Killing the Humanities, Not So Softly

What is the value of having French departments at universities these days?  Departments of Italian, Slavic, East Asian or African languages and literatures? Departments of philosophy? The (European) classics and classical studies?  Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (comprising both the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) even has a department of Sanskrit and Indic Studies, and another one focusing specifically on Celtic language and literatures: still worthwhile? And yes, having listed all of these, I must add English and American literatures?

You can be sure my answer to all of these is a resounding yes, and my arguments for their value would necessarily go beyond any immediate self-interest.  Across the country, however, and especially at certain public institutions, both before but now particularly in the wake of the ongoing economic turmoil, humanities departments (and, to be fair, departments, programs and faculties more generally) are under assault.  The initial post that caught my attention about this was Stanley Fish's October 11, 2010 New York Times Opiniator blog entry entitled "The Crisis of the Humanities Official Arrives." In it he noted that on October 1 of this year, George M. Philip, the president of SUNY Albany, had decided to eliminate the departments of French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater.  Fish, a famous professor of literary and cultural studies, public critic and intellectual, and a former dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, went on to make some problematic assertions.

These included that the moment for French studies and theory, once the darling of the lit crit and cult studies set, was long gone and that the only foreign language literary and cultural game nowadays was Spanish (no Chinese? No Arabic?), and that humanities departments didn't earn their keep (we'll return to this below), before laying out the process by which Philip announced the end of these departments. What Fish did not do, because he could not, was turn to what he called the outdated "pieties" of the 19th century to defend the humanities, since as a "progressive" academic he no longer dared fool himself or readers that he believed in them (Enlightenment, pshaw!).  Nor, it appears, does the SUNY Albany president, who noted rather bluntly that "that there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs." Fewer bodies, so the departments and those who teach in them must go.

The fervor and furor of the comments were enough that Fish again blogged about the situation, in a post entitled "Crisis of the Humanities II."  He began by noting that:

The respondents make a number of points, but two are made repeatedly: (1) The humanities not only pay for themselves but help fund the sciences and (2) I dismiss traditional justifications of the humanities — the transmission of the best that has been thought and said, the humanities enhance society, and so on; you could recite them in your sleep — but I myself either have nothing to offer or end by offering a weak version of what I have dismissed.

His main response instead was to cite commentary by administrators who spoke to him about cuts in state funding, which meant that there was no way that humanities departments at public institutions could make up the difference in lost funding in the same way science, engineering or business studies departments could.  This then led to another point, quite interesting to me as a writer of fiction and poetry, a translator, and so on, as well as someone engaged in humanities work (writing about and teaching literature and the arts), which was that the humanities and arts people consume--the plays, the novels, the films, etc.--outside universities are quite different from the scholarly and critical study of them, and that what scholars and administrators ought to be doing is to justify those activities on their own merits, based on their contributions to their fields and related ones, to the production of knowledge itself, rather than arguing about benefits to the larger culture, to the "man on the street," in a directly instrumental way. (Though extrapolating outwards from this argument is a larger argument hinging on instrumentality.) Fish continued that a defense of humanities work would assist (sympathetic) administrators in making a case to legislators (and private funders, since this is an increasing component of public university funding) for the validity of humanities programs. Or, as Fish wrote:

Do you want a university — an institution that takes its place in a tradition dating back centuries — or do you want something else, a trade school perhaps? (Nothing wrong with that.) And if you do want a university, are you willing to pay for it, which means not confusing it with a profit center? And if you don’t want a university, will you fess up and tell the citizens of the state that you’re abandoning the academic enterprise, or will you keep on mouthing the pieties while withholding the funds?

In yesterday's New York Times, eight scholars offered differing thoughts on the university humanities crisis, with some, important figures in humanities fields, suggesting that in fact French departments should, at least at some institutions not wealthy enough to support them, go the way of the Dodo bird. This comports with a larger societal trend I've written about before, in which the neoliberal model, once restricted to a small economic sphere, has since the Reagan-Thatcher era been increasingly applied to every aspect of American life, and is now not only part of the DNA of university administrations, but increasingly of society's view of how universities should operate. As I say, public universities are feeling the severest brunt of this.  The University of Iowa has, like the University at Albany-SUNY, placed several departments or programs on the block. At Texas A&M University, the Wall Street Journal reports, all departments and faculty were subjected to a cost-benefit analysis, to see whether they were producing a net gain or loss in financial terms. So flawed has this process been that the administration pulled the spreadsheet listing the results from the University's website. The WSJ article notes, however, that Texas's legislature passed a law requiring all its universities to post online "the budget of each academic department, the curriculum vitae of each instructor, full descriptions and reading lists for each course and student evaluations of each faculty member. The law, the first of its kind in the nation, requires the information to be accessible within three clicks of the college's home page," and accessible in 3 clicks. Other university systems, the WSJ points out, have pressed the issue of "accountability" in a variety of ways, yet none appear to focus on the various non-monetary values of the work that faculty and graduate students undertake.

That said, back in August, the Times reported that there was a constituency apparently quite interested in the humanities--seniors. Though humanities programs are under budgetary and rhetorical attack, seniors are increasingly seeking them out as subjects for continuing educational-stage study. Mary Walshok, the associated vice chancellor at the University of California, San Diego's Extended Studies and Public Programs School offered one of the best and simplest rationales for the importance of the humanities (it might not please Stanley Fish, but it sounds appropriate to me):

“From where we sit, the humanities are more critical than ever because of their role in helping to understand the political and cultural context of the world we live in today,” Ms. Walshok said. “They contribute to Americans’ capacity to be good citizens, as well as enrich many areas of professional practice, given the effects of the global economy on so many spheres of work.”

