Well alas, dear blog, no success in making out with Neko this weekend, but perhaps it’s for the best. This is largely due to the ridiculously cheap beer available in central Illinois and the very unmanly effect of it on my sexiness. Also, she doesn’t know me, and they have, like, security.  But humiliations-in-blogs-with-teeny-page-views aside,  let me move on to my engagement du semain.

So, if you haven’t heard, I went to see Neko Case this weekend. It was lovely. Now my most decidedly favorite song of all time in the whole spherical world is “Hold On, Hold On,” which perhaps makes me a terrible fan, since it’s pretty popular, but if you feel that way, hey, fuck you. Aside from displaying her incredible, defining characteristic, the four hundred guitars and the searing harmonies, this song really nails something quite close to most of us, methinks. The plaintive. An anthem of personal history as one of great betrayal. And, subsequently, a cyncism. “I leave the party at 3am, alone thank god.” Right? This is a song for anyone who has been wronged by another, or, for that matter, by the malevolent cosmos. One feels the fool, one feels one has lost one’s innocence, that the rules of life one learned in school no longer or never really did apply. It’s a mature sound, a sound that confesses a kind of knowing, and for that, ironically, there is comfort in it. This is abound in music. Think Bob Dylan. Think Elliot Smith. Damn, this should have been a music blog. And while I’m short on good poetry examples and betraying you, dear blog, let me suggest a quick romp through any of Louise Gluck’s early collections and I’m sure you’ll see what I’m talking about straight away. So yeah it’s strident, wistful, kind of pissy, but also kind of resigned and opened to a different kind of beauty. Depth of experience, life that has meaning and ferocity. So that’s what I mean–THERE’S COMFORT IN IT, a great amount in fact, and this is where I get into my little bit of trouble.

I love this song and most like it, and I have tried to write countless poems that follow similar lines. It has, for me, seemed a necessary indulgence; it has seemed like one of the most unifying verities–who hasn’t had a pity party driving back from something–we can connect with the plaintive because we have failed. A ha, but danger lurks. Entitlement, I think, is the other word. It is my right to sing this song, for I have been wronged. So leap from the realm of song and we get, I don’t know, this war in Iraq. Pretty much, every war. Perhaps I’m leaping to conclusions because I’ve just read “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand,” by DFW (that’s it, I promise), or because this is the eve of the launch of one of the the most violent video games to date (which is why, you’ll notice, I’m posting tonight. Gonna get my killstreak on tomorrow!), or because I feel guilty about my own grievances, that no one wants to publish my book yet, that I am not waking up tomorrow to have a room full of students listen to me, but regardless of any of these things I think the connection remains. Complaint is just a good wind’s push from justification, which rubs it’s sore back against retaliation and, well, continue the metaphor yourself. Maybe it’s more cogent if we localize it, make it a little smaller. Say you are on your fourth breakup in the past six years. You are driving home from the bar and like, feeling this song. You make a decision to leave. Maybe you make a decision to have words with your father. You make a decision to burn your car up out in the desert, hell, I don’t know–you make something happen. This is what art is best at, it compels you. The problem is, you aren’t exactly thinking clearly. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do any of these thing, but you certainly aren’t drawing a line down a piece of notebook paper and making any kind of list of pros and cons. You are being impulsive, reactive, and just go ahead and see above for the more troubling results of this.

So we can see the box of problems this opens up, but let me just take a quick step into the alley with you and whisper something dear: I think this is still necessary. Even if it means war, hatred, disorder, all the lovely kingdom in smoke and ash. Don Delillo has this great, repeated aphorism in White Noise, “all plots lead toward death,” which in a sense means that all plots toward something are inevitably toward a destruction, if you’ll forgive my condescendance. Right, the entire design of a plot is a change in world order, and you can’t sow new seed without overturning the earth, etc etc. This is why Christ died. This is why the Greek, Roman, Egyption or British empires didn’t happen at the same time. Okay but this is getting foolish–my point here is that a serious truth in life is that it turns on dissatisfaction, complaint, and the appropriate and subsequent actions thereafter. Now I am a privilaged individual to sit in my house on my computer with my job to make these kinds of comments. I know nothing of terror, true terror, and of the deep humanitarian desire, need, to put an end IN TOTAL to it. But I think the truism is worthwhile, and little songs like Neko’s, with its ambition much less audacious than mine in the past few sentences, harkens to this truism. By reviewing the past it is designing the future, it is enabling the future, and what I really mean to say is that, short of being totally in love with Neko, it is organic, perfectly natural, how it must be. Ah but this all too serious. Thanks for letting me indulge, dear blog. I can count on you.

