Where did the idea that to write poetry is to teach poetry arise?

Is a poet critic a hermetically sealed role or is there room for change?

What was TS Eliot’s relationship to the Academy? Or rather, the academies, because apparently his relationship to Cambridge was much different than his relationship to Oxford. Why did he not take that, by now mythical and much coveted teaching job? What difference would it have made in his career, to his poetry? To the poets of the early 20th century, and so on?

Is there a critic outside of poetry? Why do so many “innovative” women writers seem to have criticism embedded in their poetry? (Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Anne Carson…). Where are the critical women writers? Why are there so many non-poet women critical writers and so few women who are poets and critical writers? Or, is that a myth?

What do Wittgenstein, William Carlos Williams, Cotton Mather, Charlotte Mew, Fredric Jameson, French Theory, Fred Moten, Thylias Moss, and James Sherry have to do with each other, let alone the question of poet critic?

Greetings from Santa Cruz where I am attending a conference titled Re-imagining the Poet-Critic. Yesterday I listened to a dozen or more papers, several respondents, a lunch hour reading, responded to two papers myself, and then after a fabulous dinner listened to three poets, Kasey Mohammad, Craig Dworkin and Vanessa Place, read in the Felix Culpa gallery.

Kasey read some of his Shakespeare anagrams. He is making his way through the sonnets, using the jumbled letters of each to construct new poems. The remaining letters are used to make the titles which, as he notes, are usually the silliest part. Humour is the main note in Mohammed’s workings and later, over drinks, we found ourselves wondering what would happen if he explored different registers–he is a flarf poet so the dominant response is flarf. Here, by the way, is Virginia Woolf’s reading of flarf.

Dworkin read a write through of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty that was brilliant (you can find a review of that here). First time hearing him read, knowing his critical and editorial work more than his poetry. He also read a very funny and quite imaginative “translation” of Beowulf  that I would love to read.

Vanessa Place went last because as her introducer said, she tends to disturb. She read a reworking of Valerie Solinas SCUM Manifesto, her long piece comprised of the names for that place, you know, down there…and read a piece from her ongoing Statement of Facts project that did indeed disturb.

Today another dozen or so papers and respondents and tonight yours truly reads with David Lau and Juliana Spahr. I will try to add to this post tomorrow at some point when I can catch wireless in between San Francisco and Montreal. Until then, I’ll take notes…

That said, I cannot help but see the situation from a different perspective than Behrle (or at least the Behrle of “24/7 Relentless Careerism”; Behrle is, after all, a poet, as well a tireless community organizer and activist for poetry within the community around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project). Often, I feel frustrated by all that one cannot do as a poet, what one seemingly gives up through one’s devotion to poetry. And how far short of reality—of exigent political and social conditions—poetry would often seem to fall. Likewise, it is frustrating to feel as though one is at the mercy of an apparatus of contests, and editors, and prestigious academic appointments in order to be appreciated for one’s work. What Behrle expresses eloquently is a cynical perspective I have no doubt is shared by many. That one can only follow one road now, and that that road is paved by mediocrity and meticulous calculation.

When I went to Buffalo for graduate school in 2000, I was fresh out of college (I deferred for a year between college and graduate school). When I applied to Buffalo, I didn’t apply anywhere else. It was Buffalo or bust. I wanted to go because I admired Charles Bernstein’s and Susan Howe’s work and had grown up on the poetry of Robert Creeley and the poets of Creeley’s generation. Having met Howe when I was a college freshman, I had no doubt that Buffalo was a place where I could learn to be a poet. That’s all I wanted. And, if nothing else, that’s what I got from Buffalo. A practice as a poet. Common ground among other poets whose work I admired.

I am still grateful for this. Looking back on my time at Buffalo (Bernstein had three years left, Creeley would pass away in four, Howe was preparing to retire), it seems like a miracle I got there when I did. To work with Howe and Bernstein, and also with Myung Mi Kim and Tony Conrad at Buffalo has instilled me with an enormous sense of good fortune.