Making the rounds today (I originally saw it, interestingly enough, on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog site) is a disturbing yet comical video that synthesizes many of the most negative discourses about pursuing a degree in the humanities today--in literary studies today--and being a professor of English. Note also the commentary about politics near the end.  View it, and you'll see exactly what I mean (I particularly loved the mention of Harold Bloom, though nowadays wouldn't students mention Gayatri Spivak, or Stephen Greenblatt, or Marjorie Perloff, or Charles Bernstein?):



Lastly, Marc Bousquet's heartening ("inspiring") response to the video is here, on the Chronicle of Higher Education site.

Update: from Pierre Joris's Nomadics blog, here is Hélène Cixous's letter to University at Albany-SUNY president Philip:

November 29, 2010
Open Letter to :
George Philip, President
University at Albany-SUNY

Dear President Philip,

In April 2007 I visited the University at Albany, extremely happy to have been invited by Professor David Wills to participate in a conference organized around my work. I had the distinct impression that the university was an institution focused on intelligence and culture, a place open toward the future, thriving on new initiatives. I encountered very high quality faculty and graduate students and found the sciences of thinking represented there to be strong and alive. I had the feeling of excitement experienced by every scholar or student of knowledge who is able to work with an engaged and motivated group of like minds.

One can judge the future of a country by the space that it provides for the Humanities. The warm welcome I received from the New York State Writers Institute, added to the intellectual atmosphere of the programs in French, Italian and Theatre, made me think that SUNY-Albany was a privileged place for emerging research, and that it possessed, in particular, the good political sense to watch over its interests. You cannot imagine how stupefied and indignant I was to learn that that institution was about to mutilate itself.

I don’t wish simply to be scandalized. I don’t want to believe that you are going, of your own account, to destroy your own riches. I’ll allow myself only to ask you to stop the ill advised process that will surely and irremediably weaken you. It is as if one were to cut out one’s own tongue. Don’t do that.

In 1968 I founded the Université de Paris 8, which still remains an experimental jewel within the French university system. I know full well that one has to struggle in order to allow the proper values for insuring the worthy and dignified development of students to flourish. They are your children, whom you must provide with the best opportunity for succeeding in the world. And, as Aeschylus said, “blood once shed cannot return to the veins”. Beware of doing something that is irreversible.

I would be very sad to know that the University at Albany had stifled its own breath. I want to believe, dear President Philip, that you won’t make the wrong choice.

Hélène Cixous
Professor Emerita Paris 8 University
A.D. White Professor at large Cornell University
House playwright Théâtre du Soleil Paris
Writer, author of 70 volumes of fiction and theory
cc. Susan Phillips, Provost
Edelgard Wulfert, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
David Wills, Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Events from July, Part 1

A snapshop of my summer thus far:


Passing by a movie set at Astor Place, early July


Dancers on 14th Street, mid-July


Watching the World Cup, at DOMA in the West Village


Fence Editor Rebecca Wolff at the journal's launch, Hudson, New York


Tara Betts at the Phati'tude Launch Party, mid-July



Rebekah Rutkoff reading at the Fence launch party


My iPhone life drawing of Rebekah Rutkoff reading


Anselm Berrigan reading at the Fence launch party


My iPhone life drawing of Anselm Berrigan reading


One of the artworks at the Fence launch party


Hudson, New York, at night

A Poem-Report: Rethinking Poetics @ Columbia

I thus voke thy aid
to my adventurous song,
what are "poetics," what
is poetry? Is it
"segmentivity" or "the news
that stays news," is it central
to the nervous system
of poetics?  Between
Columbia and Penn
a poetics conference, con-
versations begun
by Golston and Perelman,
(and Bernstein, behind them,
in minds, so many here,
and elsewhere, inspirited
with memories and ideas
of Leslie Scalapino, Cage,
Wittgenstein, Emerson,
Dickinson, et. al.),
three days, in Philosophy
ten panels, many panelists:
scholars, critics, poets; 41,
none Asian-Americans
if you're counting. Who counts
haunted the proceedings.
Who counts, in or outside
the proceedings, in or out-
side academe, institutions,
aaaarg.org, outside or in Silli-
man's or the Poetry Foundation's
blogs, the journals, net-
works and coteries,
the batteries of chapbooks
and books the oral and dissertation
writers and committees
might be reading, thinking
about and rethinking,
this rethinking and defining, amidst a ghost
horizon of privilege and invisibilities
framing the conversations'
often radiant, expanded fields.
What counts, as poetry, in
poetry, as poetics: relating to the art
of poetry, of making (poetiké, fr.
Gk. poiein) objects,
cf. Aristotle. Accountings:
poetic composition, tools
and materials, history
(but not materialist history per se),
tradition, relation (mostly tradition
of the European kind),
globalism and hybridity (mostly US,
i.e. "us" (we? who are ____), mostly
form), social location and ethics
(grazie Rachel Blau DuPlessis
and Joan Retallack especially),
poetics and the Academy
(which counts most, perhaps,
among most of the attendees), ecologies
of poetry, poetics as a category,
affective economies and prosodies
(but mostly affect as a concept,
so powerful, contemporary),
the end of authentic time and
reading radicalism came after
my attendance ended, on Sunday,
though PennSound was listening
continuously, so the presentations,
challenges, arguments, vocal antagonisms
and their responses--"fuckface"--will be--
"fuckface"--available--"fuckface"--
to the world. So what is or are poetics,
our poetics, and does poetry matter, do poetries
other than the Euro-American
matter, other Others' poetries
matter, and are there poets
not in academe, not critic-theorists,
not doctoral students or soon to be doctoral
students dissertating, who do? They do. Where
were the writers and students
from the School of the Arts
creative writing department but
three blocks north, Perloff asked,
and is creative writing--poetry--
valid, relevant, connected directly
to this thinking, rethinking
an entity (a system
of institutions, a discourse,
a field, expanded),
this poetry that still holds
considerable capital
(Bourdieu), a high place
in the social (if not economic)
imaginary and hierarchy
(publishing, Epstein, Schiffrin, unmentioned),
that some might be seeking then
by rethinking to destroy?
Is it true that most people hate
poetry? Is it true that most
find it difficult, even beyond
the neoliberal prisonhouse
of university classrooms?
Do most people really think of it
when they think of it at all
in relation only to greeting cards
or else inaugural poets
and poems, like some serious
and bitter medicine lacking even
that sickly-sweet cherry flavoring
that starts to taste good when you're
really sick rather than listening to it
daily in songs, hiphop, rock, pop (so far
as I can recall, never uttered, not once,
not even the touchstone Gods
Dylan-Elvis-Leonard Cohen),
in speech, in backs-and-forths,
writing it in journals, on blogs, to loved
ones, reciting it to impress or beguile
or as acts of resistance, eagerly
returning to poets dead and living
who were not mentioned and wouldn't be
mentioned within a mile
of these sometimes exceptional panels?
Whither music, dance, and related
arts? Must poetry be lineated
as this pseudo-poem report is,
rhythmic, prosodic, metrical (not
that word!), use repetitions at all?
(Oh conceptual poetry, writing,
horribile dictu, you and Flarf
burbling up through the drains
of contemporary writing
and causing great anxiety,
delight, joy, annoyance, fright,
confusion, dismissal, because of your refusal
to fit within unstable confines.)

