Filed under: lists, lyric, poetry, science | Tags: idea, order, parenthood, poem
Filed under: lyric, poetry, writings | Tags: derrida, essay, heidegger, monolingualism, paul celan, poetics
This is a paper/presentation I gave last week on Paul Celan:
Derrida concludes his essay “Monlingualism of the Other” by saying that Paul Celan,
while writing in the language of the other, and about the Holocaust, while inscribing Babel in the very body of each poem, expressly claimed, signed, and sealed the poetic monolingualism of his work just the same.
The “monolingualism” that Derrida presents involves the paradox that “we each only have one language, and that language is not ours.” This aphorism might help us understand Celan’s elusive, yet central poetics. As a poet, he seems to embark upon an impossible task: the writing of poetry after Auschwitz, and he writes within its ashes so as to go past it—towards a poetry which “rushes ahead” and which tries to see the figure “in [its] direction” (45). As he says in “The Meridian,” poetry should be en route. Whereas other Jewish poets of his time were recounting the catastrophe that had past in their poems, Celan refused an autobiographical dwelling, or a meditative, anamnetic “looking back.” “Imagine,” he says:
the eyeless without shape
lead you free through the throng,
you grow stronger and
stronger.
This motion of moving forward, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests in his essay, occurs at the site of the “pre-syntactic, pre-logical level, [at] a level also pre-disclosing: at the moment of pure touching, pure contact, grasping, squeezing—which is, perhaps, a way of giving right up to and including the hand that gives.” (41).
The u-topia topos that Celan refers to in “The Meridian” is not a place that we will eventually reach, but instead that in writing poetry, we reach towards. “By dint of attention to things and beings, we came close to a free, open space, and finally, close to utopia,” but never exactly there (52, my emphasis). The utopic place, it might even be surmised, might not even be a wholly desirable, if locatable site. As Celan notes in the draft of an unsent letter to Rene Char in 1962, “One can never pretend to comprehend completely –: that would be disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits – or comes to inhabit – the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something one breathes; that poetry breathes you in” (184). Celan is aware here that he is working within and from a language from which he was deprived. I would agree with Pierre Jorris when he says that this dynamic is not simple-minded. Rather it’s a complex double-movement of love for his mother tongue and “strife against her murderers who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue” (4). He works from the position of an almost aphastic transcription—where there isn’t a primary source vocabulary or original language—no points for absolute reference. For Celan there are what Derrida calls only target languages. However “these languages cannot manage to reach themselves because they no longer know where they are coming from, what they’re speaking from, and what the sense of their journey is” (61). The gesture of giving then, in Levinas’ terms, stems from the poet’s awareness of the German language as having being killed in a certain way, or at least utterly muted—as having reached an ultimately opposite topos—one obscured in death. “Half-death,” the poem “In Prague” begins:
Suckled on our life,
Lay ash-image-true around us
Filed under: lyric, photo, poetry, writings | Tags: imagine, lake effect, shitty mornings, snow
Filed under: art, lyric, poetry, writings | Tags: poem, susan howe, the midnight
Filed under: food, fucking, lyric, poetry, writings | Tags: fucking, poem, sucking dick
COCKSUCKER NARRATIVE
I had this great idea once, for a poem. It was to leave it unfinished like a cocksucker would do. What I realized was, that I couldn’t, because I wasn’t a cocksucker. I had to become a cocksucker.
I’ve always considered myself to be a whore able poet. And when I first realized that is when I became a cocksucker. My poetry’s worth shit but when I shut up and suck your cock, I’ll make you feel it all right.
Because I am a cocksucker now I am able to think of all the poets I know with their pants zipped down for me and its really helpful to think of them that way, especially when they can’t be around anymore.
Irritatitingly new and funny I am your cocksucker.
As this too will pass, I’ll hold myself accountable. I will take on the position of cocksucker for the night.
There is nothing about me in the sentence except for the fact that cocksucker’s in this sentence and that I wrote it and that it’s about me and that’s about it.
It’s took a while and I took it all too personally and it took several baby steps to becoming a cocksucker.
I had to think of the cocksucker as one does the rock star, the trooper. The cocksucker as unforgiving, and full of himself and willing to empty himself and fill himself with all of you, all of you, so he could be the cocksucker. So I could be the cocksucker outright, and forward. I had to learn to quit singing with my fingers and to blow you away.
I give you the right to be as funny and as loud and as irritating as can be you cocksucker, I told myself.