My decision to apply to Buffalo was a fairly hapless one. It was motivated by eagerness, and interest, and desire. When I attended Creeley’s memorial service at Buffalo I remember Robert J. Bertholf (at the time the curator of Poetry / Rare books at the university) thanking Creeley for inviting him to “come along for the ride.” When I get to host a reading, or correspond with a contemporary, or I am invited to give a reading I have a similar feeling of gratitude to simply be part of the conversation. If I become critical of something, I think it is in relation to and out of respect for this sense of conversation. Many of the poets who I feel closest to feel burdened by a sense of privilege and would try to conduct themselves counter to this privilege. Among these poets there is an ethical commitment to poetry—the writing of poetry as not just counter to “official verse culture” (which it is obviously always in relation to), but as the principal expression of the poet’s desire to be and act in specific ways within the world.

At its best, I think that poetry can make things seem possible again. Possible worlds, possible sensations, possible ideas, possible ways of being, possible relationships. I also think that poetry has its limits, and that a major limit of poetry (or most modes of aesthetic production for that matter) lies in its inability to effect immediately practical changes in reality. As Tillie Olsen reveals through her book Silences, there are “natural” hiatuses which occur throughout a writer’s life, and then, more often than not, there are hiatuses which occur as a result of economic and/or socio-political violence. For women and minorities such imposed hiatuses have obviously occurred more frequently than for any one else. There is also a hiatus that I believe occurs out of a sense that poetry does not suffice in the face of strife or emergency occurring in the world. George Oppen’s twenty-five year hiatus during which time the poet fought in World War II and organized for the Communist Party is a famous example of such a hiatus. Similarly, there is Robert Duncan’s hiatus during the 1970s during which time the poet did not write or publish. Laura Riding Jackson gave up poetry because she did not feel that it could represent “the real,” and spent the rest of her life writing text books which, in prose, extend many of the preoccupations of her renounced poetic practice. There is also the legendary case of Rimbaud, who became an arms trader; an act which Mallarmé likened to amputating one’s arm while still conscious.

Mainly, I want to suggest that there are counter-actions to the kind of careerism Behrle skillfully describes in his essay. And one is to imagine the poet acting beyond the boundaries of poetry both as a literary genre/medium and as it is embedded within a set of institutional practices and cultural locations. What happens when a poet works without words, in mediums not their ‘own’ (as so many poets have done)? What happens when a practicing poet produces something outside a culture or context of poets/poetry (as so many poets also have done)?

Thinking about poetry as a labor and a field of production is crucial here. Because I believe that part of the difficulty with contemporary poetry is that poetry, for many, has seemingly ossified as a field of production and now seeks its revivification in other cultural activities. Off-page poetries—performance and somatic poetry, conceptualist poetries, ecopoetries, and other poetries which redistribute themselves across multiple fields of production—are therefore of the hour. While many poets obviously still do write poetry for the page (and I am someone who personally believes in the power and potential of page poetry, not to mention poetries traditionally identified as ‘lyrical’ ones) many others are writing across disciplines, genres, and modes/fields of production. So while many of us are still wrapping our heads around late-modernist appropriation practices, we also have yet to adequately address the more complex problem of how off-page poetries redistribute poetic effort within a more expansive and extended field of cultural production.

Following Paolo Virno’s book, A Grammar of the Multitude, I would also like to take poetry, at bottom, as a labor. While this labor may not be easily quantifiable, there is nevertheless a finite energy that one can put towards the generation, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry (what, traditionally, has been considered the ‘work’ of poets to a large extent). What, I often wonder, if this effort was to be radically redistributed? If the poet is also defined by their having a practice of using language in ways considered to be poetic, what would it mean for those practices to be displaced and put to uses other than they were intended? What, in other words, if one was to voluntarily and tactically use the labor power they would normally afford to the writing, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry towards another kind of labor? What if such a hiatus were organized? What would this experiment result in?….

so some say that poetry is dead because it stays within the academic classroom, overlooking how important the classroom is to creating lifelong poetry readers / writers, as well as how important course adoption is to keeping books alive and relevant and in print.

when i design a syllabus, i try to choose books that i think will engage and challenge my students. while at the native american literature symposium this past weekend, i began to think about this process more because i kept hearing an interesting word at many of the panels. this word was….

