Why Do We Expect Meaning From Poems?

Contemporary poems and poets that purposely work-around the styles and tones (though not necessarily the influences) of prior generations are not unlike Lynch’s description of films and music. However, in poetry classes, students are either asked to find the meaning of a poem or, in the case of teaching a course with a focus on postmodern poets, seek meaning themselves. Meaning, of course, is endemic to everyone. We are constantly searching through the world, through space and culture for the meaning to life and, less abstractly, to the events which surround us, especially the traumatic events of shootings and other acts of violence.

However, the search for an objective meaning to these existential questions is fruitless. As Camus tells us, there are three methods for dealing with this fruitlessness: physical death (suicide), philosophical death (religion), or acceptance of the absurdity which surrounds the quest for meaning. The fourth option, I wrote previously, is denial, a very popular choice.

We are trained by the education system, at least in the United States, to seek meaning, to codify our response to anything: birthdays, death, politics and music or art. We are expected not only to place a subjective value judgment on these items by also to explain via language why these subjective judgments are correct.

I believe this kind of judgment and search is based on religion. Religion tells us not only what is right and wrong but also that any subjective “truth” is sinful and that only the objectivity of the very subjective faith can lead to an answer to these greater existential questions Further, it is in determining these judgments that meaning can be discerned. Religion is not philosophical death for nothing.

Students are especially conditioned, then, to find a correct meaning in the poems they read, a process hammered together in grade school in order to teach a consensus literature with a set meaning before behind catapulted into the subjective world. Does religion not do the same thing? Does it not attempt to indoctrinate one with a set of ideas for governing oneself and others before unleashing these individuals on the world? This is not to say that education is killing philosophical thought – far from it. Education should be the expansion not only of knowledge but also the blueprint for how one should acquire more knowledge. However, for the sake of testing and making sure those entering the world beyond school have the same base of knowledge, it became necessary at some point to teach that objective meaning is possible.

Life, friends, is not boring – at least not anymore. Life is chaotic and yet simultaneously structured. There seems to be a narrowing definition of success in American society and it seems that any discipline which challenges that definition is deemed “difficult” and undermined through that difficulty via its subjectivity.

Poetry, then, stands in opposition on these fronts. Poetry, like Lynch’s example of music and his own films, is a witness to chaos through the subjective lens of experience. However, because poetry uses language, it is expected to make sense, to provide meaning within its framework. Because language seems to exist within set parameters of definition and grammar usage, it is assumed that words themselves are not subjective. Words, because they have a set definition in dictionaries, are seemingly not open to interpretation. Words are made up of their prescribed meaning based on society consensus. Because language is our most developed construct, when elements of it are used, they are decidedly set in their meaning – otherwise, what would there be to hold on to?

Poetry is the tool of abandonment, the way of letting go of these pre-determined parameters of language. A poem is the place to let go of expectation, to cease our attempts at aligning meaning, language and experience. The elements can exist as themselves: experience can remain just that with no need of affirmation and language can be reset with the space of a work as it needs to be.

For some, surely the search for meaning is itself meaning, a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. Without the search for meaning, life would veer dangerously into the absurd which, under no circumstances, and the accepted. In a poetic work, however, this absurdity should not only be allowed to flourish but it should be expected and encouraged.

Life is full of inexpiable chaos so why do we expect anything different from our poems?

Permutational Aesthetics and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Previous posts on permutational aesthetics: Dreams of an Ideal Life; Dwelling, Regret and Permutational Art

Surrealists have been living and dying on Gerard de Nerval's opening to Aurelia: "Our dreams are a second life." It is a concept so central to surrealism that one can hardly contemplate escaping it. What happens when one falls asleep is the essential makeup of any surrealist work and nowhere more than in the films of David Lynch. If Ashbery can be considered the offspring of poetic surrealism (a highly debatable claim) then Lynch is at the epicenter of contemporary surrealism, perhaps even globally.

Basically all of Lynch's screen work has dealt in dreams, even the outlier The Straight Story, which is about a man's journey to see a dying relative. Even in that work, Lynch's strange Americana is depicted and the very plot of the story seems like a dream experiment, riding a tractor for great distances in an attempt to see someone before they pass. However, the work most exemplary of surrealism and permutational aesthetics must be 2001's Mulholland Drive, a strange nightmare that covers over unpleasant activities in the waking life.

In the first part of the film, we meet the doe-eyed Betty, a young actress who is passed over for her shot at stardom due to the underground activities of a mysterious man (played by Michael Anderson, Lynch's Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks) and his representatives (one of whom is Lynch's dreamy composer, Angelo Badalamenti). In the cryptic repetition of the line "This is the girl," the director (played by Justin Theroux) is forced to take on an actress for the role that he does not want. In fact, he looks longingly at Betty when she is in the studio but cannot pick her due to the direct threats he is up against. Everything is falling apart for this fellow.

