Monday, September 5, 2005
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Contests and Communities
Ron Silliman remarks that poetry contests "substitute an administrative social context for poetry in the place of a community one...To win a contest generally is to announce that one as a poet does not come from any community."
"Community" here is something analogous to being a member of a poetry "scene," though Ron notes (as I would) that membership in such a scene can be determined by geography, aesthetic, or even race.
It's that last type of community that interests me here. Because when Ron characterizes contest-winning as a kind of rejection or abadonment of community, I think immediately of a moment that is often seen as a breakthrough for Asian American poetry: Cathy Song's winning the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1982. (Asian American prose has a similar "coming of age" story, with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior winning the National Book Critics' Circle award in 1978.)
For many Asian American writers and critics (see, for example, Garrett Hongo's introduction to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America), Song's winning the Yale contest was a moment of recognition and validation for the Asian American poetry community. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that the visibility Song's award gave to Asian American poetry helped create the flourishing Asian American poetry community we see today, since it gave younger writers who might have been working in isolation an example, an awareness that other Asian American poets were out there and finding success.
If we follow Ron's argument, though, Song's contest victory ought to be seen not as a great victory for Asian American poets but as a kind of betrayal of Asian American poetry: to be named a Yale Younger Poet is to declare oneself part of no community, Asian American or otherwise.
There's certainly something to that. To read Song's poetry of the early 1980s is to realize what a departure it is from the vast majority of Asian American poetry of the 1970s--much of which was a poetry of explicit political engagement, raw emotion, and archetypal sweep. Song's sensibility, in contrast, is pointedly lyric, focusing less on Asian American social realities than on the inward states of a sensitive and somewhat detached observer. It might be too easy to assert that such poems turn away from "the community," but in the context of the early 1980s, as a younger generation of Asian American writers began to come of age and seek opportunities beyond "movement" literature, it's not entirely inaccurate.
The paradox, though, is how a book that looks like a departure from the inside of a community looks like an arrival from the outside. While Song's poetry didn't look much like what other Asian American poets were doing at the time, it was consonant enough with "mainstream" practice to be seized upon as "representative" Asian American writing--opening the door for other Asian American lyric poets of the 1980s, from Garrett Hongo to David Mura to Li-Young Lee. In Ron's terminology, I supposed we'd have to say this is a transition from a "social" Asian American poetry community to an "administrated" one, mediated by MFA programs, trade presses, and academic recognition.
Indeed, it would be hard to argue, at least in the very narrow and local sense in which Ron uses the term "scene," that there is now anything like a single community of Asian American poets. (The one exception might be the activity surrounding the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, although I've never sensed that institution--as valuable and necessary as it is--producing anything like a scene or a coherent aesthetic.) We can now speak of "Asian American poetry" as a broad and abstract project, going on all across the country in many different venues; we cannot speak of it as a social community, a network of peers forging their own standards and their own aesthetic. Whether that's good or bad, it's a vision of Asian American poetry that began with one poet winning a contest.
"Community" here is something analogous to being a member of a poetry "scene," though Ron notes (as I would) that membership in such a scene can be determined by geography, aesthetic, or even race.
It's that last type of community that interests me here. Because when Ron characterizes contest-winning as a kind of rejection or abadonment of community, I think immediately of a moment that is often seen as a breakthrough for Asian American poetry: Cathy Song's winning the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1982. (Asian American prose has a similar "coming of age" story, with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior winning the National Book Critics' Circle award in 1978.)
For many Asian American writers and critics (see, for example, Garrett Hongo's introduction to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America), Song's winning the Yale contest was a moment of recognition and validation for the Asian American poetry community. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that the visibility Song's award gave to Asian American poetry helped create the flourishing Asian American poetry community we see today, since it gave younger writers who might have been working in isolation an example, an awareness that other Asian American poets were out there and finding success.
If we follow Ron's argument, though, Song's contest victory ought to be seen not as a great victory for Asian American poets but as a kind of betrayal of Asian American poetry: to be named a Yale Younger Poet is to declare oneself part of no community, Asian American or otherwise.
There's certainly something to that. To read Song's poetry of the early 1980s is to realize what a departure it is from the vast majority of Asian American poetry of the 1970s--much of which was a poetry of explicit political engagement, raw emotion, and archetypal sweep. Song's sensibility, in contrast, is pointedly lyric, focusing less on Asian American social realities than on the inward states of a sensitive and somewhat detached observer. It might be too easy to assert that such poems turn away from "the community," but in the context of the early 1980s, as a younger generation of Asian American writers began to come of age and seek opportunities beyond "movement" literature, it's not entirely inaccurate.