O dear blog, I have been a terrible patron. But I haven’t forgotten about you. I’ve been busy with other things. As is customary for these autumn months, I suppose.

So I don’t have much in the way of, like, content, but I thought I’d mention just a few things.

1. I’ve sent off my fall round to mags and already had some hits. The world is just! Check out “Side/Side” and “A Yellow Bucket of Sun” next summer at Drunken Boat. Of course I’ll be so kind as to let you know when it actually comes out. Thank you for humoring me with your attention.

2. As I was rehashing my cover letter, I came upon an engagement for you. While I want so very badly to say the internet (interwebs is dead, please, from here on out, use intertron) has great effect on writing students, that it is determining a new world order of poetic composition, etc., but I haven’t really been able to prove it. Moreso, as I was thinking about these things, I realized that the more accurate seachange, perhaps, is that of psychological awareness. And of course the two things are related, at least, that the internet provides us access to unbelievable amounts of external information, and psychology (might we say we live in a post-psychoanalytical world?), our self-awareness, has provided us with unbelievable amounts of internal information. What is the relationship between these two things? Where do they intersect in poetry? Discuss.

3. On a large David Foster Wallace spree, as noted in earlier posts, and I just want to push you to read, at some point in the near future, his short story “Tri-Stam: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko.” A medieval-style telling of California and the birth of rerun television. It’s some of the best satire I’ve ever read. So goes the words of Dirk of Fresno, Ovid the epiclete.

In other news, hoping to make out with Neko Case on Friday. I have a detailed plan on the shared drive, if you are so concerned.

“The most tender place in my heart is for strangers”

             So in the previous post I engaged, with great brevity, this cultural trend of fascination with old-timey objects, leading to this kind of logic that old-timey nouns (e.g. “fifty-cent piece”)–>anachronisms–>nostalgias, however you want to interpret those arrows, dear reader. Well, I want to pick up on that again. Claro.           

            By “old-timey” I think I am really referring to the first half of the twentieth century, and, more specifically, to farm-ish, rural kinds of apparel, tools, musics, values, and ultimately mythologies. I’m talking about Cracker Barrel, and who would of thought, but this culture, at least as I see it, is rearing up full throttle in the hearts of our largest cities and of the most urban peoples among us. You see it in clothing, in the dingy flannels, huge knit hats and tough canvas pants and bags and whathaveyou. You read it in writing, all the sparrows that fly through all the rafters in all the poems.You see it in the beards, the care-not haircuts, the keys latched to belt loops. You hear it in the resurgence of bluegrass, jug bands, and especially folk music. And you see it in design, the hand-stitched (oh yeah, knitting and crocheting) and the wood-carved, or the facsimiles thereof. My point being, all these examples point to an increasingly ubiquitous, contemporary style that in many ways defines a subsequent counter-culture. 

            Now, there a few things to be certain about with this. 1. I feel a personal affinity for this culture, mostly because my own contrived identity was/is so close, so I really don’t mean this in any chiding or jocular way, at least, not yet. 2. This is a particular sect of urban youth and is not any more or less important than hip-hop, club, punk, hardcore, etc. Certainly, in fact, it gets interwoven and diluted among these other cultures and definitely varies in intensity according to an individual’s commitment. 3. On this point, like many youth cultures, it is strongly centered around musical taste, a very reductive definition/history of which is a return to melody, vocal harmony, lyricism, and the heartfelt and true that were so derided by musics of the nineties, alternative stuff that promoted a view of the world as hopelessly vapid and monetized (caveat: gross generalizations up in here, also), and which concluded that any sincere response to said world was in fact merely naivety. Or perhaps that the only sincerity was in the insincere. Hmmm, at any rate, one successor to that (i.e. nineties alternative culture) is this blowback ruralism, which at this point is firmly present. 

            But what I really want to get into is more specific, an aspect of this culture that I will call, for the time being, Soft Surreal Barnyard Mythologizing. Several times a year, my neighborhood explodes in an arts & crafts frenzy, filling streets with EZ Ups and beer trucks and stages and the like. One of the best reasons to live in Chicago is for these events, and as much as I can I make it to them, all over the city. But my neighborhood’s festivals exhibit the culture I am trying to get at with particular tenacity, and what I have found most interesting, quite specifically, at these art fairs, is the staggering amount of woodland and barnyard animals I see printed, etched, stitched or otherwise represented on whatever product, all number of small birds, cats, squirrels, rabbits, owls etc.—a veritable Charlotte’s Web. Now, it’s not merely the presence of so many animals—hey, animals are neat, always have been, and I hope always will be—more it’s the design with which they are so often rendered, this kind of softness, I think the proper term is illustration, so we get a style much akin to those in animated bucolic adventures like Watership Down. So my question is, where did this come from? 