The other part, of course, is the finding of the amnesiac Rita who accidentally makes her way into the home that Betty has kindly been lent by her aunt. Rita is the survivor of a car accident but cannot remember said accident or much of anything, in fact. Betty takes the ailing Rita in and the two eventually become lovers and things are going magically well for Betty, despite her not getting the role she was destined for and whatever horrible things happen to those around her (the poor director finds his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus, which is horrible for everyone; two men in a diner discuss a nightmare scenario actually going on in the film and one ends up dying!).

Of course, the whole thing is a sham: this is desperate actress Diane's reconstructed dream world wherein she is the innocent and well-meaning young hopeful (which she probably was at some point before being corrupted by the horrid ways of Hollywood) and where Rita is nursed back to health rather than killed off for jilting the madly in love Diane.

After Betty and Rita open the blue box, the film shifts and we see what has really been going on: Diane has her lover killed, not only for leaving her for the director (who for whatever reason is forgiven by the dreaming Diane- remember that he is being threatened by cowboys and Billy Ray Cyrus punches him), but also for being "the girl" that gets the role she not only covets but feels is rightly hers. The man she hires, who is hilariously incompetent in her dreamworld (having to kill a second person because he accidentally fires a gun while attempting to make another hit appear to be a suicide), hands her a blue key which makes its way into her dream reconstruction.

In fact, many elements make their way into her dream: the cowboy, the random woman who is the aunt (which is similar to a scene in Twin Peaks where Donna goes to a home, only to find a different interior with someone different living there with the same name), as well as various objects which are too numerous to mention. Of course, in the dream, everything is idealized but reality has a way of sneaking through. Her real name is given to a waitress from whom the waking Diane stole her dream name. They see a dead bloated body in  what we come to realize is waking Diane's apartment and clearly her body at the end when Diane can no longer live with her actions.

In hiring someone to kill her lover, Diane creates an escape in her dreamworld from the horrors of her waking life. Lynch, of course, wants the viewer to believe that the dream life is real (even though the beginning is so clearly a dream) until he washes it away by sucking Betty out of it but one can never quite escape reality, in dreams or in art, and Lynch plays on this duality throughout the film by breaking down the barriers of Diane's dream for Betty to discover. Dreams may be the second life but the first life has its place among the ephemera of the constructed existence and ultimately this causes Diane to not only awaken but leads her to take her own life.

This is naturally at the heart of permutational art. Arts allows us, in an external form, to recreate idealized versions of past events. In Diane's case, she creates a permutation in her dream to deal with the issues she is naturally dwelling on in her waking life (her lover, her career, etc.). It makes sense that by the time one hires an assassin, one has spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the slights and wrong-doings one feels has been done to them like Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado." Diane, of course, must re-enter reality with the evidence of what she has done when she finds the blue key left by her hired killer on the coffee table. It seems he is much more capable in real life, much to dreaming Diane's consternation. Any hope that Camilla might be alive vanishes and ultimately, Diane cannot live with her actions. The idealized dream life seems to make the situation worse as Diane contemplates the alternate stream of existence that she created.

It seems more and more as if the event of Camilla's death occurs the same night Diane sleeps and dreams this dream. Her dream life attempts to worm its way out of the act of murder that she has set in motion. She hopes that Camilla survives but wakes to find she has not, but not because she does not want her dead but rather because she does not want to be the cause of her death. The guilt ultimately is overwhelming for Diane and while an escape back into the dream construction could have made a perfectly reasonable ending, for Lynch, there is only one way out.

Second issue of N/A

Really excited about today's release of the second issue of N/A! The best part, I am discovering, about running a journal is that you get to publish not only the work of those that inspired you, but of people you think will inspire others down the road. It's an amazing feeling knowing that some of the work is in manuscripts and things happening right now in other places in the poetry world.

N/A's second issue has work from Rae Armantrout, Pierre Joris, Matt Henriksen, Michelle Detorie, Adam Veal, Karen Hannah, Gina Abelkop, Megan Kaminski and, of course, rob mclennan.

We're already looking down the road to Issue Three, which will be out January 1st, just in time for your post-NYE celebration coma to have passed.

Hindsight

I must admit, despite the damage to my liberal street cred, I am torn on Syria.