“teachable.” so my question to all the educators out there: what makes a book “teachable”? does this idea of “teachability” change whether you are teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, or graduate students? how do you choose texts for your courses?

my first book was published in 2008, and since then it has been taught in about 20 courses that i know of in universities throughout the pacific and the u.s. i’ve had the pleasure of visiting some of these classes in person, blogging with them, skyping, and engaging with students via email & facebook. (the pic above is a Native American Studies course at UC Berkeley that read my first book last fall; as you can see, only the two over-acheivers in the front row managed to stay awake during my class visit).

what’s been surprising to me is how many different contexts there are for poetry. so my first book has been taught in courses called “Literatures of Oceania,” “Asian American Studies,” “Native American Studies,” “Poetry and Politics,” “Writing in Place, Writing as Place,” and “Ecology and Poetry,” to name a few.

two really interesting courses teaching my first book this year are called “Decolonizing Narratives: Indigenous Literature and Culture in the Age of Sovereignty” (Kansas University) and “Discontiguous States of America” (St. Thomas University). Here are the descriptions of the courses:

1) Course Description: This course takes as its premise the decolonizing potential of indigenous literary and cultural productions. It seeks to both answer and explore such questions as: How can literary and cultural texts such as novels, poetry, music, and film from world indigenous communities function as decolonizing tools? Can decolonizing methodologies be applied to such texts?  How do such texts contribute to and strengthen indigenous political, intellectual, cultural, visual and rhetorical sovereignty?  These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer throughout the semester as we read indigenous literature and view films and documentaries from North America, the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand.

2) Course Description: This course examines ideas and examples of American literature in light of territories outside the forty-eight contiguous states. We will begin by considering more typical accounts of American literary history that rely on the relationships between geography, region, and cultural contact in creating a sense of American identity and literary production. Moving from historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of American character through westward continental expansion, we will consider writing by authors such as Willa Cather and Zitkala Sa that sketch out visions of an expanding America from the perspective of settlers as well as displaced indigenous peoples. We will then turn to explorations of American imperialism that leads to the incorporation of Alaska, Hawai’i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico through the literary imaginations of writers like Jack London, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Nuyorican Cafe poets.

In addition to reading literature about and from these spaces that lie outside the contiguous United States, we will study legal and cultural claims to the peculiar status of these lands and peoples to the American landscape and body politic. While these places are often effaced and the inhabitants forgotten in the national imaginary, their incorporation into the country has led the US Supreme Court to define some of these areas in a series of early twentieth-century rulings called the “Insular Cases” that turn on the question of whether citizenship and the protections of the Constitution necessarily follow the reach of American military might. We will read these legal discussions along with literary renderings of the complicated status of such people and places. This course fulfills the Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors.

this current semester is a bit strange as seven courses that i know of are teaching my first book and three courses are teaching my recently released second book. for my second book, those three courses are “Native American Studies: Reading and Composition” (UC Berkeley) “Pacific islander Studies” (San Francisco City College), and “Poets in Conversation” (UC Berkeley Extension)

i had the pleasure of visiting the creative writing course last week at UC berkeley extension (special thanks to laura walker). here’s the class reading my book:

the weekend before this past weekend, i was at UC Santa Cruz, where a course called “Visual Cultures of Africa, Oceania, and Native America” read my first book. i gave a lecture to the class titled “A Brilliant Lecture on the Themes of Mapping and Navigation in the Wondrous Poetry of Craig Santos Perez, whom is I.” Here is a picture of the class (note it was a friday 8 am course so i wasnt mad that all the students were sleeping:

that night, i also conducted a writing workshop with some of the graduate and an undergrad–but i forgot to take a picture. the next day (yes they worked my butt off at santa cruz)–i gave a poetry reading at a conference being held that weekend called “Spatial Imaginaries and Critical Geographies” sponsored by the Asia Pacific Americas Research Cluster. here is a pic of the rowdy academic crowd:

i must admit too that i was a bit starstruck because rob wilson, karen tei yamashita, and hsuan hsu were in the audience! eek. here was the flier for the events (with special thanks to stacy kamehiro & dina el dessouky):