Brent Edwards spoke of Hemphill
(Julius), Tonya Foster of Sarah Vaughan
(and scat and the scatalogical), but
music was only an echo, a trace
amidst the talking (no singing, scatting),
a solo in this hive of dreaming out loud
and hard, hard thinking into being
(the archive of) an archive.

Oh, there is a blessing in this drizzly breeze
that carries the questions, What counts, who counts
what is poetry, what poetics might be
in an age of ever-developing technologies,
what of books too in this digital
age, our dematerialized present, virtual presences,
the vast and powerful neoliberal "software"
we're all running on, whose air we breathe in
every hour of every day? What of books
and what of collaborations, poetics whose ecologies
encompass other disciplines, landfills, oil spills,
wars metaphorical and literal, embodied as dancers,
publics imagined or not yet imagined,
politics imagined or not yet imagined,
archives imagined or not yet imagined,
poetries becoming "something else," counter-
speculation, material disintegration, waste (shit
and its residues), news, new or old, the impure
products of America (Williams another angel
omnipresent, edifying), all gathered together,
breaking apart (fragments, ruins, the specter
of Modernism and post-modernisms), the oral
and the written, discursivities, "choral."
Can poetry look outside itself?
Can we look outside ourselves, collectively?
Can we look outside the neoliberal, collectively?
Can we look outside the human, collectively?
Can we look outside the windows of the packed room,
past the panes to the concrete, the park and its steep
drop down Morningside Heights to the 116th Street
pavements I crossed to enter on Saturday?
Are we looking outside the comfort-
able confines of the pack,
the alphas and betas setting the pace,
do we see the other faces, the others' faces,
the other poet faces, other poetics facing these,
as we (who?) peer closely at and rethink
our (whose?) own? Who owns these poetics,
these poetries? Who remains invisible
and illegible even after the curtain parts?
Can these poetries and poetics be musical in the absence
of music or discussion of music, can they be or
become ontologically plural and is it ethical if there's not even
an active peeking and looking beyond those panes,
is that poethical if there's peaking beyond and none
here see it or hear it? Brent spoke of Ellington,
parallels, proliferations, concretions, can you hear
it, them? Do you listen? Aware, but you care?
"Everything we see could also be otherwise" (Wittgenstein),
other whys (Baraka): Bernstein's pataqueeranormal, -normative,
his "swerve" and "adversive" ("mental fright"),
his "derangement of the senses" (Rimbaud), his "strange,"
his "swish," and "sissy," but to a swish, a sissy, a queer,
this one here who asks with "sincerity" (Reznikoff, via Zukofsky),
is he really listening, aware yes, sure, sitting there, swerving
there, but what are the manifestations of that care? Show me.
Scalapino: "The human is crisis." (Ghost traces.)
In here poetry is in crisis, poetics are in crisis; out there?
Out there poetries are in crisis, poetics are
and....we are for ontological pluralisms (Erica Hunt), we are.
"One world, many minds" (Hunt) Many minds,
so much cleverness, so little time (Clever Clover
and the landmine of the mouth). Is poetics
a limiting frame? Is poetics in friction
with innovation, does it do the not-Princeton rub
with experimentation? Thinking past the limits
(historical and empirical with figural-Edwards), over there
is where the parallels lie.