The reasons are too complex for me to post on in any meaningful way, but ,unusually for me, this process of thinking through has lead me into a poem. I don't normally post poems here because, well, it's a blog about poetics and things but not necessarily about showcasing my own work. However, because this will likely go nowhere beyond me, I thought this "thinking through" poem could be posted, just this one time:

Hindsight

a fourth, typed draft

The boy has cried

and we heard him

but we're so tired now. It's

a new wolf and an old 

boy is dead, swallowed

in parts, I think. In our

uncertainty, cries are heard 

again but we know that

wolf already and have

seen it's eyes and  teeth that

pervade.

The boy cries, a leg is

gone and blood has

our wolf lusting over there. We've

heard it before, though:

we've known the stench of

death, eyes rolled back

and white, entrails spread down on

clay and read enough. We

can deceive, unknow,

unbecome when it's only

the ears which have been

sprayed across.

The boy is dead, anyways, but

it's not our boy, our blood or 

even a neighbors': we can keep

the door shut, yeah, but we 

linger in the outer hall, wondering

when one leg became a hand or

liver. The boy was left an

eye and gristle.

On Henriksen's Post

On his Tumblr, Matt Henriksen writes "The best thing about being a poet these days is we are widely ignored and not taken seriously." This has its upsides and downs, of course, an upside being that, yes, we can generally get away with things that might be seen as controversial if someone the public was aware of did them. Fortunately, there is no way for American poetry to be controversial, except to other poets, but it seems we are fully capable of creating our own drama for drama's sake.

Here in lies the conflict that seems to embody much of what has been happening lately: there is a struggle between what Henriksen calls the "anomalies, outcasts, losers," who "don’t need consultants, the establishment hierarchies, or pyramid schemes" and those who wish to see poetry in America as a bourgeoisie engagement, made up of public intellectuals, professionals and politicians who are asked about their opinions on television, who make policy and who are mobbed like Alfred, Lord Tennyson when they are seen on the street.

It seems, to me at least, that poetry isn't (or at least it shouldn't be) about that. Poetry is an act of subversion: it is against the normalcy of language, the complacency of society. It's not about being a pop cultural icon or about being categorized and stuffed into some simple ideological space. Poets, and artists in general, ought to be on the outside of society because that is the way in which one can look into it. Those that want to make poetry a water cooler conversation piece seem to have little understanding of its history.

Robert Archambeau's wonderful essay "The Discursive Situation of Poetry," which is included in his equally wonderful book The Poet Resigns, talks about this history. I admit freely that I didn't know most of it myself. In it, Archambeau takes on those (Dana Goia comes to mind immediately) who wish to make poetry some great endeavor and poets the grandes dames of some kind of intellectual society built on a shining hill of egos.

This, again, doesn't seem to me to be what art is about. Art is an afterthought, the remnants of the ideas and culture that have gone before it. Art is about what's left over when things have passed, the memory and the experience. The thing is, the reason artists are famous after they are dead, to use a very tired cliché, is because artists always make up the awareness of a time period, which isn't something that happens overnight, although we seem to be trying to in the poetry world-- we cannot create our legacy by will alone.

Henriksen points out a systemic problem with art, especially in this country and to a similar extent, in academia, which is the commodification of art, the branding of it in order to make it a non-difficult, accessible item available for purchase for the purpose of profit. Especially in colleges and universities, where students are now taking on a lifetime of debt in order to get very little by way of future prospects, the arts are falling into a worm hole in which the outcomes are not definable or identifiable in any simple or timely way but must be in order to justify their existence.

This, to me, is a constant issue within the Capitalistic society: things must have a monetary value and not an abstract value before they are allowed to exist in the same world as the norm. And the beauty of it is that there are those within poetry, who in order to justify their existence as poets, are attempting to pull poetry into the branded, hyper-capital. On occasion it feels like our own establishment within the poetry world is busier trying to get into regular establishment, like the pigs of Animal Farm, than exist in the system which is already in place for them.

It's hard to blame folks, really. We all want to be comfortable and be taken seriously, especially the people that consider themselves adults. When you have your own slice of the "American dream," paying a mortgage and driving a large car, the answer to "What do you do?" rarely ends with "I write poems." Some might say that it would be nice if poets were paid like athletes but that hypothetical society would be the one in which poetry, as a mainstream established art form would be usurped by some other form which takes as its motivation the subversion of societal hierarchies.

This, however, in Henriksen's words, does not mean those people should expect the "embrace" of the "loser poets." No, it's a battle that will constantly go on because "American Poetry," as an institution. is growing, and in seemingly close numbers on both sides of the commercial/ars gratia artis divide. The embrace of either side would mean poetry has lost whatever vigor it had and that seems worse than the in-fighting and commoditization of it in the first place.