*

p.s. if you live in NYC, come to this exciting event:

2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (Between 124th and 125th Streets)

Recently Geist Magazine, one of the great Canadian magazines, announced a contest for the best “Jackpine Sonnet.” The Jackpine sonnet was named by Canadian poet Milton Acorn. It’s a fairly regular sonnet that aims for the traditional 14 lines, each line con­tain­ing 7 to 13 syl­la­bles, but, in Acorn’s words, “If your son­net cuts itself off—click!—at, say line 12, 18 or 20, leave it at that.” As for rhyme, “Acorn advised writ­ers to write inter­nal rhymes (rhymes within a line) or exter­nal rhymes (rhymes at the end of con­sec­u­tive lines) ‘to keep the flow.’ In the absence of rhyme, use asso­nance (the rep­e­ti­tion of vowel sounds), ‘to keep the rhyme alive in order to come up with a true rhyme fur­ther on’…”

I love the sonnet, and the many ways in which poets have handled the form and continue to handle the form. It’s a challenge to make it lively, to not feel you’ve handed yourself over and let its history have its way with you: are you writing the sonnet, or is the sonnet writing you? So many feel like ghosts of other sonnets, barely breathing, barely able to stand on their own two feet. Others snap, insist. Demand attention.

The sonnet can be overwhelming and liberating. A necessary exercise for a poet I think, at least at one point in one’s development. The form is pliable. Back before I realized that the sonnet could be so pliable I recall encountering Vikram Seth’s novel The Golden Gate, which, while impressive, I didn’t find particularly compelling (It’s hard to pull off so many…Shakespeare only did 154). Then I discovered Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons and was quite taken by the energy she captures in those sequences. Hacker’s book isn’t only sonnets, but there are many, and Hacker certainly can claim to be both a master of the form, and a great reader of the form. Here she is on Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Rites for Cousin Vit” which reminds me a little of the luge track in Vancouver the way she handles the corners and slides into the gold stretch.

When we discuss the form in an introductory setting we do so in several ways: from traditional to radically experimental. Recently a poem from Ken Babstock (more on him to come) and a crown of sonnets by Anne Simpson—both found in Open Field. Babstock’s handling of the form is full of swagger and precision. Here’s the beginning of “First Lesson in Unpopular Mechanics”:

As a boy, it was a scale-model Messerschmitt
pitched at the wall in a boy-scale rage–
Now? These grown-up middletones, wafflings, shit
flung deliberately wide of the fan. I remember the age
I began to ease off–thirteen, fourteen–
when busting one’s stick meant a five-minute major,
and there, in the sin bin, thinking, what did I mean
by two-handing the crossbar?

Simpson’s crown takes on ekphrastic poetry and mixes in a post 9/11 narrative with great condensed and moving language.

“Are you still there? Are you?” A voice falls. Stone,
Unbearable stone. It grinds. It tastes of grief.
Don’t watch. Go blind. Oh Lord, those moans
will haunt us. This one. That one there. Brief
lives…

There are many poets in North America working with the sonnet, and many in Canada. George Murray published a collection of sonnets not long ago. Here’s a couplet from “Collusion”

The crushed grass evidence of collusion:
the animals fuck themselves to bleeding.

And from The Corner:”

The child’s conception like a struck match,
an axe ringing off knots in trunk wood,
cloudy brains forming in the sky. The twin
of today is yesterday, or will

be tomorrow, yet each continues/follows,
different from the last/next. Like obstinate
math problems we line up, waiting, in effect,
for a dark age to pass; to be made public, fixed.