Several distractions have gone come along, but have never truly interrupted my cock sucking.
As this too will pass, it’s okay for the cocksucker to tell you that its like going to a poetry reading, you know, and hearing those around you laughing. At the poet, right. And you think it’s all really funny. That’s the attention span that I have learned to give being a cocksucker. That’s what makes me such a cocksucker.
I have sucked only 5 cocks and I have become really good at being such a cock sucker.
It is neither tedious, nor thieving, or at least it probably seems to you, as it did to me.
Because I am a cocksucker, I am not afraid to click anything, go anywhere, say what I want.
I speak from a position of minority. But as this too will pass, I guess I should go ahead and ask how many of you consider yourselves to be cocksuckers. And how many of you want to be cocksuckers.
Its not always as it seems, sucking cock.
Not every time that I suck cock can I get ahead in life. Not every time that I suck a cock can I write a succesful poem. Or finish.
Not every time I suck a cock can I make it worth it for the both of us.
Not everytime I suck cock am I doing it at the right place, with the right person.
Not every time I suck a cock can I make you feel sorry for me, if that were the point.
Every time that I, a cocksucker, does something new, I have to carry all of my baggage with me. All the pains and tedium of all the ways I’ve sucked cock in the past.
There is no real method to what I do. This too will pass and you will then become the cocksucker and I you, envious and curious, so as to see, what its like, to be, to be such a, to be such a cock sucker, and to have become one, and to be, to be so good at it.
The last couple times I did this, no one was pleased.
Every time I suck cock I have to remind myself that rhythm is everything.
It doesn’t come to you, being a cocksucker – you have to go to it. I tell you.
If this was organized any less, or anymore, the page would be full and the blow job wouldn’t be done. There are several things that would go along unnoticed and I would consider them healthy residue. And you’d leave me here, and you’re supposed to take me with you.
There are periods of nothing at all. And periods of extreme cock sucking that no one can ignore because everyone wants to be there for it.
As this too will pass I have to ask myself how much of this am I doing for you? Every time I ask myself that by sucking cock, I realize I’m not sure if I can answer the question because I am a cocksucker and I don’t have the time for answering questions.
As this too will pass, I should tell you that what a cocksucker’s constitution is, mainly, is to continue a repeated action of assembling everything he doesn’t like and putting it into one place. Not every time, but most times, this requires the functions of his entire body. The muscles, breath, knees, Achilles tendon and toes working together, neck. Not every time that I suck cock does it require the voluntary removal of saliva which takes a lot of work, and sometimes it helps if you cover your eyes, especially if you are averse to triangulation or semen. That’s what it’s all about and it’s all you’ll see.
There have only been four songs about cocksucking. On the other hand there are 10,700,000 results for cocksucking and not one of them shows up instantly. No one here has ever gone on a search for their cocksucker. Look, you’ve found me. And you can have me. And I can have you. And we can be pleased, here, together, because of me. When you search for cocksuckers all you find are poets. When you are looking for a poetry reading all you’ll find are cocksuckers.
There are more people, empirically speaking, who don’t go out of their way to search search for cocksuckers.
“Cock sucker aurelius and catamite furius, I will face-fuck you.”
After the cocksucker is gone, all that’s left is the effect of the cocksucker. Of the cocksucker, being there, in front of you, you calling him a cock sucker, and telling him that him and his boyfriend are the cutest pair. And that
There are exactly 5 poems written about cocksuckers. The first one, written by some chump named mark doesn’t count. He never was a cocksucker and he’s just trying to fucking defend them. Cocksucker’s need no defense.
The second, written by catallus. Who invented, if you ask me, both cock-sucking and face-fucking. And I work in homage to him, even when I’m there, present, in front of you, sucking your cock. I do it for him.
The third is by some Nelson, who’s written one too many poems about cocksucking to have ever really done it. He doesn’t know what it feels like. And it has nothing, in my case, to do with lips. Fuck lips. Use your words.
The fourth was Duncan. Who I thank. For letting me speak at night, and during the day. For mentioning the cocksucker in a goddamn poem. Moving on. Spicer and Lorca used it. They didn’t in the same way, and everyone knows who was sucking whose cock there.
In effort to you show you all of the effort I put into this, I wish I could show you all of the things I found near cock suckers and how to be cock suckers and how to suck cock well, and the things that weren’t so helpful.
Filed under: lyric, photo, poetry, writings | Tags: derrida, ekstasis, lyric, poetry, writing
I’ve been busy lately, I suppose. Here’s something I wrote, and have been thinking about lately.