Ambitious unknowns, collectively sigh
no more sadly. That is where the lie
parallels the--no Plato, long since buried,
under the unspoken green Greek swards
with Socrates or in some other archive.
Collectivity: what is poetry, we ask you?
Collectivity: poetics? Collect-
ivity: how many times can and must we seek
of an archive? Can and must we not speak of the archives?
Whose? Collectivity: can you answer me
without recourse only to the great master
minds and archives of Europe? One world,
so many minds but all from one historicultural mental massing.
Collectivity: are there verbs to express this kind of thinking?
Don't noun, verb. Don't image, think. Don't look, write.
Don't don't, act. Collectivity: what and where are the answers?
Collectivity: are we not always speaking of the body, of bodies,
ours and others? Collectivity--poetry: image: action:
(Laocoön, with Lessing unmentioned as well).
Collectivity: are aesthetics a superseded category, too
limiting to the field of poetics, its possibilities?
Dead as deconstruction, psychoanalytic theories, post-
colonialities, the new historicisms, the new new post-new?
Collectivity: to get beyond the boundaries set by neoliberalism
and its traps, to puncture the market master magus,
the page, or stage, or dais, to enter the frays
of the digital--this is ethical, we are together in this,
at least some of us, in here, whether we see us
or not, we see US or not, a "we" (or not).
Is there a spark, collectivity, and what is its verb?
What lights, illuminations, fires--what's motive?
Choral crowds, genres for action, verbing and swerving
into the now thing, the now-thinking, thinking now
as it enters and blossoms into something, landscape, harbor,
haven, abatgis, slip, hammock, arbor, slope,
sleep, hammer, keyboard, labor, affect, archive,
hope or some other abstraction, the we
in here, inhering, the we of poetry, poetics,
the whee, way, wee pluralizing, waxing
poetic is a form of knowledge-making,
making and taking back the forms
of knowledge, the possibilities,
rhapsodizing, of pleasure, poetics' and others,
that we're phreaking as we're seeing
and speaking thinking, and wreaking
writing: one world, many
minds (Hunt): many worlds,
many mimes: any worlds,
many memes, reres publicae: poetry.

Whose making all that racket
in the archive? Poetics.
Who's making all that racket
in the traditions? Poetics.
In the archives, poetries
or the traditions of poetics,
traditions temporationally, not spatially,
alternatives, to join, though who's
this we making all this racket
and not even leaving
testimony to the eyelands
beginning to appear,
and are we--we?--spatially
in there? Debriscapes, extrascapes,
countertraditions, are they ours
and are we in there? Are you? Nudge,
engage, be against, to be again, to gain
access to, think through.  Ante, up, anti.
Anti-interpretive, an "erotics" of...stop/ /bogging,
start telling the joke without its form, scatting
performative rather than definitive spaces.
Scattering, reconfiguring, transfiguring,
in the silences
                       within silences.
A baratadeeboppaluquivadoop: phatic.
A da daadaaa deeet deeetdeet
dum diddlysquatalicious--phatic.
Get phat, got that? Trawl Jakobson, Abrams.
Shudder, utter, stagger, stutter, still. Troll
the airwaves, fill them. Flarf dem
um, uh, duh, da, doobie, okey dokey, fort-da, say what?
Phatic, haptic, knowwhatimsaying yo?
Get back, for real, fo sho, daswassup, say what, Son?
You alright, stay around, almost mellow, One...Say,
our "boats are open." (Glissant) Say, the multiple
consciousness (nope, no dope DuBois). Say Césaire
and Baudelaire, "more at stake than aesthetics,"
the beautiful, the true, the sublime, disinterested, purposive,
Aufhebung, the autonomous, the aestheticist,
the historicist, the Dionysian and Appollonian, the high
and low and mid-brow, the is it art or is it not or it is
what I say it is, the public coefficient, the aleatory, the Ou-
LiPolean, the formal or formalist, the depersonalized,
the post-aestheticized, the desiring machined, the it-is-there,
the all of that glowering history, his-story.
This is a confab about poetics (and poetry).
Say dehistoricize and rehistoricize (Willis), push poetry up
against those other works, get it popping, into all that biz it's walking into, talking its way into, stammering and shimmying its way to, this important political labor that people are doing and all of sudden it's become this other thing, a political creature with some power in its having no public power at all, so how do you talk about it, yes you, the poet or critic or poet-critic or academic or whatever you fashion yourself as, coming back to this idea and your archive-praxis, knowing that "all you can do is suddenly listen?" (Cage). Poetry, are we into it? Is it into us? Do we mind it, truly, really? Is it not the basis, or one, for memory, no matter what psychologies and biologies may tell us? So I'm sitting at this seminar at the university, this is a month or so back, and we get into this back-and-forth about some theoretical issue, and my colleague, a poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, scholar, all these things in the same body, tries to bring the discussion back to the language itself, the language of the poems, and I say, it can be both+and, which is at times a problematic formulation, but this came up again at this conversation, in a conversation, around oppositionality, because there's inclusivity as well, "discursive inclusivity," though the language of the poem, our languages and how we use them, shouldn't be forgotten. Are we in them, poetries, poetics?  Once upon a time a great deal of poetry was published for children and adults read it, adults memorized it, my grandparents did, my parents did, there were all these collective forms and forums, form as a collectivity, hymns, worksongs, music (popular), how did we forget all this? Say, how is it we don't look outside the window most of the time, poetries, poetics?

And this is very sooth that I tell you...radical particularities...the SF language school of the...1970s...not everybody was Kung-Fu fighting...some were talking and writing at the Grand Piano...some (the dazzling Mónica de la Torre) were talking of some talking and writing in the 1920s in São Paulo, Paulicéia Desvairada!...some were talking and writing about those Andrades, Miss São Paulo and the other one, not related...some were talking and writing about the Brazilian manifesto (Modernism--open to the world) and the Cannibal manifesto (closing up shop, a self-devouring)...some were talking about Haroldo de Campos and concrete poetry, how exportable it is, the image prevailing over the text (think Smart vs. Campion)...eye over ear...some were talking and writing about how "the longing for modernity led the poets to abstract the location of the future" (so beautiful, a truly poetic thought)...some were talking (and citing Roberto Schwartz) about how de Campos by 1963 had gone onto another project, the Galáxios, known in Brazil and Latin America but not on English tongues...some were talking suddenly in Spanish about the neobarroco and la poesía conceptual y pues porque no dejó de hablar en español many people perhaps didn't understand...and some were asking questions like, what might poetry for export be?...and what might the goal of extending a poetics to include globalisms?...and are you a filterer, relater, or rehearser, poetries and poetics...and it was good to hear about poetries and poetics outside of the Euro-American matrix...because those other poetries exist, those poetics exist...not cut off from the EA matrix but also not totally dependent upon them...they exist, we exist...and them someone was talking about antagonisms and "American hybridity" meaning formal hybridities of a very specific kind and that led to a blowup during the Q&A...that antagonism and blow were wake-up calls...there was the poetry of the expanded field...the charts that lured my eyes like sirens...Smithson, the jetty, the not-sculpture, not-language, the Klein square (not bottle), poetics, the not-poetry...making me think as I type this, am I still writing a poem?...is there segmentivity and rhythm here...repetition...rhyme...how would I describe the poetics of this elliptical passage...ellipsis being a technique and rhetorical figure...and Butler having returned us in the 1990s to the importance of the rhetorical, the gestural, as against the structural, the linguistic (Nealon)...how would and could you speak of the poetics...the poetry...here and now...