In Murray’s hands the sonnet becomes a comfortable vessel in which he offers playful, and often very insightful, knotty, stubborn, surprising, ruminations: “I’ve met my match in my son, the mirror/image of his face constantly separating/from mine…”

There are more unconventional turns—such as Mr. Acorn with his cut it at 12 if it wants. West coast poet Alfred Noyes, also known as Stephen Collis and author, most recently of The Commons, has also published poems called Compression Sonnets. Wee sonnets that consist of fourteen words:

What shall a
Book undo measure
And consign the
First act of
Alienation together

Or

Dear anything with
Ears we are
Imbedded displeasures who
War as reporters
Shell images

*

A poem appearing
After Auschwitz dear
Unflappable ghost we
Must address a
Torn fragment

Noyes is interested in condensation. In his introduction he asks, “what might come of only fourteen words? What of the ‘sonnet’ remains? A turn after the eighth word? At the  thirteenth (a concluding ‘couplet’ of words)?”What remains is a good question, and one that poetics of erasure takes up (The Capilano Review did a brilliant job with this).

One can’t think of the sonnet without considering Shakespeare, and all of the textual interventions and engagements his sonnets have evoked. Jen Bervin’s exquisite book Nets, for example. If you haven’t seen Nets, you must. For a little movie about Bervin’s book check out this link from Webdelsol and you can find an essay on Bervin here. What Bervin does can be compared to heightening or rubbing away. It’s a technique that I used in Teeth Marks—but with my own work. Chiseling away the dull bits from a conventional narrative poem to allow for a fragmented version of same poem to emerge. In Nets Bervin takes several dozen of Shakespeare’s sonnets and rubs away at them revealing her own poems. The result is exquisite. Here is one of my favourites:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

It’s one of the best uses of erasure/intervention I have found, and partly because it actually builds to something, becomes more than the constraint though arguably no longer a sonnet?

There are many, many interventions. Chris Piuma’s Constellated Sonnets, Raymond Queneau’s “100,000,000,000 Poems,” Mr. Bok reminds us “a book of 10 sonnets, whose cognate lines can be permuted to create more sonnets than aspeedreading immortal can read in 3.5 million years…” Paul Hoover, in Sonnet 56, Les Figues 2009, takes up one of the homely sonnets–and rewrites/revisions in all the hip ways, from N+7 to digression, villanelle to ghazal, haibun to haiku, flarf to homophonic–translation that is.

In a similar turn, Gregory Betts, the author of the essay Plunderverse, recently published The Others Raisd in me, a little book that takes sonnet 154 and creates 154 poems by erasing, sort of as Jen Bervin did with Nets except he doesn’t leave the original poem in the background. Rather he takes words over and over again from the same sonnet, arranging them to create the different poems.

Along the same vein there are the anagrams from  K. Silem Mohammed. Elizabeth Bachinksy takes a close look at Mohammed’s sonnet 44, which begins:

Unwholesome leather flagpoles gross me out;
I never may endure their bulging mass.
Abjection hatches random nests of doubt
When I am reading Newsweek in the grass.

Bachinsky compares the Mohammed’s results with her own reworking of Milton’s “On His Blindness,” which turns into “She is Blond Sin” which I offer the first four lines as well, just for a teaser:

Dim, nephritic, yet single (whoosh!)
She’s a dandy kid. Why film her drear wilt and
Tease the wanton hidden clit? Oh had I that
Molten loadstone rebel—gum my thighs. She is down…

Bachinksy is one of the few poets who roam from conceptual and procedural into more formal realms, which has lead reviewers to ask will the real Bachinsky please stand up? I think she did stand up, in several fields, and with equal prowess.

There are also visual sonnets. Christian Bok blogged here on the Poetry Foundation about Darren Wershler’s “Sonnet for Bonnie” pictured above, a few years back.

Sonnet for Bonnie” is a provocative brand of occasional verse—a love-poem that comments upon the vaunted history of the love-poem itself. Wershler-Henry has written a kind of encoded message to a girlfriend named Bonnie, but he has revealed his feelings without resorting to the tropes of standard lyricism because, for him, the act of writing a sonnet in our contemporary, technological milieu must seem all too sentimentally anachronistic. His poem often causes my students much bewilderment when they first encounter it, and I go on to tell them that I always enjoy teaching this poem because, in my opinion, it represents one of the great limit-cases of sonnetry, since the poem is almost a miracle of concision, distilling all the traits of Petrarchan expression into a hieroglyph of four symbols.