The paradox, though, is how a book that looks like a departure from the inside of a community looks like an arrival from the outside. While Song's poetry didn't look much like what other Asian American poets were doing at the time, it was consonant enough with "mainstream" practice to be seized upon as "representative" Asian American writing--opening the door for other Asian American lyric poets of the 1980s, from Garrett Hongo to David Mura to Li-Young Lee. In Ron's terminology, I supposed we'd have to say this is a transition from a "social" Asian American poetry community to an "administrated" one, mediated by MFA programs, trade presses, and academic recognition.
Indeed, it would be hard to argue, at least in the very narrow and local sense in which Ron uses the term "scene," that there is now anything like a single community of Asian American poets. (The one exception might be the activity surrounding the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, although I've never sensed that institution--as valuable and necessary as it is--producing anything like a scene or a coherent aesthetic.) We can now speak of "Asian American poetry" as a broad and abstract project, going on all across the country in many different venues; we cannot speak of it as a social community, a network of peers forging their own standards and their own aesthetic. Whether that's good or bad, it's a vision of Asian American poetry that began with one poet winning a contest.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Contributors' Notes: Yes or No?
Here's a question for everyone: Should poetry mags have contributors' notes? You know, those little things in the back pages that say, "So-and-so's poetry has appeared here, here, and here; he/she teaches at the College of Wherever and lives with her/his two dogs."
I ask because neither of the two journals I'm currently reading (The Hat and New American Writing) have them, and I'm wondering if this is a trend or something.
I've always found such notes vaguely irritating and feel like a moron on the few occasions I'm called upon to compose one. But I'll grant that they do serve a few purposes. They tell you something about a new writer you might like. They tell you where else you can find that writer's work. They give you some context for what's otherwise a set of disembodied texts. (Ron made this point a few weeks ago.) They can tell you a biographical fact that illuminates the work. They show you a web of connections between people in a journal that can explain why Poet X and Poet Y are next to each other.
And I can think of just as many reasons why they're awful. They all sound the same. They're show-offy. They're like posting a resume at the end of an aria. They emphasize the most crass and careerist aspects of being a poet (I went to school at the right places, publish in all the right places, and have a better job than you; I went to the same school all the other people in this magazine did and that's why we're being published together).
All these apply, of course, to the conventional bio note. There's the subgenre of the funny bio note, of which SHAMPOO is one of the more entertaining examples; these can keep the whole enterprise from taking itself too seriously, or even act as an extension of the poem.
So is the note on its way out? Is dropping contributors' notes an egalitarian act? a demand to focus on the text itself? Or does it hide the matrix--fetishizing publication even further by erasing the way the authors got there?
I ask because neither of the two journals I'm currently reading (The Hat and New American Writing) have them, and I'm wondering if this is a trend or something.
I've always found such notes vaguely irritating and feel like a moron on the few occasions I'm called upon to compose one. But I'll grant that they do serve a few purposes. They tell you something about a new writer you might like. They tell you where else you can find that writer's work. They give you some context for what's otherwise a set of disembodied texts. (Ron made this point a few weeks ago.) They can tell you a biographical fact that illuminates the work. They show you a web of connections between people in a journal that can explain why Poet X and Poet Y are next to each other.
And I can think of just as many reasons why they're awful. They all sound the same. They're show-offy. They're like posting a resume at the end of an aria. They emphasize the most crass and careerist aspects of being a poet (I went to school at the right places, publish in all the right places, and have a better job than you; I went to the same school all the other people in this magazine did and that's why we're being published together).
All these apply, of course, to the conventional bio note. There's the subgenre of the funny bio note, of which SHAMPOO is one of the more entertaining examples; these can keep the whole enterprise from taking itself too seriously, or even act as an extension of the poem.
So is the note on its way out? Is dropping contributors' notes an egalitarian act? a demand to focus on the text itself? Or does it hide the matrix--fetishizing publication even further by erasing the way the authors got there?