Of hermit saints, these words addressed,
much more they said, so many pages I filled,
cursive upon cursive, line by line,
about genre (social) and form (individual),
about Derrida, the negative, social
and ethical locations, about absences
that Blau DuPlessis elegantly touched upon,
ethnicity (RACE?), class, gender (SEXUALITIES?),
disabilities, economics, social positions,
sediments and sedimentation,
memories' traces in the identifications
we daily live and perform,
the scripts and texts we carry
around inside us, imagi-nations,
Toscano's "material
translocative carnicities,"
evidence of things not seen
but discussed, reviewed,
on location, in location,
ego and echo (-location),
Lo: Poetry, said Joan
Retallack, "is a form
of courage," the microclimates
of our poetries affecting
and effecting the larger climates
of our world (Cage),
this necessity, always,
for reciprocal alterity,
alterities this courage,
created by poetry,
this ethical necessity
of relationality,
in Chang (videoing Hughes)
and Tolson, this need
of and for "soul," the word
SOUL, thinking about
the between,
a "textual structure
of feeling," older forms,
vulnerabilities,
rhyme, rhythms
going back
to that black place
--poetries, poetics,
do you hear me,
do you read me,
over and out?

((Freemasonrywise)
I missed it--Delays!--Escarpments!--
Those light-rail tracks and subways
of dishonor!
The panelists' disquisitions
on poetics and the academy,
there is no terminal on the molehill
of ambitions...the most important panel
of the morn....Spahr, Novak, Giscombe,
Evans, Young...at lunch D spelled me....
you start out as a peon and maybe be-
come a classroom star...
Oh, how to think beyond the architecture
of the private or semi-public institution...
Spahr: how to (re)create the kinds
of associations and organizations that existed
not so long ago, the disappearing independents,
journals, zines, collectives (cf. the Dark Room)
that arose outside and beyond
the universities' doors?
Is that outside out there any more? (Yes.)
Is the only desire now to gain entry? (No.)
--Creating those open spaces that defy
the boundaries, the rules, the private, and capital.
That resist the overwhelming neoliberal vacuum.
You began a schoolgirl and now wield your PhD.
You are armed with knowledge but you are not free.
Giscombe avowed teaching writing, creative
writing, taking field trips, leaving to see,
to learn, to come to know in the out-there, the otherwheres.
But what about hierarchies, prestige, the a priori
power of certain names and the potencies they claim,
these institutions and their social capital, their demesnes?
What about the wolfish logic (the genius
of capitalism--Paul O'Neill) that devours us,
poetry too, that makes a college ed and gig necessities
for so many?--Not all are rich, not all entitled,
so few can say I want to write all day or even part of each day
and someone will pay my rent, utilities, clothe me, feed me.
--Even the idea of the open university is a threat here.
--Even the idea of the non-academic is a threat here.
Does this stifle poetry, suffocate it? What would a poetics
of the socially, economically and politically open
sound like, look like, feel like, taste like?
What would a poetics of freedom, a free poetics look like?
We would know it when we were in it, wore it,
wrote into it, would we want it?
BD spoke of cross-university
partnerships, outside registrars,
she and Perelman Penn and Temple,
what the students gained in access,
but what about those not in their classes?
Is there a public forum by which these ideas
can circulate, the poems can circulate, the poets
connect? Is there a public poetic sphere,
not about power and privilege,
reputation making and breaking, the great
men and women, lettering and rubberstamping,
where poets and poetics can
even uneasily set camp?
Write the secret sign, and make it available...
write the open sign, and free it: poetry.)

And went down and rode in a hole
in the ground. To Jersey. And then went up
and climbed a mountain in Harlem.
Saw Schurz, back to the living city,
bronze profile helming the promontory.
Families moving about as embodied poetry.
Asphalted history snaking beneath me.
Three streets, two hills, back in Philosophy.
So different from the spaces Bitsui comes from.
The places a few of my ancestors knew.
Where words still bore their sacred force.
Where capitalism had not yet snowed
over the hard terrain. Where hot rain fell
into the estuaries as they sailed them,
worked them, their own or some others'
dying fields, the blue/black ceilings or skies
repeatedly raised by their plaintive blues: poetry.
What is the message within the message?
What is the message beyond itself?
Occasionally, like yesterday or today
I am permitted to enter, at a premium, a message
like a meadow that doesn't feel mine,
mean or indifferent, at least, where I stumble
and sputter and listen and linger,
where longing pervades me and I spend a long time.
What is the message of the message?
What passes through the meadows
that are not truly ours? Poetry.
Watten: nature's importance "as a site of the not-me."
What do you mean when you tell me
of ecology and poetry?
What is poetic ecology, or an ecology
of poetry? What is an ecological poetics
or ecopoethics, and where does it take us?
Bitsui: these lands, my people's,
are now turning to dust.
Ecologies require multiple
ways and acts of seeing.
Ecopoethics require human trust
in the nonhuman.
Not reducible to a single form.
Sometimes silence is better than doing harm.
Sometimes silence is the way to go.
Sometimes silence carries the power of a charm.
Sometimes in that silence you come to know.