“Sonnet (for Bonnie),” Bok points out, is a Petrarchan sonnet using only four characters (probably the shortest possible sonnet so far created). Of his sonnet Wershler says, “If I remember correctly, my thinking was that the basic definition for a love poem of any sort was a question to which the answer was inevitably “you.” The sonnet diagrams that relationship (octave and sestet) in the most efficient way I could imagine at the time. In that respect, it’s more conceptual than visual — almost an algorithm that you could use to generate other work.”

Indeed. The form is generative on many levels: the constraint itself, the conventions, the history, the body of work…it’s probably our most durable and flexible form. The sonnet is a great tool, as Collis says, “so portable, and yet so conservative/constrained in origins.”

So yes, the Jackpine Sonnet. “The fiddle’s incomplete without the dance,” Acorn writes, “Let’s hook fingers to complete.” Without some kind of constraint, verse Acorn suggests lacks luster, and in general, I would agree. There is little sign of a struggle, perhaps. Form or constraint puts pressure on the idea behind the poem, on the original gesture. The sonnet form, Acorn argues, is “realisant.” It’s an organic, not fixed form. “It grows to any shape that suits the light, suits the winds, suits itself.” The Jackpine is a tree that grows in all sorts of conditions. It is resilient and as Acorn appreciates, each tree grows and looks very differently.

Of course each is a member of the same order of tree too, which might be problematic. In 2010 we might see a hybrid Jackpine, part cedar or with strands of tomato for fun. I am being facetious, but not only. I want to think Acorn’s enthusiasm for the form would include all of the above and interpretations we have not yet imagined.

But perhaps that is not so? I’ll end with a provocative little poem from Acorn, poet of the people, but also, it turns out, a poet quite savvy about the poetry biz.

The Craft of Poetry’s the Art of War

Attack! Don’t think yehr poetry aint war.
Them warbling noises be no kind of birds.
They zing—they fly—they smack. They’re bullets
And any minute one of them or something
Even rougher on your balls might score.
Put on your hardhat of proletarian scorn;
And when you throw roses—never mind how sweet;
For sweet life’s sake don’t omit the thorns.

Attack! Those clutching fingers of dawn
Will bundle themselves, soon enough into fists;
Punch you into gargage, put a lid on the can.
You’ll get dropped from this or that love-list
By reason of hate—by reason of fear…or another
But if you think this aint war you’re dead brother.

just returned from a weekend in albuquerque where i attended the Native American Literature Symposium (NALS), which is “organized by an independent group of indigenous scholars committed to making a place where Native voices can be heard.” the symposium was held at the Isleta Casino & Resort (apparently, this symposium has been held at various native owned venues throughout the years).

this year’s theme was “Many Voices, One Center,” and featured…

some amazing keynote performances by Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nalani McDougall, a performance by the Spoken Word Team of Santa Fe Indian School, a talk by Comanche playwright Terry Gomez, and an evening with Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyres (of famed Smoke Signals). in addition, there was a wide array of engaging panels on native fiction, poetry, song, film, performance, philosophy, activism, feminism, and more (read the entire schedule here).

this was my first time at NALS, and i loved how intimate it felt. it was small enough so that there were only 3 panels per session (so each panel had a good number of people), and it seemed that many of the scholars & writers in attendance were “regulars” (or more like family members–perhaps apt since the organizers were referred to as “clan mothers” and “clan fathers”). it was also nice for me personally that there were a handful of Native Hawaiians in attendance.

my favorite panel was “Blood Run, Repatriation, and Native American Literary Activism,” which featured three panelists: Cari Carpenter (”Blood Run, NAGPRA, and the Buffalo Village Case”), Penny Kelsey (”NAGPRA, Blood Run, and Dickson Mounds: Gendered Narratives of Activism”), and Chadwick Allen (”Citing the Serpent Mound in Blood Run”).

