(A Lack of ) Singing in the Reines

Looks like I'm the first one here, so I'll start the conversation on Mercury.  I'm just going to be upfront and say that I was not a fan of this book (granted, I'm new to Reines and I have an incredibly low tolerance for affectation, so...).  I'm interested in what other people's thoughts are about it, as I am actually finding myself at a little bit of a loss of things to say.  This book is pretty blunt; Reines says things straight out here.  It's interesting to me that she so often evokes poetry itself - the art or non-art of it.  Over and over, these poems call attention to themselves as being poems.  Through the conversational style broken up into line breaks instead of the sentences they more sonically evoke.  Through the constant talk about poetry and writing.  Through the "multi-media" aspect.  Part of me finds this somewhat brave, as I am nervous to write about poetry in fear that someone will point to me and ask what right I have to speak of poetry at all.  So kudos to Ariana Reines, I guess.

I think this book demands to be talked about by separating each part.  So I will just add a few brief comments for each section:

1.  Leaves:  If this book is in some ways a construction-deconstruction of poetry and the poetry book, then Leaves is definitely the section where Reines shows us a typical poetry book before she tears it down.  Titles, reasonable poem sizes, standard line and stanza breaks.  I think there's something to be said for the fact that Reines knows how to put a poem together.  That being said, I think there's a real dearth of interesting imagery and language here, which is too bad.  Question for all of you:  Is this deliberate?  Is she fucking with our notion of what good poetry is supposed to be?

2.  Save the World:  I can't seem to get through one of these blog posts without telling a story, so here we go.  After my little brother and I anxiously awaited the big-screen adaptation of a graphic novel we both loved, Watchmen, we saw the movie on opening day.  It's as terrible as everyone says it is.  Afterwards, I went home and wrote a short poem about my hatred for the movie and the audience we saw it with.  This poem dropped the f-bomb; it got indignant on the behalf of women everywhere.  So imagine my surprise to see that Reines has done the exact same thing here.  I wanted to like this section, as I love when strong writers address pop culture in complex and artful ways, but because Reines had nothing to add to the general discussion of this movie, I had a hard time getting into it.  I realize that's personal taste and not actual criticism.  Sorry; this whole part made me kind of mad.  Probably because I had done the exact same thing when I was a dorky undergrad who didn't know any better. 

3.  When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died:  More questions for you guys.  Is Reines actually trying to shock us here?  Why?  Is it working?  (Note: I don't think it's shocking nor do I think it's subversive, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.)  Or does she know it's not shocking to contemporary audiences and is trying to subvert our expectations of shock value as well?  Is just throwing around the word "cock" a lot make something shocking, or does it actually take all the power out of that word?  Is that the point?  Oh man, I'm talking in circles, here...

4.  Mercury:  Probably the best sense of poetry and image in this series, but I mostly skimmed through it.  This book suffers from being too long, I think, and by the time I got here and knew I had to finish this thing so I could blog about it, I no longer cared to pay much attention to it.

5.  0:  This is probably my favorite section in the book, and I wish it could have been its own self-contained book.  I really admire the way Reines takes a speaker, the speaker's mother, and the speaker's daughter (all of whom are constructions and not actual people, I'd argue, despite the pictures that are clearly of Reines herself) and smashes them together.  There seems to be one primary speaking voice, and yet in that voice, all these generations seem to exist at once, speaking to - or more likely, through - each other.  I'm not totally sure what to make of this section (I might have to reread it a few more times), but I think there's some cool stuff happening about what it means for unhappy women to bring unhappy daughters into the world and the way you have to both cut yourself off from the future and yet cling to it, too.  I think this is directly linked to how Reines feels about poetry and her relationship to it - that her poems are the daughters she doesn't want but which she tries to love.  And that maybe she fails to love the right way.  Again, I wish this had been it's own thing, as I think it needed some space to breathe outside of this large book. 

Anyway, those are my non-academic thoughts on Mercury.  I apologize for the scattered way this is written.  It's the end of the semester and my brain is absolutely fried.

Juan Gelman and Roberto Bolaño: Against Dictadurar

I am trying not to write a “love letter” to Juan Gelman and instead to address the historical and literary value in his work as well as how it breaks form and how language breaks as this is the official theme of this unit in the syllabus.

As someone who was born outside of the U.S. in a region of Mexico still lacking such basic infrastructure as plumbing (I grew up using latrines for example) and whose inhabitants have further been displaced by the signing of NAFTA (the 1994 free-trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and that led to the armed-uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas), it is not easy for me to convey the monstrous inequalities that have led writers like Gelman and Bolaño to struggle and support and sometimes even participate in many of the revolutionary and also democratic movements of Latin America. The people in this region that I grew-up in were primarily corn farmers who after the signing of NAFTA could not grow a crop that could compete with the vast subsidies of U.S. grown-corn, in many parts of Mexico the local corn is more expansive than the U.S.-imported corn due to the lack of trade tariffs and as a result many of these people have been displaced to the U.S. including myself, in essence we are economic-refugees. This is the world that I come from, that Gelman and Bolaño too come from. Gelman and Bolaño were political refugees, uprooted from Argentina and Chile respectively because of the U.S.-backed military-dictatorships that overthrew those democratically-elected governments.