Voyage through death
to life upon these poetic shores,
but does this even address
unending questions of categories?
Why, Dworkin queries,
the category of "poetry" at all?
Why are the other categories
so given to parsimony?
Why pitch your freaky tent
in front of this particular stall?
Why's poetry always stirring
up so much damned trouble?
In the center of the ring,
fists raised, ready to rumble?
Denken ist dichten, or should be
a form of therapy--but not poetry!
Golding: "the production
of poetry and its consumption."
Don't all roads return us
ultimately to this issue
of commodification?
No no no no no no no!
Future anteriors, becoming
the person one is,
the "authentic poetic project,"
pace Dorothea Lasky (where was she?).
Hofer resurrected Aram Saroyan.
Thank you. Voyage through death
to life, or "lighght," as AS
had it, Duncan chose it.
"Minima," "spareness,"
and as Emerson proposes it,
"every word was once a poem,
every word is a new relation."
Pound: "Rhythm is a form cut into time."
Saroyan: "Consonants govern pacing."
Pound: the poem debunks
"by lucidity." LIGHGHT.
Has one come on? Many?
Because we are back to forms
cut into time, to poetry. Perloff:
the public, what's a poem,
Maya Angelou at the podium,
riffing for Clinton (which became
a House song I heard and danced
to--"a Rock, a River, a Tree"--at the Delta Elite,
--"you, Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation"--but I doubt Perloff,
who knows so very much has ever heard that),
poetry, etc.  But really it's all
about poetry. The poem. Place,
Vanessa, Statement of Fact,
sexual crimes, etc. But really it's all about
poetry. More Vanessa Place, career,
fiction, one subgroup but the wrong
one, blurb, what do we call it,
sexually contentious, etc. Poetry.
Goldsmith's (not present)
Traffic "is poetry." Fitterman
UbuWeb Dworkin and Goldsmith's
anthology from Northwestern,
etc. BUT REALLY IT'S ALL
ABOUT POETRY!
A fuzziness today, but...
Clover: prestige, kids know it
it when they spot someone with flow
in basketball, on TV, in movies--
poetic vs. prosaic, no body
wants to be a vast flat lot or lumpy plot
of words and text and movement,
but wants that lyric swagger: poetry.
"Is there a desire to undermine
or destabilize this?"
Perloff: "That which is written
in the language of information
but not in the language game
of giving information,"
i.e., Wittgenstein. Word.
Jakobson said: "poeticity"; Blau DuPlessis:
"chosen segmentivity," "rhythmic
segmentivity," that's poetry.
But really it's all about the poetry,
or should be, according to Marjorie,
lose not sight of that,
as pretty and shiny and exciting
as theory and criticism
and cultural studies and psych
and anthro and socio
and performo and bio and neuro
all are ("hairy star turning
under water"--BD). Po-e-try.

Some hour, in the emergence from this fierce insight,
let me sing--because that was once the source of this gift--
jubilation and praise to the assenting or dissenting angels.
Not real or better angels but people who think deeply,
seriously about affective economies. They may or may not
be poets. They mostly have academic jobs and are very smart.
They know their Derrida like seminarians know the Bible.
And Foucault because he's still important, and Benjamin,
and Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, and Sedgwick,
and Leo Bersani, with panache and despite the difficulty.
(Once I spent a week trying to figure out
the argument in Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?"
which I pursued because the title intrigued me so.
But that's neither here nor there and I finally untangled
Bersani's argument, or at least convinced myself I did.
It took me longer to grasp Lacan's "Kant with Sade,"
but there's revelation in persistence. Most
of the time, IMHO.) Thence: affect queer theory
before queer theory 1990s affect Butler Bersani
plus a short graphic sexual passage, involving
male-male sex, penis and ass--Nealon. Brilliant.
Williams (Raymond), Structures of Feeling,
affect, neoliberalism, Zukofsky on Reznikoff's
"sincerity,"Peck and Tickle, neoliberalism
as a "software," Harvey, Lefebvre, Ahmed,
neoliberalism, market/structure of capitalism,
sincerity, "of word to thing," to the social,
"sincerity is a software that would allow other forms
of sociability into the poem," still thinking about
what that would look like (the poetry)--Derksen.
Brilliant. "There is a third path and that
is the one we're going to take."
(Shklovsky) and much about
the problems of witnessing
in an encantatory performance.
--Zolf. As always (cf. Adfempo),

super brilliant. Then the much-heralded
Lisa Robertson, who spoke
on M. Henri Meschonnic,
a figure needing to be
translated, prodigious,
who passed last year,
his poetry and theories
and terms so vital,
but also running counter
to the terms so widespread
in the contemporary
American experimental
poetic communities;
pour M. Meschonnic
le truc c'est rhythm
"as a social force
via prosody"--so
many good quotes,
including "the active ethic
of this listening
for which a politics
comes" and "motility,"
and "the poem is
the critique
of the sign,"
his critique
of l'écriture et
les pages blanc
and il y avait tant plus...
until in the Q&A
Golston notes
that he wrote about Meschonnic
in his first book, pointing
to the French figure's
intellectual genealogy
that includes Klages
(a raging anti-Semite)
and Jacques-Dalcroze
(Mr. Eurythmics,
who also believed
rhythm could be a "moral
hygiene" and the basis
for a "new society)," etc.
Questions ensued
and not a lot of answers
and we, who think
of ascending joy,
would feel the emotion,
yet that's not what
all this work on affect
is really about,
that almost dismays
as much as our anxieties
about poetry and activism,
or rather poetics
and activism, though
for some poets
and activists, like those
at Split This Rock,
who were nowhere near
this event, this tension
unfolds as central
to their praxis,
if I'm using the terms
of art correctly,
but nevertheless
these are very smart
people who are training
others through their gifts,
and writing about writing,
and writing, and perhaps
not feeling dismay
or the stultifying angels
of tradition or neoliberalism
or of poetry itself,
when it, a joyful thing
at times, at others
utterly terrifying, into
their laps or laptops
or books or minds
or mine or anyone's,
like this longish
report--I thus invoke
your aid itself
a kind of poetics--
slowly and
inexorably falls.