Blood Run (Salt Publishing, 2007), by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, was published through Salt’s Native American writing imprint Earthworks (edited by one of the coolest editors out there: Janet McAdams). If you havent read this book, you must. Here’s the description of the book from Salt’s Website:

This volume testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Blood Run was once a great mound city. About eighty remnants of its original four-hundred mounds still stand in testament to the 10,000 people who made their home here time ago and prove a terrific tribute of world history for their descendants living just down the road today. Yet, Blood Run is still in great danger of being forever destroyed by looters, developers, and the plow. This volume stands to persuade others to protect her and the sacred remains she guards in mounded tombs. The verse play of persona poems herein emanate its character of architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Previous to European colonization and conquest efforts, trade flourished between Indigenous peoples of the Americas for perhaps as long as time earmarked humankind. Evidence of continual vast trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, including art, symbolic items, and practical tools, was well cached in the multitude of mound cities puckering vast portions of the continent, some still incredibly existing after decades of continual and intentional desecration, disfigurement, and dismantling by grave robbers and Manifest Destiny driven anti-eco agriculturalists. Though surely there were times of dilemma for Indigenous Americans, these long-developed relations ensured survival during eras of doubt. Thus the likelihood of peace prevailed and most nations enjoyed the security of blanket protection, aid, and assistance from related tribes; whether by blood or adoption. In so much, tribes that enjoyed helping one another sustain themselves engaged in trade relationships with numerous additional nations outside these pacts; building cities of ceremonial, burial, effigy, and civic mounds, wherein which they flourished.

so the papers given on Blood Run were amazing (Cari & Penny connected the book to NAGPRA–Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act–while Chad read into the book’s deep aesthetic structure based on the “indigenous technology” of the mounds). as a bonus, the author herself gave a reading after the presentations.

besides drinking & eating & socializing & losing my shirt (”nice abs” everyone kept saying) at the casino, on the last day at the last session i presented a paper titled “Indigenizing Poetics, Written ‘Olelo: Brandy Nalani McDougall’s The Salt Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai.” i must admit i was kinda nervous because brandy (remember she was one of the keynote readers) actually attended the panel! eek. throughout my paper she kept interrupting me, saying “that’s not what i intended! are you dumb or something!” since my paper is too long and brilliant to post here, here’s a description of her book The Salt Wind / Ka Makani Pa’akai (click to purchase) (the book is published by Kuleana Oiwi Press, a press dedicated to Native Hawaiian literature):

This postcolonial collection of poetry is the first by Native Hawaiian poet, Brandy Nalani McDougall. Of the collection, Samoan novelist Albert Wendt writes: “Once in a while a collection of poetry comes along and grabs your eyes, heart, and na’au and makes you see and feel more deeply than you’ve done in a long, long time. For me, Brandy Nalani McDougall’s collection is one of those. And I keep rereading it. Her poems have a unique and hugely inviting surface simplicity and elegance that immediately hook you into them, into their profound and complex depths of imagery, lyricism, political and historical savvy, feeling, thought and vision. These are woven together with unusual wisdom, perception, control of language, and intense aloha for her people and islands. You have to read this collection. It will lift you and make you feel you are more.”

special thanks to Gwen Westerman, to the Isleta people and to everyone who made this symposium happen. i will definitely be attending next year (please accept whatever abstract i may submit!).

Sprague’s The Port of Los Angeles, published this past fall by Chax Press, addresses the dire through its insistence on relation. That we are utterly screwed without an approach to the world (and ourselves within the world) through relationship is an understatement given the exigencies of our current environmental situation. Sprague’s book is painfully aware of this reality, and moreover of language’s culpability for producing this reality. How to assert relationship within autobiographical-‘lyric’ modes of writing? If relationship could speak—the relationship between ourselves and the things we produce, between ourselves and those things and more expansive cultural processes—what would it say?

“the goods awaited swift transport through many states and witnessed
many things” (8)

“the things saw this and held the memory of what they were into” (9)

“because the things knew of a use beyond the sound of their names” (10)

In the first part of Sprague’s book she tells a story. She sings herself, “Citizen Jane,” in conveyance (her family’s move from Upstate New York to Southern California), and in doing so speaks both of personal loss—a loss of feeling rooted in a place—and about conveyances far exceeding herself—“ourselves perfectly pitched at the edge of globalism.” (23) Global or international economic exchange is represented by the ports of which Sprague also sings (“container / as the staple / vessel of modernity” [28]). The ports encompass a local ecology of dockworkers and natural phenomena, drug and sexual trafficking, goods transported via shipping containers and other modes of transport. They are also the backdrop for the United States’ over-consumption; its consumption of world products and commodities at the expense of others within an international community—their labor power, their health/wealth, the security of their families and communities. “ownership or loss / and ‘no bordered sense of that’ / I do not know how we were to be (we) unbordered.” (32) Irresponsible consumption and waste as a result of exception.