The only place I take issue with Henriksen is on whether his Tumblr/Facebook post is a "manifesto." Regardless of his saying it isn't, it is, mainly because it (the piece) gives us the intentions of a group, their motives and their views. It tells us what loser poets are not: bankers and politicians, who seem people and their productions as fetishized objects rather than the art and artists they are. Henriksen's manifesto creates a public of poets as defined separately from other poets. Henriksen points to an already existing line and shows us what side we were already on, whether we believe necessarily in the tenants of either side.

The Most Important List of Poets Ever

Matt Henriksen is a half-blind/half-cyborg poet who drinks soda in a top hat 'cause he thinks he's better than everyone else.

I don't know about all the other lists of poets that have come out lately. They grade poets on their contribution to poetry, not, say, their ability to sit in a car, converse politely and avoid the feeling of death that accompanies most interactions with Matt Henriksen.

In May of 2011, Matt Henriksen visited Providence RI to read at Kate Schapira and Brent Legault's Publically Complex Reading Series (at Ada Books). My wife, Jennifer, had just returned from a year in the field doing research for her dissertation. She had had the car. I drove only a few times during the year and thus, when Matt turned up, was re-acclimating myself to driving the literally rough streets of Providence. Since, Mr. Henriksen (fuck him) has made fun of my driving on at least two separate occasions. THIS AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND, MAN. 

I'm very serious about my driving. I learned from my brother, who is overly aggressive, and my father, who is the least aggressive person ever, at least on the road. In me, this has created a perfect balance of awesomeness. I may be bald, overweight, an above average poet, salsa dancer, professor and extremely above average hamburger maker, but degrading any of the items on that list wouldn't bother me. Make fun of my driving, however, and you'll find yourself ostracized, probably from all of humanity.

I can only imagine Mr. Henriksen drives like he picks baseball teams. Here now is an INCOMPLETE list (in order of remembrance) of poets who find me a perfectly fine driver (if I've forgotten you, please email me or leave a comment! WE MUST FIGHT THE SCOURGE THAT IS MATT HENRIKSEN):

1) Jessica Smith

2) Jerome Rothenberg

3) Johannes Goransson

4) Karen Lepri

5) Catherine Imbriglio

6) Gale Nelson

7) Darren Angle

8) Kate Schapira

9) Jordan Stempleman

10) Andrew Bourne

11) Claire Donato

12) Tony Tost

13) Mark Nowak

If I have forgotten that I gave you a ride, DON'T BLAME ME. BLAME MATT HENRIKSEN because I'm so angry right now that I CAN'T EVEN TYPE A LIST OF POETS WITHOUT FORGETTING SOME OF THEM TO WHOM I HAVE GIVEN RIDES ETC. Look at all the caps!

(seriously: if I've forgotten you, please let me know. If you disagree with your inclusion on this list, tell it to Castro.)

Brief Written Response to Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry As Experience

[This was written for the Theories of the Lyric class I took at Brown under the wonderful and brilliant Susan Bernstein. The class, mostly, was well above me and I'm not sure I did the course any service by being there. That said, I'm posting this because it was a response I gave in the course to Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry As Experience, which we read. It was a work I really latched on to, which may be evident if you've been reading this blog at all. I'm also sharing this because it has nowhere to go, may be totally wrong but is still interesting to me and something I'd like to explore further. As President Obama says, this is "above my pay-grade" but hopefully won't be forever. The crossed-out passages were left because, well, no one is grading me here.]

Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe begins with a reading of two poems by Celan, starting off by telling us about some of the translation and publication history. Immediately he suggests that while the titles of both poems are towns, most likely commemorating visits, they really stand in for Hölderlin (Tubingen) and Heidegger (Todtnauberg, where Heidegger famously worked). As the two poems are linked by theme and the word heute, so are Hölderlin and Heidegger, though the connection between those two is thoroughly through Heidegger. On page 18, Lacoue-Labarthe discusses experience as something that differs from living because rather than simply describing events, poetry tasks itself with working in memory and the sensations of a moment. “A visit in memory of that experience,” Lacoue-Labarthe writes, which is also in the non-form of pure non-event.” In the last paragraph on page 20, Lacoue-Labarthe states that there basically is no “poetic experience” because calling something an experience necessarily deviates from something that has been lived. This I believe is the crux of both halves of the book: how do we experience the events that give the sections their titles and how does poetry aide us in that experience, vs the recounting of events? On page 14, Lacoue-Labarthe asks “What is the work of poetry that, forswearing the repetition of disastrous, deadly, already –said, makes itself absolutely singular? What should we think of poetry (or what of thought is left in poetry) that must refuse, sometimes with great stubbornness, to signify?” I think this leads to a discussion that is still going on in poetry, which is one of difficulty and levels of “coding.” At what point does poetry go too far and become so difficult and so abstract that it allows no real reading? It’s a complaint I’ve heard all too often, so many apologies for harping on this one point.