Copyright © John Keene, 2010

Printers' Ball Project + Escritorio Publico + Gulf Tragedy Video + Apatowed Out

Last night I dropped by Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts to participate in a project organized in part by Fred Sasaki, of the Poetry Foundation, pairing writers and print artists from the Printers Guild.  In combo, we'll be creating original pieces that will be displayed in an art book during the 6th Annual Ball, which takes place on July 30.  I've never attended, but I'm excited to have something included in the event. We were asked to bring an object which the printers would select to select us; I bought a baked good, a cookie (in the shape of a star). Food and a metaphor all at once. We were also suggested to bring a previously unpublished poem, something perhaps old but serviceable, so I brought a poem I've never published, but have tinkered with for years, "Serenade," finally getting it close to right, I believe, last December where I read it in English and, in translated Italian, at the poetry festival. It's a simple enough idea: each stanza of quatrains represents a season, represented by the naming of a month, seasonal tropes or metaphors, and an appropriate image; and it's a love poem and a serenade, so the words "I love you" repeat in each one. I used to worry that it was a bit sentimental, but as I get older I care less, I think (and reading up a bit on sentimentalism has also shifted my position a little). My Italian hosts got immediately that it was a "New York" poem--I have written poems or stories set in every place I've lived, save Charlottesville (none is forthcoming, and perhaps never will be)--which I hadn't really focused on, so it may be a bit jarring in a Chicago setting, but Big Shoulders, with its skyscrapers and business bustle and cosmopolitan diversity and slumlords and corrupt pols and rivers and sea-like lake and all can hang, so it should fly. I had my camera at the ready, so here're a few shots, one featuring two particularly great poets:


The printers' selection of our unique "objects" which led to their selection of us

Ed Roberson and Vladimir Mayakovsky

Ed and Fred Sasaki

More poets and printers (poet Lisa Janssen is in the purple dress)

§§§

This sunny but cool afternoon I dropped by the first part of poet and translator Jen Hofer's "Escritório Público: public letter writing," at the 6-corner intersection near Chicago's Blue Line Damen Station. There she was, folding table bearing a typewriter before her, composing off the top general letters ($2), love letters ($3), and illicit love letters ($5), in English or Spanish, based on the participant's wishes and directions. She even offered a choice of colored papers and stamps, and provided a standard-size envelope. I sat, chose blue, and went with a combo of the first and second, recounting the events of the day and C's role in them, so the letter was to him. It was fun, Jen's skillful renderings really turned my thoughts into something poetic, and as we sat there, she typing and I watching, we drew a lot of attention, including some eager young people who filled the chair as soon as I got up. All the while, the temperature steadily dropped and music blared from restaurant speakers above us, and the El trains rumbled in the near distance. As for the contents of my letter, only a certain few people will see them!


Jen Hofer, composing away

The letter writer and yours truly

Wicker Park Passersby
> > >
The rest of this program continues on Saturday evening, with more participatory events to come. The info:

Red Rover Series
{readings that play with reading}

Experiment #37:
Public Words - Letters & Interviews

Featuring:
David Emanuel
Jen Hofer
Anne Elizabeth Moore

PART TWO: SATURDAY, JUNE 5th
7-9pm at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave, 3rd floor
suggested donation $4

David Emanuel asks participants to assemble and write letters onto the pages of their own handbound chapbooks or zines. Materials will be supplied.

Anne Elizabeth Moore invites Chicagoans down to do a short interview about their city, lives, and what they think about the world. Know someone with a great Chicago story? Bring them or prepare to tell yours!



§§§

This is what BP doesn't want you to see or journalists to talk about, and the images are from just at one beach in Louisiana:

Tragically, it's only getting worse as ecoterrorists BP and the government bumble along. Tomorrow, I believe, they're aiming for yet another Hail Mary....

§§§

Okay. I get that Russell Brand is the (British-imported) laddish flavor of the month. (Who is Russell Brand?) But I still must ask Hollywood, can we not see more than 1-2 films starring Jonah Hill, or anyone associated with the Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen crew, if even that many, per year, please? PLEASE? There are millions of stories to tell that do not involve this gang or their puerile and decreasingly funny bro(m)-antics.  So please, Hollywood or someone else in the US with access to DV or film stock, create and distribute some other films. Please!

Memorial Day + Anne Carson's Nox + My First Literary Agent, the Crack Addict + Gordimer on Books & Libraries

A listing of all the young women and men soldiers who've lost their lives in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (CNN.com: US and Coalition Casualties)

A op-chart graphic on the dead and unknown dead in the US's wars, from today's New York Times, by Robert M. Poole and Rumors presents the country's military history in a metaphorically arresting, unforgettable way. (Cf. above, at right, and click on the link for the larger view.)

Finally, here's a Memorial Day post written by veteran and progressive Todd Theise, who's running against Democorporatist Scott Garrett in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District.  (H/t Digby!)