The modern lyric practice doesn’t seem to be one of direct self-expression. What constitutes its “subjectivity,” it seems, has greatly changed from what we as a class, or the practice in general began as. Rather, I’ve come to consider the lyric as a practice which doesn’t necessarily always go against the grain, but one which does indeed looks beyond the it and the self—forward, not back. It presents itself as an experience of transliteration or transcription of “otherness.” I recall Rilke’s expression in “What Birds Plunge Through is not the Intimate Space”
Space reaches out from us and translates the world …
At face value, we should be compelled to ask of this otherness to what or whose asubjectivity it belongs. It seems to be one that is just beyond our own perception or perhaps beyond our ownership. As Derrida asks of language in the “Monolingualism of the Other”: “who exactly possesses it? And whom does it possess? Is language in possession, ever a possessing or possessed possession? Possessed or possessing in exclusive possession, like a piece of personal property? What of this being-at-home in language toward which we never cease returning?” He’d say, of course, and he does: no, it does not. We only speak one language, he avers, and it is not ours. The act of writing, then, works as a transcription of an “other”; utterance or poetic expression are transliterations of some, let’s say, harbored vocabularies into print.
This type of dialog can, and might, however, be taken in two different directions: first, that the lyric practice—or more generally—the ongoing written tradition—is reactive to the a) demands of what has come before it and is both an exercise in literacy and b) an expropriation of those said “vocabularies” gathered as an aural excess into something frozen, in text/imprinted. Or, secondly (perhaps a more conductive way of looking at it) that the lyric “event” is a moment of arrest and interception by this particular figure of the “other” into and through these vocabularies and onto the page—particularly working through a tradition not of posterity but of (as Joey put it) affinity. “The I [or the “personal”] would have formed itself,” Derrida goes on, “at the site of a situation that cannot be found, a site always referring elsewhere, to something other, to another language, to the other in general. It would have located itself in a nonlocatable experience of language in the broad sense of the word” (29).
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Now, what constitutes this experience? As I mentioned in my forecast, this “experience” of language—that being, the moment of writing—might be related to ekstasis – the feeling of being “rapt” out of one’s self. The word rapture and ecstasy have similar etymologies: to be rapt, is to be in a state of rapture – it is at once a single state of being qua not-being and is also one of active transit, or transport (consider ekstasis, or just ecstasy as a verb). That being said, ekstasis is, like metaphor, a liminal space between one “positioning” or state and another and to experience ekstasis is an ontogenetic experience—it is creative and electric as it provides a glimpse of a vision of what “could be”; it is both a release into ecstasy, and the moment of ecstasy. Again, some Derrida; this time, not on the “other,” but its host: “like the hospitality of the host even before any invitation, [language] summons when summoned. Like a charge it remains to be given, it remains only on this condition: by still remaining to be given” (67).
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To juggle my vocabulary up a bit: ekstasis is a transference of the self from a place that is known into a state of unknowing. The lyric practice, as I’ve come (or will always be coming) to think of it resides in this place. This assertion, though, does not come without its own vagaries. Is this moment of ekstasis a state that the poet, say, enters volitionally or, perhaps, through subterfuge? Is it a willful relaxing of vision, or the given, almost mystical trance of the Siren? I’m not sure yet, but this very place of the unseeable-seen seems to be at the threshold of knowledge – the moment of vision just before a poem begins. But what the act of writing lyric seems to do is to carefully measure this rift—to tug at, walk the line between known and unknown.
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There seems to be a catch though: this unknown has to remain unknown or else the moment of ekstasis (the poem) fails. The other disappears and the ego replaces him. The vocabularies develop their own agency, and fall into autobiographical anamnesis. Rather, what constitutes the Monolingualism of the “other,” in this case is deprived of this reminiscence or self-reflection. It is by nature forward looking. In Derrida’s terms, the poet would then work, “because [he] is an aphasic […] he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language and without a source language. For him there are only target languages” (61). It is, as if, in this “translating” venture that the poet engages not with a particular history (of selfhood or tradition) but with more of a “making” of history; an almost stereoscopic correspondence with history, where there is an prolonged unrequitedness or inconcinnity between the self and its displaced but inextricable other. The state of ekstasis, in a sense, holds the “end” of the poem in front of it from the very beginning and when this end is met, as a love consummated or a surf finally breaking, the lyric event concludes.