Before I begin to discuss the second three-quarters of the book, I believe it is impossible to know what’s going on without knowing about Celan’s interaction with Heidegger. Apparently, Heidegger was a fan of Celan’s and though Celan was naturally skeptical of Heidegger due to his affiliation with National Socialism, met with Heidegger in Totenburg, Heidegger’s retreat in the Black Forrest. There is the suggestion in the poem (and of course in Lacoue-Labarthe) that the meeting and their mutual respect for each other’s work (Celan’s being influenced by Heidegger and vice versa) had the potential to create a milestone in their relationship. The poem is not, however, the recounting of these events, but is the experience of them.

The section titles of “Remembering the Dates” ask us to define the words for ourselves before showing us how poetry helps us with these issues. We begin at “Catastrophe,” of course, which goes beyond trauma and signals an ending of some kind, usually one involving tragedy. (Page 67) For Lacoue-Labarthe, it is the poetic act which is “catastrophic” because poetry questions that which are, in a sense, expected or understood. To phrase it more simply, poetry can be and often is, a tool for dismantling the information we thought we had. Specific to Celan, on page 68 no, Lacoue-Labarthe says that he believes poetry is the “interruption of the ‘poetic’”, the intertitles to a silent film, as it were. Poetry, on page 51, pushes existence to be “released at the height of catastrophe,” (to page 55) an act of which “allows the human to take ‘place’ within” Perhaps this is all to say that while we are free to act as our true selves in the midst of a catastrophic event, so too is poetry there to explore the experience, not merely as a list, but as a set of sensations.

In thinking of the word “Prayer,” the first thing that comes to my mind is a request- but something beyond that. A prayer is meant to ask some divine being whether or not they will intercede into the events of humans and fix them in the manner the person praying prescribes. The poem that Lacoue-Labarthe talks about here beginning at page 71 is something more of a “negative prayer” because it does not invoke a being and in fact is to “no one” at all. There is the absence of an addressee, which is indeed the opposite of a prayer in the common sense. One rarely invokes no ‘thing’ at all to beg of it that which human intervention cannot seemingly provide. This falls into a discussion by Lacoue-Labarthe about the word God, especially in that it is not a name, though it is to stand in for one. The paragraph discussing Hölderlin’s “’withdrawal’ of the divine” is interesting in that it wants to give an example of an experience with which any experience seems impossible or that we would perhaps be skeptical of. By removing oneself from the direct contact of a divine being- by “retreating”- is where experience seems to begin. The conclusion that Lacoue-Labarthe eventually comes to is that a poem that seems so prayer-like because it hopes to evoke the sensations and experiences of praying without having to invoke the elements necessary to call it a “prayer”: “The poem arrives in the prayer’s stead,” Lacoue-Labarthe writes on 86, and “the poem is…uttered by the ‘deposed’ or ‘fallen’.” The poem is “unburdened” where the prayer only brings burden along.

In “Sublime” it seems that Lacoue-Labarthe really accepts the idea that poetry is what gives us a place free of fear. And though it is art and wants to unsettle us, harkening back to a previous essay’s use of unheimliche, art “suspends” and “produces” pleasure. It seems that Celan, according to Lacoue-Labarthe is somehow against this sentiment: Celan perhaps does not feel that art should create a delusion but it rather it is the job of art to show up that which is unsuspended and reflective. However, this may have less to do with the true nature of art broadly and more of Celan’s experiences. However, it seems that Lacoue-Labarthe tends to agree with Celan further along: modern art is an art in which nothing can go wrong (because it is sublime), perhaps because it is already anti-beauty and it “shows the pain of presentation” before questioning the nature of presentation as standard.

Upon first seeing “hagiography,” I would imagine that most of us would know the older meaning, which basically the biography of a holy person. Here, Lacoue-Labarthe equates “Todtnauberg” with hagiography, perhaps because he believe Celan nearly turned Heidegger and his visit to him into a religious pilgrimage, a word used by Gadamer on page 92. I must admit I am confused a bit as to how Lacoue-Labarthe sees it this way when Celan is describe as being in despair after the meeting, perhaps because he had expected some kind of apology. However, if “Todtnauberg” is to be a reverential piece, is it the experience of it rather than the direct effect that gives it its hagiographic qualities?

It is in the act of self- and other identification that human beings express their sense of existence; therefore, as to reword Lacoue-Labarthe, language is existence. The only way to summarize such a short piece is to quote what is most relevant to us directly: “When poetry accomplishes its task, which is to push itself to the origin of language…it encounters…the naked possibilities of address, reminding us of the address issues in “Prayer.”