In fact the history of U.S.-Latin American relations is deeply troubling, a repetitive story of direct support or participation in interventions and coups throughout the continent, the most recent for example: the overthrow of Haiti’s Aristide and the failed attempts to overthrow the populists and left-leaning presidents of Venzuela—Hugo Chavez—and Evo Morales of Bolivia during the Bush presidency. During the Obama presidency so far the U.S. gave support to the coup that successfully overthrow Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in 2009.

I bring up this history only because it is crucial to understanding both Gelman and Bolaño. how else can we interpret Gelman’s involvement with the Montoneros—an urban guerrilla movement that sought to overthrow the dictatorship—or Bolaños exile in Mexico and his relationship to Chile and the coup as it is retold in “dancecard”? Ironically, despite this troubling history, the U.S. remains a place that is intimately connected with literary movements of Latin America. In my opinion, for example there is no bigger figure in Latin American poetry than that of Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman’s most prodigious son. Spanish, of course, is one of the great international languages, with more than 500 million speakers in the world. But today, with almost 40 million speakers, the United States not only counts Spanish as by far the second most spoken language, it also has the second-largest Spanish speaking population in the world. For us writing in English, what might the sensibility held in Gelman and Bolaño yield in our poetry, or, as some might say: the poetry of the Americas?

I am having a hard time bringing myself to speak of Gelman’s poetry. And precisely because I do not have the beautiful words by which to make justice to it I will quote from Cortazar which you read in the packet: “He is a man whose family has been severed from him [both his son and daughter-in-law were tortured and disappeared; his granddaughter given away to a military family; he has lived in exile in Mexico City ever since and has never gone back to Argentina; similar to Bolaño]yet nobody has been able to kill in Juan the will to subvert the sum of his horror into an affirmative counter strike, a creator of new life. Perhaps the most admirable element of his poetry is the unthinkable tenderness he shows where paroxysm of rejection and denouncement would be justified, or his calling upon so many shadows for one voice to lull and comfort, a permanent caress of words on unknown tombs.”

And indeed I think the power in the poetry of Gelman is its providing of a counterstrike that is greater than the sorrow that caused it, it one deeply grounded in love and tenderness and which recognizes everything that existed (think of the testimony of the “tree” that is turned into a table in the poem by the same title and that is forced to be participant in the tortures or of the images of flight and flying; “swallows,” flying deaths, nightingales, which are attempts to reclaim the metaphor and symbols of flight from the “death-flights” that were occurring throughout the country—people being dropped/disappeared from helicopters in the middle of the ocean) and that is against the mad logic of violence, of political repression.

His poetry is one that employs the word as a material that explores the truths of the Latin American reality (such as his creation of the word “dictadurar” which means both dictatorship and to endure) and which attempts to rescue and preserve that reality as if to prevent it from falling into oblivion, and that can engage and politicize.

 The socio-political context in which Gelman begins his literary career is in the context of the presence of American imperialist interests and interventions in Latin America. And more importantly, of the nascent realization—through the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960’s—that imperialist domination was not necessarily everlasting; that the apparent inexpugnability of the powerful was not without its crevices, and that an entire peoples’ creative will could overthrow those cold architects of destruction. His poetry is thus one that successfully marries the socio-political consciousness of the author to the creative and aesthetic consciousness of the language. His poetry is never one that sought to translate manifestos or political discourses into a “poetic language” or form but rather one that simply asked of poetry to speak of that which is political, the political not simply as thematic but as something that unfolds or takes place within the creative geography of a poem.

And since this a post on form and how language breaks form I think I should address what all of you can tell by now is the defining characteristic of Gelman’s poetry: the rhetorical question and the slash “/”. The question, for me, has the same value as that of an affirmation that brings into question the force behind what the verse has or is revealing. The question has both a poetic effect but also a political one, as if to ask:

Can poetry be created even in the midst or after particular horrors?

The “/” on the other hand—I think; IDK really except that i stole it—has a rhythmic connotation.  It also fractures the verse however the poet seems fit or for whatever desired effect.   It is also I think as if the poet is saying there is not much to say about this or that horrow but rather there are many possibilities to say that there is not much to say about the horrors. Does that make sense? What do you make of the rhetorical question and the slash? (Please don’t embarrass me, I know I stole all my poetry from Gelman).

Finally how do you relate Bolaño’s dancecard which although it is a short story, it is very much autobiographical and his Lalo Cura story [Lalo Cura= La Locura which in Spanish means “The Madness”] to Gelman’s poetry and the history of Latin America? For the “prefiguration of lalo cura” runs in a similar vein as Gelman’s poetry in that it unmasks the truths of the Latin American condition without falling into the trap of being enamored with revolutionary struggles that many of the writers of “the Boom” generation were.

I know I barely touched on the aspects of translation but here are some poems as read by Gelman, in case you are interested, in listening and speaking to this aspect of the work:

"Cherries/ Cerezas:"

"On Poetry/ Sobre la Poesia:"

"I read myself": On the Awesome Mediumicity of Hannah Weiner

Not too long ago, I woke up with a sentence in my head:

“Where is Art Going and Where has it Been?”