Filed under: lyric, photo, poetry | Tags: arthur rimbaud, jack spicer, jean cocteau, orpheus, poem
CHAPTER X
Who Are You?
What has four legs, three feet and seldom talks to anyone?
A corpse.
What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?
A ghost.
What lives forever, has three knots in its rainbow, stores up passion like a squirrel stores up food for the winter, is disengaged from everything worthless, does not even sense the dreamings of poets or notice the river
They.
Notice the last lack of questionmark, notice the toss of the last question
A defeat.
–
(Jack Spicer, from A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud, from Heads of the Town Up to the Aether 1960-61)
Filed under: lyric, poetry, writings | Tags: bending the bow, poem, robert duncan, sexuality, textuality
Robert Duncan, at the beginning of Bending the Bow, writes: “We do not mean an empire, a war then, as if to hold all China or the ancient sea at bay, breaks out at a boundary we name ours. It is a boundary beyond our understanding.” Rightly so, the rest of this essay as well as the poems that follow head towards the margins of what is understood as Duncan’s “own.” What strikes me about these boundaries is that are, for Duncan, graspable. I mean, if “the poem” or the “writing of the poem” is a China, its dimensions are already considered, the boundaries are explicit. Unlike Kaufman’s abstractions (which I keep coming back to, strangely, as something to push harder and harder against) Duncan’s poetics are not to appropriate influential texts as a means of collage, but allow these texts to test their own boundaries: mutate, grow. His poetry takes from its predecessors, as Davidson makes very clear for us, but by way of Duncan as interlocutor: from the poets of the past, through Duncan, to the page as an opening. At a reading in San Francisco in 1959, Duncan commented on his often anthologized “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” that with the writing (and re-writing) of the poem, he was “permitted to return to the act of the poem and that the “meadow is the place where one enters the gate of otherness—other world” (PennSound). It’s no secret to Duncan’s reader that the man is a mystic. Does all this mean that, at the moment of language-vision, let’s call it, the poet returns (or is given permission to return) to a field that is already created: an open (boundary) space? And it is the poet’s job to within this space make a civilization, “a locality of the living”?
*
In an another audio recording (Date unknown), Duncan, in reference to the naming of “The Opening of the Field,” remarks:
one of the ideas that became to occupy me when I was writing letters is that of an atom, or the atom, who is all of mankind. That is all of us in our lives are living the atom if we can imagine ourselves as cosmic zoologist looking at men without being men and we were to collect a complete data on what man is as an animal (PennSound)
There are several interesting things here. One being his desire to be among and in conversation with a community of poets and also to get to (or begin at?) an origin; he begins with the atom (or, Adam) as a particle encompassing the world that will come forth. The genesis of the poem is key for Duncan as it is at this biologically or artistically formative moment of “occupation” that the “event” of the poem occurs—the moment the field opens, the atom splits. It is not just having a vision or receiving an image that makes the poem. Rather, it is a releasing of “the design out of itself as [the poet] works to bring the necessary image to sight.” Again, the issue of a predisposed boundary, or at least a solid substance, is articulated. As Duncan seems to put it, the poet—when not receiving the poem—is waiting for it (as if on guard) and when he “receives” this matter, the personal presentation (composition) becomes the Poem. It is the clearing out of a field, and the populating of a space in which, coming thru these now porous boundaries, men will live and will come to live: “Must I reiterate,” Duncan says, “boundary lines in the poem belong to the poem and not to the town.”
*
If I, like Duncan, can allow my text to grow and for the boundaries of what I understand to spill over into what I don’t understand, then I will allow these seemingly unconnected points or moments of vision (above) to inform one more observation—albeit a vision with no design whatsoever: What is compelling, yet not very surprising about Duncan’s township is how non-discriminatory it is. Davidson convincingly comments on Duncan’s identification with female poets of the past and how Duncan’s own “version of modernism is shaped within a narrative of personal and sexual identity.” What I thought of when reading this portion of the essay is that first paragraph of Bending the Bow, and of course, my initial response to it: that of Duncan pushing against the margins of “understanding,” and how this sexuality/textuality complex almost inverts my initial understanding: what direction is Duncan pushing, and what is his origin? Is he pushing from within the boundaries against its margin, or from within the margins themselves, towards the inside? Is his re-reading/writing of previous texts a matter of identification with a particular township, one pushed aside? How transparent is he as this interlocutor? And if this identification by translation is necessary for his personal expression, how does Duncan’s poetic function on a level of impersonality, of the self as displaced (put into the “other world” on purpose) in effort to understand oneself?