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Noelle Kocot: The Raving Fortune
I first read Noelle Kocot in the first issue of Lungfull I ever picked up. My immediate sense was that her poem ("Palm Sunday, 1998") didn't belong there. I mean, I could see certain surface resemblances between it and the other poetry in the journal, but the differences were striking: it had an explicitly religious theme; it was formalist (a loose terza rima); and most importantly, it had a baroque diction, a way of nesting metaphor within metaphor--yet deployed casually and extravagantly, as if someone had crossed Kenneth Koch with Hart Crane:
This difficulty of placement seems to be the story of Kocot's career thus far. What attention she's received seems to have been from the avant-end of things, but the reviews are a bit mixed; it's not at all clear she fits in with that body of work, or that she even wants to. David Hess's review of Kocot's first book, 4, has some caustic words for the mode of production ("No judge should be allowed to put his name on the cover of a book") but allows that there's much in the book that is "amazing" and "astonishing." Still, he's still not quite sure what to make of the whole thing:
The notices of Kocot's most recent book, The Raving Fortune, seem to follow much the same pattern, emphasizing those elements of Kocot's work that are most consonant with the zaniness of current post-New York School practice. Joy Katz's slope review describes a book I can barely recognize as Kocot's: it's "exuberant" and "funny," full of "canvas sneakers" and "UFO pictures" and as "crazily intense as a porno-movie orgasm." Jordan's review in the Village Voice is far more sensitive to the book's polarities, but still finds Kocot's primary sensibility in her humor:
Take, for example, "Beginner's Mind and Purple Plants," a poem from The Raving Fortune that's "Dedicated to the artists of my generation":
It's the final lines of the poem that are the most characteristically contemporary:
A thought interrupts. A draggy riverYou can see what I mean about Crane: that final sentence is held together by what Crane would call the logic of metaphor, as one abstraction ("the hour") is literally split into a series of further abstractions, which paradoxically become so palpable they develop "edges" of their own. There's something bravura about this rhetoric, which is always running along the edge of bombast or ridiculousness, always threatening to fall apart under its own weight, just as it threatens to do in Crane; and like Crane there's a certain melodrama correlated with that rhetorical excess, one that takes itself so seriously you can't believe it could be serious.
Runs under a cloud of power.
There will be signs, all right. The Giver
Of time and anecdote splits the hour
Into years that hone
Their edges on the edges of a rumor.
This difficulty of placement seems to be the story of Kocot's career thus far. What attention she's received seems to have been from the avant-end of things, but the reviews are a bit mixed; it's not at all clear she fits in with that body of work, or that she even wants to. David Hess's review of Kocot's first book, 4, has some caustic words for the mode of production ("No judge should be allowed to put his name on the cover of a book") but allows that there's much in the book that is "amazing" and "astonishing." Still, he's still not quite sure what to make of the whole thing:
Too often I feel as though she’s leading us away from the edge (where the poetry usually is) to a comfort zone where meanings, differences and conflicts get tied up and resolved in imaginary moments that I want to believe in but can’t, which is strange since I share many of the transcendence-desiring tendencies in her poetry.What's interesting, though, is that David concludes that Kocot is primarily a comic writer, at her best in her late-New York School/McSweeney's-style sestinas and the like; Cal Bedient's brief notice of the book in Boston Review proceeds from much the same assumption, although Bedient decides that Kocot is a bad comic writer, an "over the top" example of the "late adolescent zest" that's plaguing our avant-garde.
The notices of Kocot's most recent book, The Raving Fortune, seem to follow much the same pattern, emphasizing those elements of Kocot's work that are most consonant with the zaniness of current post-New York School practice. Joy Katz's slope review describes a book I can barely recognize as Kocot's: it's "exuberant" and "funny," full of "canvas sneakers" and "UFO pictures" and as "crazily intense as a porno-movie orgasm." Jordan's review in the Village Voice is far more sensitive to the book's polarities, but still finds Kocot's primary sensibility in her humor:
Her contemporaneity is more deliciously off when she uses Snuffelufagus as the end word in a sestina, announces that "Long Black Veil" was her shower song, or writes an ode to the person who, during a subway bomb threat, pickpocketed her Tao Teh Ching.I don't mean to say that Kocot isn't funny, or that she doesn't display the kind of self-consciousness that's come to define experimental practice. But the irony of this reception, I think, is that it's precisely these traits that Kocot's trying to slough off in pursuit of what she sees as deeper goals. The goofy, good-natured surface is, in this case, just that--a surface--one that's perhaps inevitable for a poet of Kocot's time and place (and that marks her for experimental writers as one of their own) but that she's not entirely comfortable with.