As a very conventionally educated poet and literary type, I had been ‘raised up’ to believe that artistic creation started and ended with the artist. What was in the classical period referred to as ‘the Muse’ was transformed in the Renaissance to ‘Genius’, the special property of an extraspecial individual. The invididual Genius owned his Genius. He was a master; he created masterpieces; he was surely not visited by lady spectres who planted ideas in itself. Genius was a sort of tautological current; it was God-given but thereafter was the personal property of the Genius.

Well, ok. But somewhere in my 20s I realized that this personal-property-genius model was actually a way to set up an artistic 1% and conserve resources there. That is, if we allow that only individuals of Genius possess Genius, and there is naturally a limited amount of Genius in the world, and all the awards, lucky breaks, publictions, etc are awarded by merit, then they should go to those Geniuses, and too bad for the rest of us. Genius and native ‘Merit’ began to seem like codewords to me, or like a forcefield—if you subscribed to them, those notions blocked you from seeing the fact that the literary and art worlds are like any other insitutions, based on certain people holding on to certain powers while hiding behind such supposedly great watchwords as ‘Tradition’, ‘Standards’, ‘Genius’. Words like ‘Genius’, which themselves suggested private ownership of the indelible property of Art, actually were a way to controll who controlled Art’s resources.

That’s why it’s been very important to me to discover artists like Hannah Weiner. I think Hannah Weiner was amazingly great in all respects. I love her voice (both on the page, in video, and in audio). I love her bonkers early work with its corny puns and its loopy generosity. In the early performance pieces she made herself a host for Art—she would host both the Coast Guard and the down town arty types to perform her Code Poems, or she would invite the public to her place of business (designing underwear) or sell hotdogs as an edible pun on her name. She would also host forms and genres and media—codes, flags, horns, lights, invitation cards, underwear, a vaccuum, police tape, etc. At such events, her own person became a site where all these different groups and media made contact and relayed energies and transformed each other—dots and bars became light, words became hotdogs, concept became performance, charisma (her own) became conviviality (of the group). And she never took these events too seriously, even though what she hosted was the most vital Art process of all-- she channeled the eternal force of Art into material and into human temporality, made Art arrive and perform. Art comes to a human address.

After she became ‘clairvoyant’, these processes and vectors intensified and contracted. Unexpectedly, she saw words everywhere—on bodies, lampchains, walls, etc. What’s interesting to me about this is that the first part of her career, as a medium for media and as a host for Art, served as a kind of training to be able to cope with becoming a medium in the spiritual sense. Hannah Weiner is a hero to me because she developed the technology for her new radical occult mediumicity. As she says in 'Mostly about the Sentence",

I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words ( I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals, or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored, or couldn’t cope with in the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, underlined capitals) so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS the words that appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines (italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own words in regular upper and lower case.

Thus while the amount of time and labor she spent with her Spirit Teachers must have been a lonely and exhausting and exacting endeavor, she remarkably transferred their presence into a variety of other media—the Clairvoyant Journals and other texts, small books and letters and advertisements and pamphlets, as well as tape recordings and live and recorded performances and interview. In other words, while the experience of mediumship may have been radically isolating in its pragmatic demands, it was also an amplification of the process of ‘hosting’ and mediumicity she developed in her early practice. When the spirit teachers (sonically) appeared, Hannah Weiner was gloriously up to the challenge.

One matter of intense interest to me is the specific technology of her mediumicity, the synesthesia (and anasthesia?) of moving from one medium to another, in both her pre-Clairvoyant and post-clairvoyant work. I’d like to ask you, what is it like to ‘meet’ Hannah Weiner in each of these medium? What was the difference between ‘reading’ the Clairvoyant Journal excerpts, listening to the tape, and watching the video? Why do you think Hannah Weiner was continually reiterating the specific technology of her mediumicity at the beginning of her performances and texts (i.e. everything is prefaced with some version of her ‘I see words’ speech )? What was her interest in making this process of mediumicity so apparent to others—even going so far as to refer to the ‘words’ as ‘voices’ and translate them from a lexical to an audial version?

Finally, to return to my early theme of Genius: I suppose we could describe Hannah Weiner as a ‘Genius’ if we wanted to stuff her back into the niches our literary training make available to us but it’s much more exciting for me to do the opposite, to redefine my understanding of Art and Writing using Hannah Weiner as a starting point, to see Art as a series of incomplete or oversaturated transmissions that moves from media to media, that differs and sometimes coincides with itself, that writes its name on my body, world and forehead and rips me out into the streets to see my friends. This insight also allows me to see all my favorite artists (Claude Cahun, Andy Warhol, Joey Arias, Antonin Artaud, Jack Smith, Blatny, Erocelik, Blake, Ito, Kim Hyesoon, you guys) as spectres of radiant and radical conveyance:

Well, what do you think?

---

Asylum Granted

I went looking for the madness.

I don’t know if I found it.

Did you?

The backdrop of Ivan Blatny’s life (as discussed in class and in the introduction of The Drug of Art ) prompted the search. It felt like a murder mystery, looking for clues, trying to find its seeds. I wondered what it would have been like to read the poems without knowing he spent time in an asylum, but guess that would be impossible to do. I also wondered if my preference for Bixley Remedial School came down to the timeline. I want to spend this whole post talking about insanity. I’ll try to resist. Quite honestly, I’m not too sure it exists, because so much of what is called sane/insane is just a representation of our acceptance of a power/belief structure.