In a speculative mode, using this kind of situation to think about I according to standards.
I represent the efforts of a series of men. I am your father’s lyric poem and I could out of the word of his predecessors. I am an experiment to defend his work. I was once a fascist in 1918–I suddenly–I at last—read this faster somewhere else. I underlined all of this, and I despise our mathematical I.
.
Speak to a number of things besides I like fruit spiced with I transcend such notions, such fairly glib notions of constructing I. Projecting this disintegrated I is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions and I put these two together, that, as Lacan would put it, there’s a bar between I and I LANGUAGE.
.
I, not yet thirty years old, gives that sense of sudden liberation I want to sing the love of. I like looking at I under a microscope, where I exist only in struggle. I am an utterance of Imotion, I surf of Irevolutions. I despair, but not simply to enrich. I demand direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical I. Increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial I phoneme and I grapheme which I open questions about. I has discovered something in my social situatedness, or not. I ask questions about discourses of ownership and power, I terrify us.
.
I make a nice appearance don’t I, fled from holy places I concocted to explain their metres. I am at stake with our investigation and I mix the abstract I am with the lyric embedded within my own present. I break down when we live in a world where I allow for silence—silence being the place where—I guess is the way I want to put it—I is an indulgence that comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is I.
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I is misapplied in poetry. I does make thinking possible. I RHYME AND I “get acquainted” when the painter does not. I imagine, making up what I do not makes me have to encounter I is likewise good training. I of all kinds is often diverted with a recital which I do not expect to be acclaimed as. I have lived in hotels and I achieved my own language. I came to class today and I realized that I came to the deeper responsibility of the political I. Presuppose that you hear: I cannot “wobble.” I attain such a degree of development, or, if you will, I act of discipline of I, at one with nature to which I creates the illusion of a belief in an absolute.
.
I never lived in Buffalo before I, during the last few decades, become aware of my own indulgence here. I is a manner of speech among poets to chant I: the intentional or effective jettisoning of romanticism-identified notions of I—among other things. I take place in a context where modernisms original insurgency is now, depending on whose chronology we use. I digress, I struggle with poetry. I used to be a poem but now I’m just a plyem.
.
I value I told the I didn’t know, nor did I be drawn I told me I that is I (or at least its apparent loss). I do not believe in every current in twentieth-century I which they prepare by I, on the relation of beauty to certitude. I for those romantic (though not neo-romantic) legacies in literature and art, constitutes a series of attempts to meld song to memory and I am not a new take on lyric. I am calling for new form. I want it so, austere, direct, free. I can only be violence, cruelty, injustice. I am firm, not con tint. I depends precisely on the formal ability to make I am third, and most importantly, a combination of both. I make the surprising suggestion that I copy, simulacrum and reproduce—I paradoxically winds up being anti-aestheticist.
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I note the main details of Charles Olson’s I that is the path between the ordinary to the sublime. I ratify, rather than to recognize, contest or refunction I. Experience the critical possibility of thinking otherness. I forgot to mention the decentralization of the I which made our poetic idiom a thing pliable. I should not withhold the message.
Filed under: album, lyric, music | Tags: deerhunter, halcyon digest, lotw, music
I’ll never be too shy to plug Deerhunter. They’ve consistently been so generous and their work always seems to get better. Yes, I was way into Microcastle, but I’ve always first-and-foremost been more of a Cryptograms/blog-era/Bradford-in-dresses/noise-fest fan of Deerhunter. I’ve had to put that aside for the last few years though: No more blog songs, hardly any noise at all. However, they’ve incorporated some essential elements of that drony sound that sold me to them back in ’07 into their new album. Halcyon Digest is miraculous. Sonically, so much more versatile and meticulous than their last. Focus is placed on deep bass, sustained/accented echos. Cox really has a knack for ambient sound and progression, patiently adding layer upon layer to make the songs so rich and full. Nothing on it seems accidental. And this album is just so cohesive, it makes their previous efforts seem whimsical. Annnd, just when you thought Bradford couldn’t possibly be more intimate with his listener, he does–hard (“He Would Have Laughed” is a “Bob Dylan’s Dream”-esque heartbreaker).When once they were opaquely waxing on death and the afterlife, they’ve made it down to earth, into their own bodies, grown up too fast and are pained by a most desperate nostalgia that we’ve all felt and continually make ourselves feel; that lack of understanding, at once understated and overwhelming.
I mean, you should buy this album. But here’s Halcyon Digest.