On page 98, the “Pain” section, Lacoue-Labarthe gives us Heidegger’s definition of experience as something obtained “along the way” but pain of course is then that which “tears asunder…yet draws everything to itself.” Pain is something we’re all familiar with, but in poetry, pain is something that divides, conquers, and reassembles. Lacoue-Labarthe equates pain with lyricism, which is an interesting definition of something which speaks to the self. Is the self pained and is it something that creates an identity in being objectified? At the end he talks about blindness and lucidity- a clear-headedness that comes from a lack of sight, I suppose. On page 101, I’m fascinated by where Lacoue-Labarthe talks about sight being associated with movement because of course, it is the movement and reflection of light which gives those of us who can see vision.

In “Ecstacy,” which is of course very short, Rousseau’s excitement as his “rebirth” seems to be an experience within the realm of poetry, most likely alone. While Rousseau can tell us what happened, only poetry can give us the sensation of so nearly missing death.

Vertigo, which is the experience of motion while completely stationary, is contrasted with Celan’s statement in “The Meridian,” translated several times over (I wonder if we can have one more from the room, even). Poetry, in my best judgment, is the experience of speaking into an infinite space while become mortal and ultimately in a void.

Blindness is love. I think that experience is probably clear to most of us and is so far the clearest equation with poetry.

“Lied” is the act of betrayal in a sense, because absence is really missing something that should be there, so in the case of the relationship between Heidegger and Celan, because the apology is missing, what is left is the lie.

“Sky” comes back to “God,” but at a new angle. I am reminded of the question of karma in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna ultimately explains to Arjun that the question of karma is not up to him, so there is no point in dwelling on it. In another sense, quoting Dylan, “All you can do is do what you must.” Really we are back into discussions of measurement and for Hölderlin kindness is an example of “divine goodness” Near his conclusion, referring back to “Lied,” Lacoue-Labarthe states that for Hölderlin, God is not really “absent” and that his kindnesses (such as death) are examples of his interaction with humans.

I feel that “The Unforgivable” gives us yet another sense of betrayal: why is someone whose work informs Celan’s so well in such opposition to him personally? Obviously this is such a huge question for Celan (like writing in a language which has just promoted the extermination of his people, for example) that really what comes through as betrayal is that Heidegger never recants his statements, never questions his own judgment. For Celan, this act seems to signify something so dark in humanity: “thought will never recover from such silence.”

N/A

http://www.nalitjournal.com

Happy to announce the very first issue of N/A, a journal where nothing applies! It's been a long time coming, I think and I'm happy it's finally here!

AMAZING folks in the first issue: Jerome Rothenberg, Kate Colby, G.C. Waldrep, Jessica Smith, Darcie Dennigan and more!

Hope you'll have a look and maybe even submit to the second issue!

A Little Memory

UGA@Oxford's former house at 106 Banbury Road.

Ten years ago, I left for England and UGA's program at Oxford. It was kind of a fluke, really: after a long April night, I was voted president of the Demosthenian Literary Society  The next morning it rained and I was carrying my umbrella and at the end of Kalpen Trivedi's (no relation) British literature class (which one escapes me at the moment). I walked up to him, thinking I'd let him know that I had this new gig and that my first goal was to figure out a rematch between UGA's debaters and the Oxford Union.

"Oh- you should meet Judith Shaw." To be honest, I was about to head back to Demosthenian Hall for a humid nap but I figured meeting the person in charge of such things was a good idea, so I followed Dr. Trivedi up a few floors and met Dr. Shaw. We talked a few minutes about DemSoc and Oxford and by the end, she was selling me on UGA@Oxford's new summer program. I politely declined, even after meeting Christine Albright, who equally politely nudged me into at least thinking about it. Walking out of Park Hall with my umbrella over my shoulder, I called my Dad, mostly to tell him the hilarity of them asking me to go abroad the coming summer.

"Why is it funny? Why can't you go?" my Dad asked. I didn't have an answer. He immediately pegged it: "How much does it cost?" he asked. This, I figured, would put an end to the whole thing. "Well, beyond travel and all that, the program itself is $1500." At that moment, I figured my Dad, who had been in and out of work since I was ten (though in the middle of a very nice job at the time), would stop talking about it and drop the whole thing.

"$1500 is easy. That's the wrong reason not to go. This could be a once in a lifetime experience." My Dad is fond of sayings like that one, especially when the opportunity may well never come again. "What do they need right now?"

Again, delaying my nap, I went and asked Christine what they needed. Transcripts and a down-payment. Uh oh.