            I have many explanations, and most of them place this trend in a fairly complicated maelstrom of cross-vectored nostalgias. Shall I make a list? 1. Nostalgia for the time period when such animated features were prevalent, late 70’s through the 80’s (which, in turn, most often, were remembering back another 30-40 years)—as in, precisely when the people embracing this culture would have been children. 2. Nostalgia for childhood through animals (do I need to explain this? Kids love animals). 3. Nostalgia for childhood engagement with animals as metonym for the rural homeland, the farm-from-which-one-came-to-the-city (if even that history is merely cultural, that one in fact was raised Schaumburg). 4. And perhaps most importantly, nostalgia for this place as seen through the opiate-like lens of remembrance and invention, the dark annals of childhood, the glorious, innocent, learning-heavy, seemingly pure engagement with something (animals) that is truly Other, which, in turn, provides a kind of self-learning and self-development (I do not have fur, so what do I have?). My point being, when I carry a tote bag with a big, illustrated owl on it, I am in fact taking part in a kind of surrealism that is a result of near tectonic forces of nostalgic layering, for a thing itself, for a thing I did not in fact have but feel I should have had, and for the very media that has convinced me of this. So no, I am not Robert Hass or Gary Snyder or Muir or Leather-Stockings or Chief Seattle or whatever—my renderings of nature are not so close; they are instead guesses at nature that have been filtered through assumptions and culturally propped-up aesthetics, and the mark of this filtering is apparent. 

            The reason I’m being such a littler pisser about this, beyond the obvious reasons that “nostalgia” seems unarguably pejorative, that nostalgia is deceiving, is that it is also really CONSERVATIVE and distracts us from the larger, pressing issues of what it means to be an ADULT, among other adults, making decisions, being social and human and dealing with a far wider array of Others than the farm-dream can ever afford. The other issue I have is that I can’t help but feel that this culture is entirely ironic, that people are drawn to it not because it’s rural but because, in fact, it’s urban, in a really edgy, self-effacing way. I find all of this powerfully fascinating, and I very much like neo-cultures and all the complexities they bring. But I also cry caution. We are appropriating, but more importantly, we aren’t looking in the right direction.

This is, perhaps, the first of many iterations of this topic for me, for reasons that will later become clear, and since I’m laying that track for myself out toward the staggering horizon, let me begin in a proper place.

I was flipping through a few Wall Street Journals this afternoon (this is my job) and happened upon a generative juxtaposition of literary reviews, the first being, funny enough, a very brief interview with John Krasinski, who’s directing the upcoming film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” a book I happen to be reading currently. While the interview itself seemed little more than promotional fodder (with no offense to Candace Jackson or Krasinski or WSJ—I’m glad the movie and “The Office” are being promoted), it did secure the backdrop of “Brief Interviews…” in my mind as I came to an almost equally indirect bit of analysis-persuasion, this review of Raymond Carver’s Collected Stories, which is out now. I was familiar before with how severely Gordon Lish edited Carver’s work, and the revisit to those facts with Wallace in my head induced this authorial anguish in me that has now become a really regular event.

Let me describe it with a glib question: what has more value, the simple or the rich? There are caveats, of course: that this an entirely moronic question to ask in the great scheme of Literature, that the terms are ill-defined, and that David Foster Wallace isn’t exactly who I mean as exemplary of a “rich” style, if anything because he otherwise strikes me as an anonymous propulsion behind an entirely unpredictable set of voices. But his best, for me, is when he enters the more sumptuous descriptions:

Forever below is rough deck, snacks, thin metal music, down where you once used to be; the line is solid and has no reverse gear; and the water, of course, is only soft when you’re inside it. Look down. Now it moves in the sun, full of hard coins of light that shimmer red as they stretch away into a mist that is your own sweet salt.

This is from “Forever Overhead” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and yes, much writing has greater displays of syntactic chops, but the point remains that Carver (and Lish) trimmed the thought-fat from the action-meat, whereas here, Wallace lets the fat plump in the Tucson sun (O poor metaphors). But let me leave this inchoate/coherent comparison of these two specific writers in the shadow of a larger concern. Perhaps it’s best expressed in this manner: simple writing allows a reader into the humanity of the characters—the reader doesn’t feel threatened by the characters, and in some lovely psychological phenomenon happily produces the congruent response to the call of the text (e.g. flowers in a quiet room call, and we respond, death). And, despite my tone, there is great value in this. I love the implied, the NOT said, and the cycle of mystery/guesswork that compels such writing compels me. We are interpreters, and such writing as that which I describe plays to those compulsions. Oh hell, like this from Carver, when our protagonists arrive at Bud and Olla’s in “Feathers” and encounter the peacock:

Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car. It shook itself. It turned it’s long neck toward the car, raised its head, and regarded us.