Institutions:

Blatny was a clearly prolific writer, but there is a 32-year gap between the poems presented in The Art of Drug. There could be many reasons for this gap; an editorial decision; Blatny didn’t write during this time; or anything he wrote has been erased by an institution. It doesn’t much matter if it was the Czech or English institution, both labeled him dead.

It seems that his run-in with the communist structure and subsequent interactions with a mental health structure, affected the survival, creation and reception of his work. His interactions with a political regime literally shaped the tone and character of his poetry, and also shapes the way the reader interacts with the work.

So, for an author whose life and art was so politicized, I was actually surprised to find little overt political content in the poems. In the earlier poems, I get a sense of social upheaval and war, but the war felt like the background noise for the speaker: as the radio broadcast the farm report,/the newspaper carried news of war,/of war to come, and yet everything and everyone was fast asleep (57). What is outside is like a condition of being, it is like sleep, and it is something that needs to be navigated. This passage comes from The Game, which is a long poem that is a mix between pages of prose block and the more traditional poetic page. The prose section of the poem is the Passerby dreaming of trials, rules, a doctor, a Resistance and of poetry.

Boundaries and Other Containment:

The Game is a poem that typifies recurring images/ideas of boundaries and containment that I saw throughout the collection. I felt that the speakers in Blatny’s poems are solidly contained. The containment is sensory, physical, relational and structural. But the speaker perceptions cannot be contained, and the poems represent a blurring of boundaries and distinctions between realties. (By “reality” we mean, the reality of his dream.) (59).

The dream within The Game, shows the Passerby on trial, and the people who represent the structures seem confused about the rules and labels they have aligned themselves to: The inspectors sought to establish who was a member of the Resistance and who was not. Still, he had no idea which signs meant yes, and which meant no (59). The inspector tells the Passerby he and his mother that they were going to chop off a leg from each of them (59), for whatever crime, and they would replace his leg with some type of mechanical apparatus. Towards the end of the poem the speaker tells us: he gritted his teeth and brought his leg down sharply on the lower block./He made up his mind to play it out to the end…/as the Passerby sat down at the table/and heard/the buzzing of several milky ways..(67).

Here we see confusion between the boundaries of wake/sleep, participation/observation and identities. Is the buzzing the sound of the saw in his dream, or is the sound of wasps as he wakes? When the speaker is hearing the buzzing the prose block has ended, giving the reader the impression that the dream is over and this is reality; a reality that the speaker will: play out to the end. As a dreamer, the speaker is both participant and observer; he is the inspector, the doctor and the victim/patient. And although the speaker is going to play out this game, there is no real sense what the game is. Is the game, the game of politics, of conformity, of poetry, etc.: the game is never spoken of: everything must be played out within the games framework, and within this framework the doctor had every right to be insulted…(63).

Wow, I just realized I got lost in The Game, which is ironic, because it was the one poem I did want to talk about. I found the prose section so dense; I couldn’t force myself through, and skipped it on the first read. But it really illustrates how Blatny works away the edges of the real.

While I see The Game mostly playing with structural boundaries and norms, I see other poems playing with the boundaries of the sensory. This Night paints a sensory world, in which the speaker’s senses exist beyond their prescribed powers. Light and time can be heard and what is seen of time can be touched. ...Eight-thirty struck/In the lampshade I heard…/I turned out the light And outside it was gently blowing…/I reached for the handle, what can be seen in an instant/All days All nights Right at this moment/Gurgling from the water mains (13). His word choice, line breaks and repetition in this poem and others are techniques Blatny uses to subvert the distinctions between internal and external existence.

But are these the signs of a mind that has the seeds of mental illness showing, or are they simply an expression of experience, an aesthetic? And what about his experience or aesthetic couldn’t be contained within the “normal” functioning of a society?

Flatness:

And I guess I’m going to use that question as a rough transition to his later works, which are the works directly attributed to his so-called confinement. There are many things that struck me about the poems written in England. The length is much different, tending to be very short, efficient use of the page. He also shifts back and forth between different languages. I could very well be mistaken on this one, but I think he flips between German, English and Czech. I really enjoyed the language shifts. It was like an erasure of parts of the poem, like closing the door to certain members of his audience.

But beyond the switching of languages, the quality that most struck me in his later poems was the evenness of tone. It was like every word, every image all carried the same weight. The poems became flat—not blurred, just flat. An untitled poem on page 120 is one of my favorite examples of this evenness:

Never Light the job

Nottingham is the North of England

potato blight killed there all the bulbs

I have no rules

I’m still undecided about everything

I’m still in

There is a church in America

and when you get married

the priest gets more voices

to get to bed in the evening

it is not my birth-day

to expect the triumph of God in the morning

The potato blight, the church in America, being undecided about everything and not expecting the triumph of God in the morning, are all joined together in the same manner of importance and tone. Nothing seems to be beyond the internal logic of the speaker’s voice. I’m not sure I can describe it any better than this but I’m wondering if any of you experienced this same sensation?