The money didn't bother me- my Dad had already told me he could put money in my account- but my grades. My grades were a whole other matter. For some reason, like many, the transition to college from high school was a tough one academically and to make matters worse, at the start of college I found myself with a group of individuals who were as geeky as me and liked to get together and talk about stuff. I'm not blaming Demosthenian for my poor grades but spending every waking moment thinking about the society was a lot more fun than studying.

I don't know if enrollment for summer was low or if they just really liked me but the UGA@Oxford folks said I could go immediately. I was so embarrassed about Christine looking at my transcripts that I bolted from the room as she opened the envelope, but I guess it didn't end up mattering.

Soon I was planning a trip to somewhere I'd only stopped through on trips to India. My parents suggested I plan a little extra time in and it occurred to me, the young writer wannabe, that I could make it to the 99th Bloomsday in Dublin, so I planned four days in Dublin and four in London before taking the train to Oxford. I had never really travelled on my own besides a two week "leadership" camp type thing a in high school and the idea of being in a different countries, even ones that spoke the same language, was daunting to say the least, but exciting.

In the back of my mind (which is to the front), I wondered what kind of trouble I could get myself into abroad, especially spending the first eight days alone. It was a strange feeling: I was free to goof off in Athens but being out of the country seemed especially liberating. Sure, there would be the academic aspect of it but there would be lots of wandering time.

Wandering is something I brought back with me. I don't like to go to cities and SEE things- no, I much prefer to walk down Eighth Avenue in New York City or drive around looking at the neighborhoods of Baltimore or driving through the islands on Lake Champlain. It is no doubt the most enduring thing about my study abroad trip.

Well, the second most enduring thing. First, of course, has to be writing. OK, like any asshole 20 year old, I thought I'd write the great American novel, but the idea was there that I want to commit language to the page. It was all a bit romantic and hazy at the time but I suppose all young writers start that way.

Anyways, on June 11 2003, my parents dropped me off at Hartsfield(-Jackson) International Airport in Atlanta. I immediately tried to see if I could take my thinning hair over to a bar, which I did, and I drank a Killian's. I'm not sure why no one bothered to ID me, but I guess the whole "Unless you look x years old we card you" thing didn't come until later.

Naturally, the flight for Toronto left late, making me miss my flight to London and miss my flight to Dublin. Already, the trip was off to a bad start. As if being in Toronto during the whole SARS thing wasn't scary enough, I was terrified about the trip in general. I had no real way of contacting airlines while en route, especially as STA Travel had set me up on several different airlines to keep the cost down.

In my free hotel room, I listened to the new Radiohead album on repeat and read the Bible. I went downstairs and had a drink with one a pilot, who told me about going all over the world. I spent a lot of time thinking about the traveling I would do after this, even with whatever flight complications. I was handling it, which seemed most important.

When I did reach London, it was late at night so I took the train from Heathrow to Paddington Station and took my gigantic bag with me around the corner and found the Boulevard Hotel. My flight to Dublin had been missed by some twelve hours or so and it seemed best to deal with it in the morning. For the night, I watched British TV and ate at the only place still open near the station, Burger King.

The next morning I woke up early. I guess I barely slept, to be honest, stressed out about the flight I had missed. It wasn't a super big deal- I hadn't booked anything in Dublin in terms of staying, so it worked out that I had missed the flight but I did want to get to Dublin.

I minded the gap and made my way to Gatwick Airport. I was nervous- I really had nothing I could do about the flight, but for some reason arriving at the airport meant I'd have some chance to do something. I was to fly from Gatwick to Dublin with British Airways so I went to their desk and explained everything that had happened from Atlanta on. The man said over and over that there was nothing he could do but then he paused.

"Meet me over there."

I walked over to the spot he had pointed to and waited. He walked out of the booth and quickly towards me with a slip of some kind in his hand. "Look- I got you on a standby flight to Dublin. It's empty, so you'll get on." I tried not to let tears slip out of my eyes as I shook his hand. I'm sure if I tried, I could pick him out of a lineup, but I have no idea now what his name was or anything else. It's quite strange literally relying on the kindness of strangers.

I made it to Dublin a little while later and took a bus into the center of the city. When I got off, I asked a random employee where I might find a place to stay and he laughed at me, suggesting I should have booked something sooner, but he did point me to a hostel, where I would stay for a few days.

Charlie and Ben, whose lip was cracked and bleeding.

This post could go on endlessly but I think I've reminisced enough. I did come back with lots of different feelings and ideas than I had left with, including a better sense of how Americans are seen in the world and very different political ideas that come from that. I had a better idea about being a writer (I felt) and made some new friends (some are easier to keep in touch with than others).