I cannot help but think of Whitman reading Sprague’s long, anaphoric lines. Such lines form one of the principal shapes of her book. Yet whereas Whitman attempted to dissolve himself in cosmic multiplicity, Sprague would seem to dissolve herself into cultural processes. How something gets to be something else? How this transformation affects something or someone beyond itself? (“we became all over” [67])

The most moving section of the book to take up anaphora is the book’s final, boldly titled poem, “Fuck Your Pastoral.” Fuck your pastoral: as in, fuck your pastoral poem; or, the pastoral tradition of poetry just isn’t cutting it anymore. There is a tension in Sprague’s writing between working within a pastoral tradition, calling it into question (critiquing it), and transcending it (doing something else entirely). Foregrounding relationships between natural phenomena and cultural production—attending to these relationships both epistemologically and phenomenologically—enables Sprague to surpass a merely epiphanic or ecstatic encounter with ‘nature’.

The title “Fuck Your Pastoral” belies the poem’s tenderness, which translates subjects, objects, and pronouns effectively to arrive at an “I” subtracted from its identification with multiplicity (a manyness of beings and experiences). The biographical fact of moving from West to East coast (the scene of the poem is the reverse of the first poem of the book, “The Port of Los Angeles”) is allegorical. Seemingly a return to a more ‘natural’ lifestyle (a rural environment; a family farm), the speaker’s/I’s return to the East is in fact a return through processes of “unmaking.” The prefix “un” appears repeatedly throughout the book, but especially in “Fuck Your Pastoral,” where it indicates a desire to reverse a process of making. Not just ‘deengineering,’ but actively unmaking the world that one would refuse. Dismantling it. Removing from it our veiled awareness of how it came to be. “I” is in between things and beings in the world. “I” is also what stands between their having been made and their unmaking, undergoing both.

“I was undoing all of this as I undid the spool
the radio’s wheel unmagnetizing tape
zipping the case
I emptying notebook erasing the names
unwriting the manifest
unnaming the ship.” (59)

The Port of Los Angeles marks an ecopoetry as much committed to questions of human injustice as to human-animal interaction and interference with non-human natural phenomena. If the problem with “nature” poetry has long been that it exalted phenomena perceived as separate from ourselves, therefore keeping those phenomena at a remove from what we are doing, ecopoetry can counter “nature” poetries by foregrounding how perceived ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ mediate one another and how language (the language we give to nature) is instrumental in this mediation. How can poetic language investigate and transform languages inherited by science? How does poetry provide a toolbox for understanding ecology, for possibly changing our place within it? To what extent can poetry/poetics be a subtle tool for ecologically responsible behavior? Sprague’s work as a poet, essayist, and educator have for me long been at the forefront of these questions.

1. Ernst Jandl, Bist eulen?
2. William Kentridge – Stereoscope
3. Samuel Beckett – Quadrat 1+2
4. Cheryl Donegan – Refuses
5. VerbiVocoVisual Concrete Poetry and Music (1956-1970)
6. Merce Cunningham – Points in Space (1986)
7. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt – Mono Lake
8. Caroline Bergvall, Via and About Face
9. Derek Beaulieu -”an afterword after words: notes towards a `concrete poetic” [PDF]
10. Öyvind Fahlström – Manifesto for Concrete Poetry (1952-55)

Marjorie Perloff co-edited with Craig Dworkin THE SOUND OF POETRY/THE POETRY OF SOUND (Chicago, 2009).  Her UNORIGINAL GENIUS: POETRY BY OTHER MEANS IN THE NEW CENTURY will be published in Fall 2010.

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