The short, measured sentences give an air of ritualism to this entrance, a distended moment of encounter, and when we get to “regarded” we are wild in thought over how they must feel coming to this strange place with its gatekeeper. But there is no “the house is only soft when you’re inside it” kind of detailings of thought. It’s pure action, and the joy is that it evokes our assumptions of thought in the characters—we are seduced into their frame of view, so our mental reactions to this event become those of the characters, and there is great reward in this mechanic. Okay, so this is fiction workshop 101 type stuff. Going on.

The point is, simple writing also fails, at the very beginning, at achieving another, equally important ambition: to secure possibilities through language. And isn’t it just my trickery that this is in fact not a post about David Foster Wallace and Raymond Carver, but, in fact, G.C. Waldrep and his pretty recent book Archicembalo, which I am more heartily reading. I love and hate Waldrep to the extreme, but let me save all of that for a later post, zeroing in, instead, on Waldrep as, I think, the exemplar poet of a very defined technique. The list. The shock of original image. Perhaps we’d also include the more senior Dean Young and John Ashbery, but damn if I don’t stay with you here in Waldrep, because, importantly, he shares a very distinct value with David Foster Wallace, which is an intense love of the English language and a use of it almost artistic in its own right, separate from conveyance, as a matter of color and sound. Sure, there’s a whole school for that, but more than they Waldrep and Wallace act as kinds of park rangers of the dictionary, of diction (I believe Wallace said he wanted to use every word in the language—sorry, no hyperlink, but it was in Harper’s). Shall I give you my recent queries lists from the dictionary on my phone? Cerements, fletch, haruspex, crepitant, peristyle, cittern, wyvern, cowslip, chalcedonic, armigerous, struthers, raddle, shirr, arcature, abluted, orogeny, sot, epode, asperges and, well, let me stop there. Trust me sans-screenshot, openoffice just went crazy with red squiggles. Ah ha, and both writers use such words appropriately, I mean, with great imagistic force. Here are two from Waldrep:

When the coulter withdraws from the body of a child what then is seen clearly….This, like flesh, for the licking. Surgical. Sweet.

From “What is Sforzando”–and O how the violence and passion are so compressed with the simple inclusion of that somewhat esoteric term (also, “surgical”–just lovely). Or something like this, from “Who is Anton Webern:”

Ablute serial malfeasance.

Sic. I mean, that phrase just so, it’s own sentence, verb-less. There’s something irritating here, to be sure—it’s bravado, but in my better moods I rather see it as a muscular forging, a yoking together of wild words that don’t otherwise want to be anywhere near the others’ territories, and that tension alone is worth the ten bucks, which, of course, misses my original point in that this combination in fact provokes a new meaning, a local presence that, through the combination of connotative and tonal timbres of these words, allows, in fact, a kind of humanity, the religiosity of public figures through their deceptions/failures, etc. I buy it—it is a legitimate reality. And that reality, I suppose I argue, is only had through such intense displays of lexical richness.

And yet, still, I’m pissed, because in cases like this, all one has is the local. The global meaning of the poem is so far down on the priorities that one might as well remove the titles and run the entire collection as a single poem, an adventure of the mind, which certainly HAS been done many times before. So I’m missing that, that feeling of intention, of even somewhat larger design, and this lack is not so dismissable. But okay enough for now. Let’s go eat dinner.

I’ve been delaying things for a little while here, waiting for a proper, ceremonial way to jump into internet-land, but alas, I think it’s time to just get rolling. It feels good to talk into this box. I’m sure I’ll start, very soon, the usual anxieties over page views and the endless void that is a blog on poetry, but until then, I’ll just sit here with myself and enjoy the view. Thanks for having me, or thanks for letting me have you.

For the first few posts I think I’ll talk about Charles Simic and Matthea Harvey, and, just to get some content rolling (since I’m quite ambitiously launching like 47 blogs at once) I might shamelessly post a few papers I wrote in the MFA. Why the hell not? At any rate, the only other thing I can say is that I plan to favor frequency over length and avoid the long diatribes it seems often accompany these sorts of things. Not much on breaking news, either. Mostly, some close reads, questions, links to good places,and the necessary updates on what’s going on in my publishing life, if only for my own record. Let me light this match. The canyons are lovely.