there is a searching quality, an attempt at different styles; there seems to be a kind of haste—it’s oddly ill revised, in my opinion, and so forth. The collection is also more characteristically BOA—it has a more narrative bent, its speaker is more subdued, spiritual, etc, which are qualities I associate with BOA titles. I mention all of these things not as general assertions of right or wrong, but more that I find them at odds with the poet I’ve come to know as G.C. Waldrep, who has an unforgiving intelligence and writes crisp, challenging poems that, in their confidence, inspire one to be a better reader, rather than demand a better poem, and then provide the subsequent rewards.

As I write that, I’ve actually got three other reviews of this collection in my head, so you should go to those as well. I mention this in particular because I think Al Maginnes in his Gently Read review really describes exactly how I feel about Waldrep, so let me quote him to segue into the heart of this is review:

Someone coming to Waldrep’s poetry aware of his back story—a PhD in history, the author of the study Southern Workers and the Search for Community, an adult convert to the Amish faith—might be forgiven for expecting a quieter, more narrative poetry. The poems in Disclamor as in Goldbeater’s Skin, Waldrep’s first collection, are edgy, angular, possessed of an itchy energy but tempered by a long view of the human enterprise that rescues them from joining much of the talky, hyperkinetic poetry that has been the vogue in American poetry for the last half dozen or so years.

It’s this “long view of the human enterprise” supporting the “edgy, angular” quality of language that makes Waldrep, for me, one of our finest poets. I so often feel that humanity and artful play come at the cost of each other, even if it might not seem so as they are abstracted the way I have just done. The result in poetry-land is a constant battle of taste—the accessible is boring, the experimental coldly pretentious. I find myself so often defending work that challenges, that requires a dictionary and minutes (god forbid) of focus on three words strung together, that I often forget the joy with work whose values are in character, verities to human rather than philosophical dramas. Waldrep tends to satisfy both, and never are both more present than in this collection.

The problem is, both are rarely present at the same time, and that’s what makes this collection so problematic to me. It’s less refined. It’s individual stabs, countermeasures, over-compensations, so the landscape of the collection as a whole is uneven in a displeasing way. To make a simple and perhaps ill-fit metaphor: I have this pair of headphones that have just started shorting out. Of course, it’s not that they’ve gone dead, but rather, as I move down the street, I get the left ear, then the right, and it’s piano, a snippet of a phrase, cymbals, etc, flashing quickly on either side of my head. I don’t know how to explain this, but if such a piece of music were recorded and meant, I could find the pleasure in it—but knowing that this more cohesive thing is under there somewhere makes the fragmentation of it extremely frustrating. I know what many artists would argue to this, that accidents can be happy, that technical difficulties can inspire, but I don’t think the value of that is a hard rule anymore than it isn’t.

But I’m off topic—my point is, the unevenness of this collection feels more like a technical difficulty than a conscious rendering from source human experience. And I’ll agree with Cameron Conaway that the Batteries cycle (see the other reviews for more on this) exhibit it in a central kind of way and are, in fact, my least favorite poems of this collection, despite their being the collection’s raison d’etre. Here is the first section and a half from “Battery O’Rorke:”

What is written here fades quickly.
           Faces drawn in chalk,
                    names,
                                                  the idea
           of defense, of a beach
                                 ripe for landing.

West, east, the longitudes of war.
            This is no place for monuments. 

                                      ~

If I had ever doubted
             then  hid  for  cry ,  gill  for  gull 
                                 and the incision
                   a careless thing,
                                         stain of interval

What begins as something fairly reasonable, coherent enough, making its little challenging pushes with enjambment, turns, in the second section, to something almost unrecognizable. We have the benefit of the section break, which transports us automatically to an empty stage, but regardless, these two sections feel like utterly different poems. I don’t favor one over the other. More, I can hear the poet getting bored with himself and upping the ante, but this drama is not used to serve the poem, it just exists, and the poem never engages it nor recovers. The feeling, perhaps, is one of tediousness, and we get that in many other places, like this from “Many of Us Identify with Animals:”

…Thin branches
of the river myrtles reach through them.
They move in slow groups, as if just returning
from a war. They are trying to believe
something they have forgotten.
Or to make us believe it.
In the same way that the elaborate
miniature landscapes surrounding a model
train set make us believe.
 
 

In another poet I might like these lines, but for Waldrep, this just feels plodding. Compare either to the opening of the title poem in Goldbeater’s Skin:

Ask for an axe, a syringe, a length of rope
plein air, coiled or loose. Working from nature dilates focus,
draws form from its pale circuit—point beyond which
each sphere reckons its ovation.

Ask for a clip, a pin, a charge, a powder.
Denounce the offset: heaven knows the personal
expands to fill a visual field, colonnade or any aural space
incurred as penalty. Ask for self, ask…

Or the opening to “Who Was Scheherazade” from Archicembalo:

My job was to pick rocks. From his field. In lieu of rent. But the rocks were all limestone and were crawling with tiny fossils of various crustaceans and cephalopods & wavy ferny things that looked like plants to me but, on second thought, probably weren’t, probably weren’t plants at all but animals in the same way that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.

I know I’m comparing poems out of different collections, across greatly different occasions, etc., but I think it’s evident in either of the latter excerpts that the poet is greatly more certain of what he is trying to achieve and lets the poem run. In “Battery O’Rorke” I still hear the poet figuring it out, and while the index of that process is interesting it offers no satisfying contribution to the poem’s central areas of focus, even the basic one of a meditation on a place of history.

And so the rest of the collection goes, Waldrep engaging more narrative works, more characteristically languagey ones, even odd moments of surrealism like “What Lived in Our Mouths” or odd moments of humor like “Feeding the Pear,” and a lot of the time the poet just doesn’t feel right in those suits.

Now, I say all of this having come to the collection with some preconceptions and expectations, and there are two primary reasons that make this, still, an excellent collection (pretty weak backpedaling there, right? But I mean it!). First, there are a handful of poems that will blow you out of the water, and within those, lines that will do the same, like these from “Soldier Pass:”

In the marrow of the long bones of my legs
a sweetness gathered. From the valley, diptych of a single bell.

Or, try on “Evensong: All Eyes Sharper,” “Every Apple, Every Dreamer, Every Prime,” “Electuary,” “Bishopville,” and “Semble.” Here’s the opening bit from “Semble,” which is much more characteristic, I think, of Waldrep:

                       With all vigor of the saints.
         In an upper story.
A fine grain against the wrist like gold stubble.
                                 Is one way we defined time,
               then. In that cluster of hive-like houses.
                   In that corridor of sprung beeves.
         And were not ashamed,

Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that this is the collection where Waldrep does come closest to the humanity, the pensive meditation more accessible to us, and it is useful, good, and enlightening to see him inhabit this looser, moodier territory, to attempt, at least, to bring what he’s learned in the constricted environments of his language play to the ruminations on natural, human, national and personal history and their dramas for conclusions. Though I don’t think this effort is a total success, I think it nonetheless offers something new in terms of hybridizing the disparate poetics that plague the American scene, and certainly checks the attempts of narrative and language poetries against each other, that they might support one another.

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