* * *

Memorial Day concerns remembering, memorializing and, to some extent, grieving, which brings me to the lone book not associated with any aspect of my teaching, writing, committee work, or university visitors that I've managed to read over the last 3 months, and it took just an evening: poet and classical scholar Anne Carson's extraordinary new work, which I will not call a book of poetry, though it is a highly poetic book, Nox (New Directions, 2010). The book has been covered extensively around the Net, so I'll describe it in a few words: in the way that only Carson can, the book combines an elegy to her deceased brother (the dedication, to "Michael," is "Nox Frater Nox" (or Night Brother Night), and a record of her translation of a particularly difficult Catullus elegy, Poem 101, "Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus." She translates the opening line as "Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed," and the rest of this short poem, a little beyond halfway through the book, surrounding it with a variety of other texts. There's a method that's quickly discernible: on the left pages, she usually (but not always) places lexical entries for each word in the Catullus poem, and on the right side, she features journal entries, snippets of notes to herself, very brief poems, visual images by and of herself, and sometimes of her brother, her own artworks, or any of these elements in collaged combination.

In and of themselves, these aspects of the book, especially by a writer of genius like Carson, would make for a worthwhile read, but the real showstopper is the book's physical form. The designer Robert Currie assisted Carson in creating the sort of affordable book-as-art you rarely see today (and sadly, especially at a time when physical books are facing possible disappearance as digital technologies increasingly dominate). The pages are full color, at times nearly convincing you that you're looking at Carson's journals instead of photographs of them, and the entire book is printed in accordion fashion, as the photos below show, and then placed in a gray oystershell box, which serves as a perfect bed for the reader to flip through it and enjoy it. You can lift it out of its box, of course, like an oyster, and it expands like a bellows, but having handled it a bit, it works fine either way.  For weeks, as the pressure to get through mounds of fiction kept growing, I found myself stopping and examining this work every time I was in the bookstore (always a refuge for me), and eventually, as I was dawdling amid a stack of stories, I picked up a copy. Despite its format, the book falls within the current price range for hardcover books, at $29.95. It reminds me of another remarkable, widely available work, British postmodernist B. S. Johnson's (1933-1973) 1969 novel The Untouchables, which consists of 27 sections held together by a removable wrapper and placed in a similar clamshell box. In the UK Secker and Warburg originally published this work, and Picador published the British reissue in 2008, while New Directions published the US version.



This is not, however, a book of poetry in any conventional sense, and to me represents the most experimental text Carson has produced. Even placing this alongside her very avant-garde work Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005), the radical quality of this text stands out. It reminds me both of an assemblage in the plastic art sense (cf. Duchamp, Man Ray, von Freytag-Loringhoven, Rauschenberg) and of one perhaps in the philosophical sense (Deleuze and Guattari), with the elements determined by the author, put in play by her, gesturing towards but defying a set genre (poetry), but really to be assembled and reassembled by the reader. To put it another way, Nox comprises texts to be made into a text, that must be made into them, to be transformed not into narrative, as Johnson had done earlier, or Julio Cortázar with his great novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), but into poetry, into a poem, an elegy.  In a sense, it embodies the root idea of translation, which involves the ritual carrying over of the remains of the dead (trans-latus, carrying across), and also the very idea of remembering, which is to say, re-membering, or putting together the pieces again and a being mindful of the deceased, of the past, of their shared history, yet here, the remembering isn't just the author's, for her brother, but a collaborative effort, requiring the reader's involvement.

As with all of Carson's work, every return to the text provides and turns up something new, and I am enjoying now slowly making my way through the lexicon entries and thinking about how often the issue of "night" (nux in ancient Greek, nox in Latin) turns up in the examples, and also how each relates to the right-side materials, the Zettel that create this sad, powerful and novel conversational elegy.


Carson's Nox (New Directions, 2010), in its box (yes, that's Daneeyal Mueenuddin's stellar collection at left)

The box open, and the text inside

The 3-dimensional, multicolor quality of the text

Some of Carson's artwork, in the text

An example of a lexicon entry on the left, and one of Carson's texts, her translation of the Catullus poem, on the right

The book displayed in accordion fashion

The back of the book

* * *

When I have related the following story, or my rather reduced sense of it, to people, they listen politely, and I wonder, do they think I'm making this up? Because really, how often do you hear people use the terms "literary agent" and "crack addict" about the same person, in the same sentence? Yet such is the truth: my first (and former) literary agent is now set to become rich (again) and famous (or more so than he was), by giving his own account of his drug-addled career of a few years ago. Let me be clear that when he was my agent, although he wasn't able to sell my work (I did it myself), he was absolutely lovely and kind and encouraging and fun to be around, and I never thought for a minute that anything was amiss, and I gather it wasn't. He represented others quite well (including the author I wrote about above). But only a few years later, after he'd hit the jackpot with star writers and big advances...well, you can read the article.  And I just may have my students do so next winter. I think.

New York Times: "Tale of a Life, Unabridged: A Book Agent's Descent and Ascent from the Ashes"

* * *

Lastly, speaking of books and new technologies, I found this short piece in yesterday's Guardian Online worth noting: at the Guardian Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer was advocating for the printed word over new technologies, and was especially calling for libraries, with print texts, in the shantytowns in South Africa (how many libraries could have been built and stocked with books for the billions spent on those World Cup stadiums?) and in similar places across Africa and the globe. In addition, she lamented the absence of bookstores as well in areas where black people were formerly segregated because of apartheid.  One simple point she made concerns the technological requirements for digital materials; she spoke about the batteries required for digital readers, but we might also press the issue of electricity too: without either, or affordable means to acquire and access them, what good is digital technology? If you can't charge your iPad or laptop, or access dial-up, broadband or wireless broadband, to what end are these technologies? (I did participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program a few years back, and while it did have its problems, it still promises a way around some of these issues.) Yet Gordimer's basic point is well-taken: books are one of the more robust technologies for learning that we have, and we should be wary of doing away with them, especially in the physical and material forms we now have, too quickly. She also noted that one of the most influential wriers for her was Marcel Proust and said that she'd read his magnum opus A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) three times, first, in English as a girl (!), then in French, and then again recently in French. Would that I could find the time and space in this world to do so, even in English!