I could go on and on about what I think of this flatness, but it would probably devolve into how Blatny’s poems illustrate a Sociological Theory I love, so I will spare you all that, and leave you with some possible questions to discuss, or go whichever directions interests you. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Possible Questions:

Ø Am I wrong about the political images and themes in The Drug of Art? Were you struck by political messages within the poems? Is art always potentially political and subversive?

Ø How did the issues of boundaries strike you? What are some ways that you see Blatny establish and take away boundaries?

Ø What did you make of his use of language? How does it relate to the notion of containment?

history and theatre

an equation for black people on stage
Structurally I really liked and hated how the critical texts precede the play in the reading packet we are reading.
The structure inevitably positions the text in the same way as the way blackness and whiteness is portrayed that Susan Lori Park supposedly dislikes; susan writes how blackness, its superfluous fluidity is always positioned in relative position to the white presence, which is a solid grounded position, in theatre that has both white and black. likewise, the critical text with its solidity/certainty inevitably positions the creative text in fluid relative/reactive position, which is also vulnerable to the scrutiny of academicians-- the super pc, the believer of literal oppresser and oppressed binary--gaze.
This shows the operatie system of theatre of academic publishing and a marginalized writers: the overflowing meaning the nonstandard body is put under the easily comprehendable solid theory and names.
But at the same time, susan revels in this theatre: that's why the black character's name that susan lori parks is giving are attached to stereotypical food(black man w watermelon; black woman with fried drumstick). she plays with mask that obviously cannot contain the superfluous body. it is just like when tracie morris screams and sings the textbooklike text that describes slaery; the music is manifestation of superfluidity, the textbook-y language are the names, mask.

Of Mimicry and Man
When I say mask that cannot contain the superfluidity, it is the opposite of the mimicry/camouflage in homi bhabha's text in terms of its original purpose. The maks Susan plays with is purposfully limited to flaunt superfluidity behind it; camouflage is intended to hide the superfluidity to fit into standardized world. yet ironically they function similarly.  they both reveals constructed, thus, not-absolute nature of the mainstream/stanadard/whiteness through their own-- exaggeratedly limiting/too defined mask&trying to blend in but unsuccessful mimicry-- constructedness/performativeness

posession
in this zero-sum(in terms of interiority and authenticity) equation "the definition of posession cancels itself out. the relationship between possessor and possessed" is even further eradicated, the economic implication in the word possess. Black and white relations are always in midst of economic transaction; slavery, welfare queen, a boy with a ratty hoodie is suspicious because of this implication, and economy is inevitably in the center of theatre of history.



element of style
This title reminds me of the grammar book written by dr. white.
This section of the Susan's writing does mimick the absolute tones of instruction yet the excess, the black speech tone seeps into the instructions of how elements should be arranged to re-member the scattered, de-constructed, no longer absolutely-binary elements and masks into a new constellation, a new universe, another Ameria


America Play
That is why this is America Play, not American Play. It is creating another America, another history. There are doubling of everything, making everything into the construction and super-fluid darkmatter, the hole. The hole of History. The hole=theatre. There is no solidity. There never was. There is no ground. There is no America with capital A.

 (I will add more about the play itself later; but feel free to fill it in? :) )

Obscenity, Duality, and Style

Caveat: If the second half of this post seems a little incoherent, it's because I wrote it in unbridled anger. I had a nice, finished entry and as soon as I hit "Publish Post," Blogger immediately ate more than half of what I'd written. So I took a half hour to stomp around the house and throw things before coming back to finish it. So the tone may shift wildly. I apologize in advance.

Let me start by admitting that I didn't find Ronaldo Wilson's Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man to be that obscene. It's possible that I'm desensitized to talk of sex and blow jobs and dicks because of my romance reading habits or because of all the young male authors I read back in high school; I'm guessing a lot of you have had the same experience. I don't think it's the obscenity that is "shocking" in this book, just as I don't think it's the book's driving force, either. I think it's the super-simple style of the Narrative that leads people into feeling as if they just read something profoundly dirty or grotesque (also, I think it's a matter of race being brought into the mix of the sex and shit that gets to readers). We've read a lot of work with some kind of "artifice" lately - the quotations of Notley, the idea of roles in The Maids, etc. So the thing that interested me about Wilson's book was its lack of artifice, the way it simply lives in basics.

When I talk about "basics," I mean a handful of things. There's the actual writing style, which is incredibly simple. You don't have to run to the dictionary reading this book. The simplicity is what gives it such a poetic feel, particularly in its most beautiful passages - such as that last paragraph on page 25. There's power in the elemental aspects of good writing, particularly in the power of the plain nouns. If you look at Wilson's writing, you'll find it contains very few adjectives. And often the adjectives are nouns, too ("sand clouds," for example).

One of the other things I refer to when I say "basics" is the use of color in this book. You've got two colors right in the title. I was absolutely bowled over by the sheer colorfulness of this book, especially when considering that it's largely the same colors coming up again and again (white, brown, black, grey, green). I'm still trying to figure out the exact significance of the colors besides the fact that they build the world in really cool ways. It's largely a factor of what is meant by using color words. To call the man "white," to call the boy "brown" - these are systems of labeling, and Wilson takes that labeling and begins to apply it to all sorts of things in the world of this book. In some ways, it takes away the power of labeling colors, but it also highlights the fact that we and the characters live in a world defined by color. Color is everywhere and nowhere at the same time in this book, much like race somehow manages to feel both integral and secondary to this narrative.