Take, for example, "Beginner's Mind and Purple Plants," a poem from The Raving Fortune that's "Dedicated to the artists of my generation":
We eat ice cream at the cerulean zoo,As in much of Kocot's work, there's an instability of tone here that makes it hard to know how to read this: are Kocot and her ice-cream-eating peers delightful flaneurs or laughable decadents? I'm guessing the latter, because the pure pleasure of the opening line quickly gives way to what sounds like guilty moralizing. There's a grab bag of effects here, some of which I might call post-avant (the embrace of mass culture [ice cream, zoo, cheap velour], the show-offy vocabulary), some not (the leaning on an adjective ["I hold you up, libational"], the aphoristic tie-up); but there's also a clear trajectory from the silly to the serious.
While saltimbanques siphon the wheat of the whale.
Live wire/wild card, I hold you up, libational,
The dangling factor in a cheap velour equation.
A parade of shiny numeric gestures
Where we become breathless and call it busy.
It's the final lines of the poem that are the most characteristically contemporary:
The waffle building--it looks so small tonight.This is the porno-movie book Joy Katz read; it's the section Matthew Rohrer jumps on for his blurb ("[Kocot] finds poetry in everything. Even in The Jeffersons' Weezie"). But what is Kocot really doing with these pop-culture references? The attitude doesn't seem to be one of playful nostalgia, or of exploring the possibilities of commodified language; instead it's the pathos of a dead end, puncuated by Kocot's mock-serious footnotes ("The planet Dagobah is the swampy green planet in The Empire Strikes Back where Yoda trains Luke Skywalker to be a Jedi Knight"), which deflate any idea that these references reflect some kind of common experience. For Kocot that last line is an index of impoverished expression, a question that is some kind of degraded Ubi sunt--something we don't have the language to ask anymore. Kocot lives in our language but hates being there, suspicious of its pleasures:
The planet Dagobah shimmers in the sky.
O where are Chrissy and Weezie and Tootie and Gabe?
And I do not want the mineral water.Kocot's pyrotechnics are, even for her, a distraction from what she really seems to be trying to get to:
I do not want the green green lime.
In all of this, I'm trying to think of what you love,If I'm reading David's review right, this would be an example in Kocot of just plain bad writing, where the language turns sentimental and cliched--away from the razor's edge of experiment. But what if we took these moments in her poetry as seriously as she seems to? What if we take seriously the religious (indeed, specifically Catholic) imagery and yearning in her poems, her desire to reanimate seemingly worn-out abstractions? What if the verbal gymnastics are a kind of throat-clearing, exhausting language and getting it out of the way so we can talk about love and God again? That, I think, would give us a very different kind of poet, one whose relationship to the avant-gardism of her generation would be more critical than complementary.
And how to give it freely, without pause,
How to get inside the tinctured moments splattering
The ghost ship's sails of when we're old.
SHAMPOO 5th Anniversary Celebration!
From SHAMPOO editor Del Ray Cross:
This is to happily inform you that I'm going to host an unprecedented 5th Anniversary SHAMPOO Celebration and Reading on:
Thursday, August 18 at 6:30pm
at GalleryOne San Francisco
Mezzanine Level of One Embarcadero Center
(same building as Embarcadero Cinema)
on the corner of Battery and Clay Streets
Expect to hear some poetry from Alli Warren, Bill Berkson, Brent Cunningham, Cedar Sigo, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Ronald Palmer, Stephanie Young, and more.
Please join us if you are in the Bay Area. If you're not able to be here, thanks again for keeping SHAMPOO on the shelves for 5 fantastic years!
Spread the word -- and stay tuned for issue 25 coming in September!
This is to happily inform you that I'm going to host an unprecedented 5th Anniversary SHAMPOO Celebration and Reading on:
Thursday, August 18 at 6:30pm
at GalleryOne San Francisco
Mezzanine Level of One Embarcadero Center
(same building as Embarcadero Cinema)
on the corner of Battery and Clay Streets
Expect to hear some poetry from Alli Warren, Bill Berkson, Brent Cunningham, Cedar Sigo, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Ronald Palmer, Stephanie Young, and more.
Please join us if you are in the Bay Area. If you're not able to be here, thanks again for keeping SHAMPOO on the shelves for 5 fantastic years!
Spread the word -- and stay tuned for issue 25 coming in September!
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