Tragipoetics II

Trauma

Thomas Hoepker's photo from Brooklyn on 9/11/2001 http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/09/i_took_that_911_photo.html

The earlier Tragipoetics post

Trauma is the aftermath of tragedy, though plenty of tragedies continue over a time period. It is in the long-term that poetry could have a more important role to play for it is poetry and art in general that can be tied to memory and become the artifice for the rendering of memory. While art has a role in the direct aftermath of tragedy, it is in trauma where art dwells.

In many ways, we can heal tragedy: bandages, surgery, whatever it takes– there may be some way of moving beyond an event. Even emotional tragedies, where the body is uninjured, allow for recovery: things return to normal, etc. But in trauma, there is no "normal." It is the mind which cannot recover from tragedy, even if a person has attempted to move beyond consciously. Here, poetry has the ability to allow someone to work through the experience, even as they relive it, without having to give an audience the direct marker of that event.

The abyss hides in trauma. Consider the number of suicides by those who have witnessed tragedy. From soldiers returning from wars (especially the last decade) to survivors of the Sago Mine Disaster, it is those reeling from the effects of tragedy who are unable to cope, to move on. Obviously poetry cannot help those who are severely emotionally damaged, but it seems poetry here might be a way of working through an event, no matter how painful. When we are faced with tragedy and forced to encounter the abyss, it is like trying to escape quicksand: struggling only sinks one in further and poetry ought to be the rope to pull the victim out.

Like absurdity, the fourth method for handling trauma must be simply ignoring it. We as Americans are getting used to gun-related violence, either the shooting of an individual or mass shootings. Yes, they are on television endlessly, but as Americans, we seem to cope best by ignoring and moving on. However, for individuals directly victimized by tragedy, the brain does not simply move on.

Strangely, though, it seems that through media, we experience a kind of play with trauma, in that we obsess over tragedy – we cannot look at it but cannot look away at the same time. We could discuss how much we are the media but ultimately, when events occur, television ratings go up. We may be disgusted by it but ultimately, we cannot escape. This is a function of collective trauma we have suffered in the television age and our ability to be sucked into the replay of tragedy is merely our access to that tragedy having exponentially exploded.

Poetry seemingly has a similar ability: to come back to tragedy and find ways of channeling possible trauma.¹ However, where television is entirely passive and the viewer is force-fed information, poetry is an active engagement with trauma. It is through this active engagement that those suffering with trauma can have agency in dealing with their issues. Whereas trauma forces the sufferer to lose agency, poetry allows for a space in which one can directly take on tragedy and trauma that comes from it.

John Berryman is an obvious example of a traumatized person writing poetry, though it is hard to say if there was any intent. The suicide of Berryman’s father no doubt casts a long shadow onto Berryman’s life and creative output. In The Dream Songs, Berryman revisits the death of his father on several occasions, including in Song 145:

                                              he only, very early in the morning,  

                                              rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window 

                                              and did what was needed.

Berryman shows the hallmark of trauma here, an inability escape the event. Even as he offers his father forgiveness in the lines that follow, Berryman’s life is so warped by the tragedy in Florida that his poems must spend a portion of their time wrapped up in the event and its meaning to his life.

This is not an admonishment of Berryman– far from it. Obviously suicide is one of life’s most traumatic events and the death of one’s parent by their own hand even worse to the child affected by it. Berryman is not complaining or attempting to take advantage of this traumatic event by any means. He is merely attempting to deal with through the artifice which he, by the 1960s, had placed himself within.

Berryman’s work up to Dream Songs generally did not deal with his father’s suicide or, for that matter, personal events. Coming from the New Critical mold, Berryman generally avoided personal discussion and, even when he was later lumped in with the “confessional” poets around him, was disgusted by it. It is, however, safe to assume that Berryman was dealing with his own trauma in the work he did in the last decade of his life before his own suicide.

It is hard to say if Berryman’s central trauma led him to write poetry but it is difficult not to see a connection. Between poetry and his vices, it seems Berryman was somewhere between burying his traumas and attempting to justify them, again, not outside the realm of normal response. Berryman’s road to poetry seems to have been fairly normal, having read the works of Yeats as a teen and then coming to the writing of poetry in college under Mark Van Doren at Columbia. Perhaps the arts really do attract with the greatest inner turmoil.

Poetry can be a tool for those dealing with trauma in the aftermath of tragedy but it also attracts those traumatized by what it can reveal without revealing directly the nature of tragedy. In abstraction one can mask, cut and cover, trauma because it is abstraction which allows for one to maintain a barrier between themselves and event. Poetry, through its use of our most basic system of communication gives us the ability to deal the events which are most agitating to our psyches.

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1 Again, this is not exclusive to poetry. Indeed, people use painting quite often or music to deal with trauma but expression through poetry is perhaps the more common trope.