Finally, one of the things that really strikes me about the deceptively simple style of this book lies in the duality Wilson establishes throughout. Everything has a kind of back and forth to it. Dichotomies here become incredibly important. Old and young. Black and white. The city of the boy's present and the open field of his past. The land and the water. It's fascinating how these dichotomies are established in ways that aren't necessarily attached to value systems. There's not really good and bad in this book. Instead, it's the fact that the narrative is capable of polarizations in a single plane of existence. Wilson establishes a kind of shuttered world within the narrative, to the point where you feel trapped in with the readers, and yet this shuttered world is full of opposites everywhere. Much like the colors, these dualities become easily forgettable while also sticking out like a sore thumb.

This is where Bataille comes in, I think. I'll admit to struggling with the Bataille a bit (it's nice out and a couple of ducks got into a fight in front of me while I was reading it!), but it seems largely concerned with the falseness of utility, and how our obsession with utility is problematic. It just made me think about the one type of dualism I barely noticed in Wilson's work: that of class. Wilson establishes a world of dichotomies and yet there's not a great sense of socioeconomic class. There is an early section in which the brown boy mentions how hard his mother had to work and how relieved he was to realize he wouldn't have to do the same. And obviously there's mention of some wealth in the petsitting section. But mostly this book lives in what Bataille seems to find particularly reprehensible: the world of the bourgeoisie. Isn't the white man's world basically a model of everything bourgeois? It's such a world of middleness, of accumulation without real meaning. Think about how plain this world is. The book seems more alive when the white man's not around, I think. The bourgeois has this kind of pulverizing thing going on where it obliterates utility because of it's own obsession with utility. Is the white man's world one in which middleness reigns? How does this differ from the boy's past? I hope someone can help me understand the ways the Bataille article connects to Wilson's book (outside all the talk of excrement, at least), as I had a bit of trouble with it.

Finally, we absoutely cannot talk about the Narrative without talking about the body. This is a book where the body suffocates everything. It's a book largely dealing in bodily fluids: the sex and shit of the brown boy's world. What's interesting here is how bodily functions differ in this narrative when considered in the context of time. This seems related to how bodies are controlled throughout the book. The boy's past is marked by the body's loss of control. The father losing control of his bowels, the way the baby keeps throwing up all over itself - these things hold a kind of horror for the boy. And then there's the material weight of the mother's dead body. The body as its presented in the past is all about the way it cannot be controlled. Then, in the present (or future, we might call it), the body is marked by sex. It exchanges one bodily fluid for another, but this one seems almost easier to control. The sexual body is all over this book in the context of the boy's current existence. Penisis and blow jobs and the way the brown boy notices other men's bodies all the time. And yet it all seems much more controlled than the loss of bodily function presented in the dreams/memories of the past. Isn't it a mark of adulthood that we can (technically, or at least so we think) control who we fuck?

I'm interested in what you guys all have to say. How do you see the body in this book? What about the dualities or use of color? And what do you make of the ending, which is so beautifully written and yet which felt like a bit of a cop-out to me in the way everything becomes literally clear at the end. It made the issues of race in the Narrative seem a little too well-dealt with by the end in the way color becomes obliterated inside that glass. What did you guys think?

Note: I hope I wasn't the only one to get the Sleepers reference in that section with Kevin Bacon and Brad Pitt (who were both in the film, which was made in 1996). Wilson's bringing up of that movie is really interesting to me because of the way the film deals so harshly with not just sex and death but with the horrifying divide between being a boy and being a man. It's a really problematic movie, from what I remember. Wilson's use of it brought back my own memories of having watched the movie on cable when I was in middle school one afternoon when my parents weren't around. At an age where I could barely comprehend my own body, I was being confronted with what happens to other people's bodies (rape, murder, etc). I still remember Kevin Bacon's leering face when I think of that movie. I haven't watched it since, and it's probably more innocuous than I remember. But I don't plan to ever see it again. Anyone else in this boat? Or am I a special, pop-culture-warped snowflake?

Notley's The Descent of Alette

Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette

*Because the poem is so long, I’ve summarized and highlighted passages I think are important—there’s so very much going on in this book that I’ll trust all of you to do more close reading and interpretation than I do here. Hopefully my post will at least start everybody off. I'm so sorry for the length of this!

Book I

Notley’s epic poem—compared on the back cover to Dante’s Inferno, although it is essentially a subversion of so many aspects of the traditional epic—begins on the subway, on which a “world of souls” rides endlessly below ground, never surfacing, forced beneath the earth by a Tyrant who will let you off only if you sell your soul to him. In this nightmare world, Alette encounters wounded and tortured souls, all in some way enslaved by the Tyrant and his mind: shattered, drug-addled soldiers who killed for him, women and children on fire (clear references to the Vietnam War), strippers (suggestive of male ownership of women’s bodies), lunatics, businessmen and women, etc. There are cars of garbage and of blood, of disembodied voices crying for help, of ghostly office-workers. Not too far into the poem, it becomes clear that the Tyrant is a kind of metaphysical being, embodied in various avatars throughout history but never completely reducible to them: he is capitalist, Pope, Caesar, bureaucrat (6), even (at times) revolutionaries with guns who want to change things (implying the exchange of one form of the Tyrant for another) (39); he owns form (25), (spiritual) enlightenment, and light itself (37). He is Reason as well, wresting order out of chaos (20). He’s also a mild-mannered, appealing guy. His maleness could be read either as essentialist or as conditional, I think. The feminine principal of the poem is chthonic, creative, timeless, and the “ground of being” so to speak, and the Tyrant’s maleness is order-driven, authoritarian, hierarchical, rational, power-obsessed, and removed from the creative life-force of the earth itself. These qualities could be said to inhere in every person regardless of sex, and later on in the poem, Alette discovers that everyone has a piece of the Tyrant inside (81). More on this later. Nevertheless, beneath the Tyrant’s rule, true life itself is forced underground and the psyche is stunted, allowed not to unfurl of its own accord but borne against its will, mechanistically, back and forth along a pre-established pattern, without meaning, in the darkness of oppression / repression.

And yet there seems to be hope, if only a tentative kind at first. A woman in one car recalls a dream in which she becomes a snake and strikes at the Tyrant, albeit unsuccessfully. (The snake will return again and again throughout the poem as a symbol of chthonic, feminine / creative resistance to the Tyrant’s rule—a kind of earth mother.) Another woman—a painter—is trying to invent a form that the Tyrant doesn’t own. There is even a car made of living flesh in which Alette has an intimation that there is “someone else” in all of us who escapes the Tyrant’s rule. Alette encounters an owl—symbol of dark wisdom—in one car, who tells her that her duty is to kill the Tyrant, and when she does, she must remember that she is an animal and do it cleanly. (The animal ‘way’ of killing is significant to me: animals kill not out of malice but out of necessity, in harmony with natural impulses.) Interestingly, Alette feels the owl to be the spirit of her dead father, adding an element of male resistance to the Tyrant in an otherwise female-dominated paradigm. Alette later witnesses a death, and a counsel of spirit-beings that urge the dead man’s spirit not to rise but to descend, because to rise would be to enter the Tyrant’s world: “We can only go” “down” “farther down—“ / “Down” “is now the only way” “to rise” (26). Descendence rather than ascendence / transcendence, darkness rather than light, the depths of the earth and of the psyche rather than the heights of heaven / reason, is what Notely’s epic ultimately privileges as a path towards reclaiming all that has been lost to the Tyrant. In this spirit, Alette boards a black train at the end of Part I, headed downwards towards “true night”, “endless darkness”, and the “unknown.”

Book II

Beneath the subway’s subconscious world lies a universe of the unconscious, the “middle psyche” as the poem refers to it (47)—caverns within caverns, dreams within dreams. Before beginning her journey through the caves, Alette hears an old man’s voice singing of the snake / earth mother that once carried people through their lives before the Tyrant’s train took its place. She has numerous mystical experiences in the caves (some of which I find very difficult to interpret), and seems to draw closer and closer to the evasive earth mother / primal life-force. Of all the experiences, one of the most striking is the one in which Alette meets a mermaid with a hairy chest (suggestive of a primordial, hermaphroditic union of male and female) who tells her that she is a “forgotten possibility” and that Alette’s people “have / divided” “themselves in two:” “have made” “domination” “[their] principal”. She tells Alette, “You must begin again,” “create again” / “each moment” (64). For me, the mermaid signifies the primordial, creative union of the sexes in harmony, and the possibility of *creating* a path and a life beyond the Tyrant’s life-defeating dominion that exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in each person. The hermaphrodite motif shows up again and again through Part II (in the god/woman whose genitals are “blank” and who shapes “a hairless,” “sexless figure” out of clay [66], in the “divine neuter” mask [75], etc.) Although other parts of Part II might be read as essentializing masculinity and femininity, the hermaphrodite motif, for me, implies a basic union of masculine and feminine energies in each person that has been forgotten under the Tyrant’s rule, thus saving the poem from a simplistic kind of essentialism. The ending sections of Part II are significant dramatic movements: Alette puts on a cellophane half-mask and declares to a group of men and women that the old structures must be torn down and beds built for all the living. The group draws cards to decide who will kill the Tyrant, and Alette draws the Ace of Roses/Panthers (again, this pairing of symbols could be read as a union of feminine/masculine energies) and tells the group she will do it. She finds and steals a piece of the Tyrant’s heart in one of the last caves, and says: “its presence here” “meant, I knew” “that / something of him may be” “indigenous” “to any one of us” (81). (I will refrain from dwelling on the fact that I think it’s pretty impossible not to think of Blake’s Urizen, Ginsberg’s Moloch, as well as Voldemort’s Horcruxes here…) The primordial creative force inheres in every psyche, but so does the Tyrant’s death-drive. At last, Alette enters a cave and descends a stairwell that emerges—surprisingly—onto the earth again, and wades into a night river.

Book III

Alette swims across the river and enters a forest, eventually meeting with a headless woman—the true first woman / mother. Her headlessness perhaps represents the division of the body and mind that is perpetrated by the Tyrant’s energies: the first woman speaks of the ignorance of the holy men, the wise men, the poets, etc. as having caused her to suffer (90). She speaks of the beginning of the world, of how male and female were once one, but the male somehow lost the primal connection to the world of creation and became a thinker, a war-maker, a ruler, etc. (91). She can only “see” with her voice—a voice that emanates from deep within her being—but Alette helps her to reattach her head so that her voice can actually create reality once again (99). Alette and the first woman bid goodbye to each other and the owl reappears, and so begins Alette’s necessary self-transformation that will allow her to kill the Tyrant. Alette is first made to eat a mouse the owl has killed, and so realizes the unity of all creation, of death and life (104). She is then led to the black lake of death, beyond which is the “great darkness”—the dream-world before creation. Thrown into the lake by the owl, Alette is dismembered of her being so that she can be transformed into becoming, and in the great darkness she meets a light that isn’t a light, but her very self. This might be putting too much of my own spin on things, but I feel that this “true” self is not a fixed entity but the *process* of being—the endlessly self-creative self (to put it that way). A voice reminds her: “’It’s what you’ve / always” “suspected” “It’s nothing but” “what you’ve always known,” / “always been” “For you’ve always” “been being” (111). Alette reenters her body, delighting in her senses, and finds herself in the forest again, where the owl bequeaths a talon to her so that she can kill the Tyrant as an animal (once again, the dichotomy between natural killing and rationalized violence is highlighted). Alette must now find her way upwards to the Tyrant’s house.

Book IV

Alette and the Tyrant finally meet, and the Tyrant finally reveals that he is reality itself (though Alette doubts this), and has no need for the heart she has brought with her. He leads her through his house, past displays of various kinds showing various human societies, the subway, and his “government.” He also shows her masks of “principals,” “essences”—including vegetation, sexuality, religious leaders, and the first woman herself. It becomes clear the Tyrant is abstraction itself—he lays claim to and attempts to possess realities but cannot fully own them, although he thinks he does, in the same way that he owns museums, art galleries, and greenhouses. He thinks he owns Nature as well, but only as a scientist can, “From the outside” (128). Alette and the Tyrant travel to the subway, where the Tyrant reveals that the subway is actually his heart, and that its darkness scares him, but also empowers him (132). This is poignant to me: the Tyrant’s power comes from the very act of repression-- his darkness is transmuted to violence, to mental agility, etc. Later on, the Tyrant reveals that it is from this darkness that all inspiration, poetry, etc. comes from as well. (Do we buy this?) At last the pair emerges at a stop called “River Street”, which is a river of blood that flows off into separate rivulets throughout the subway. Alette reclaims a lost memory in this river—the memory of her brother who died in battle. This is also the only moment in the poem when we hear Alette speak her own name, and thus voice her feminine, individual identity against the Tyrant. Alette becomes an owl and flies over the river of blood, looking for a place where the Tyrant is vulnerable. She comes to a flesh grotto, where a strange bush grows: its three arms are vegetable, animal, and human, and in the human hand is a dead black rose (symbolizing, perhaps, male ownership of the female principal of life). Alette invokes the owl-spirit and pulls the bush out at the roots, and the Tyrant’s is mortally wounded. He pleads with her, says that she is killing herself, her own culture, her own soul. But all of these, Alette knows, are simply unreal constructions, dreams. “’Starting” / “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change” “In / dreams,” “in dreams, now,” “you will die” (144). The Tyrant is ultimately a dream solidified into reality, and with the Tyrant’s death Alette returns the world to the primordial openness of existence: “What we can have now,”…”is infinity” “in our lives”. (147). The Tyrant’s repressive “reality” is revealed as only a constructed reality, reified by the millions of souls unable to dream or create anything else. The sky is clear again, the light is new, and the people emerge from the subway determined to remake the world. All the lost and forgotten beings from the depths of being emerge from the depths of the earth, and with this the poem closes. Notely’s epic has come full-circle: to revitalize existence, Alette does not travel upwards to heaven, but downwards through the darkness of being to reclaim the lost power of creation that can re-imagine and re-create the world.

Some questions to consider (if you want to, of course):

What are we to make of the fact that Alette must use the power of the owl—who was formerly a man—in order to kill the Tyrant? Can this be read as a channeling of male violence against itself, or as reclaiming a sort of power that was / is always inherent in the female psyche?

Going off that, what do you all think of the essentialist aspects of this poem? As I’ve said, I definitely think there are moments of true essentialism, but also many moments that seem to undermine the male/female dichotomy. Which wins out for you, in the end?

Finally, the question of voice. Notely’s uses quotations to make sure that her text is experienced as a spoken voice, not simply a text, and the figure of the voice shows up over and over throughout the poem. Is voice synonymous with creation itself, a bringing into being of something that never was before? What other valences could there be to this?

Finally, the last question: the poem privileges descent into the depths of being over transcendence. Is the inherent, messy chaos of being the solution to tyrannical order imposed by the mind? What are the political implications of this? The psychic implications? The implications for sexual politics?