Junk Shot 2! Jennifer Scappettone and The Eye of Disaster

(Junk Shot 2 continues our on-going conversation with Jennifer Scappettone on "The Poetics of Enormity")

Milutis: Given this poetry requires a lot of research, is there a sense of regret that such a signature is not enough, and that your filtration process leaves out material that could be used to educate or elucidate? Or does it? Again, maybe the issue is one of the perceived smallness of device: poetic versus, say, prose-journalistic. You’re at an interesting intersection between informational value and poetic value, which are many times seen as completely antithetical.

I notice, too, that your list of the comico-tragic solutions to the BP oil spill has the heading “a taste of regret.” Keeping the same sense of regret as above—the regret for what’s left out, for knowledge that cannot be framed because of constraints of temporality, medium, form—at least the first four terms in this list had the status of buzz-words, calculated as incantations of American can-do. Junk-shot. Corexit. Top-kill. Sea-Brat #4. How do we create our knowledge of an enormous event out of these arguably poetic terms? Or do they block knowledge? Similarly, there is the popular concept of the “talking-point,” which is another tool to wrench out meaning from an enormity. We could say that this phenomenon is something news media shares with poetry, if we think about talking points like “no ideas but in things.” You wouldn’t be able to play with that in "Poetics of Enormity," and activate an enormous dialogue with Williams in the bargain, if it hadn’t become this take-away line, and hence, ultimately, a kind of flat, unthinking piece of text passed around from agency to agency. So, are these blockages or do they have some enabling capacity? How do you conceive of what you call the “post-slogan?”

Scappettone (Sent March 15, 2011): I realize there is an alas pervading each snippet of the whole, now that you pointedly ask. The results of every stab at research into seemingly shapeless miasmata of data are bound to fall short of the sublime knowledge base necessary to address the current social, environmental, and speculative emergencies in a concrete fashion. I like your use of the term "signature," which however redolent of a predigital age, reminds us that we are after all still mere flawed human individuals, writing pieces that are in some way bound to ourselves, no matter how many operations we launch as artists to escape, kaleidoscopically, our own experience.

We suffer in fact from a superabundance of information and a deficit of knowledge. How do we trace the systemic triggers of such emergencies? We would need to perform an operation such as that of Dziga Vertov in the Kino-Eye newsreels, to trace the sources of the common hamburger in its bun back to the farms and the wheatfields and the people working there: to try clarifying the tracks of production in a context that forces us to lose our grasp on the path, umbilical, that yokes one source of nourishment or crisis to the next.

Since I began composing this answer, in bitter confirmation of the urgency of addressing such questions, an earthquake at sea has triggered a tsunami which has triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, of proportions that remain to be seen and clarified. I think about the memoirs of hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that I pored through when editing the translation of a collection aimed to halt nuclear development 15 years back, the most painful attention to language I've ever paid. All of the survivors of Hiroshima interviewed mentioned the Aioi bridge. The mothers, siblings, children that had been left on the other side. The water or food that had been isolated to the other side. The people jettisoning themselves into the water to seek relief from the pain of burning, floating. It was a shared point of trauma punctuating the whole hell of horrible memories resisting any form of organization or even elegy.

When I returned to the US after two years of living in Japan, I went to an exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Enola Gay bombing. It was astonishing. I had imagined that even if apology were lacking from such an institution, a taste of regret would pervade the whole. Instead, what resulted (apparently following a huge controversy, I later learned) was celebration sterilized of any trauma inflicted on the ground. One walked in to find the T-shaped bridge, the target of the bomb, captured as a still from a bird's eye view. Then the triumphal recording of the flight crew as it struck. The aestheticization of horror.*

One aspect of poetry as vocation is, it seems to me, to seek justice in the present or a redemption of history by forcing these radically disparate points of view to cohabit, if not fuse. To testify to the material fallout of actions, ours and those from "on high," with the cultural breadth that we are trained to file down little by little in the service of professionalism. The bridge in a poetic text of the sort I'm talking about becomes a focal point of concentration in an environment that is apocalyptically hybridized, yet which does contain a logic to which we can point.

Poetry can, moreover, confront interested obstructions of knowledge by using the language of obfuscation against itself, its jingles and buzz-words and slogans and spins—returning the control of knowledge in the form of the take-away line to the page or screen as a shape palpably displaced, deformed—so that the fog of rhetoric, triumph and advertising emerges as just that, rather than as common sense. I am exceedingly interested in the performative power of lyricism, of sonorousness; and this work, Exit 43, cobbles choral texts together out of the most self-contradictory material—the voices of Victorian poetasters, the EPA/Superfund, corporations, Alices—so as to create jarring rhymes that one can "buy" sonically, yet which beg further attention as material falling short of sense. I've structurally sampled the "nonsense" logics of Lewis Carroll in the service of this effort.

I do believe, ultimately, perhaps naively, in the utility of such work with language, which is highly specific. I don't reckon that information unshaped can convey meaning as knowledge. And journalism, however critical, needs to form a narrative even when none has arisen, and also responds to a political climate with which it must nearly always compromise. Hence poetry, "unsponsored."

*It isn't necessary for every document of history to include every possible point of view in order to be responsible to the truth. Years later, I went to an exhibit called "Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960," at the Brooklyn Museum. The fascination and dread surrounding the chemistry of biomorphic form in those years, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence emerging from the United States, was represented with remarkable clarity by these curators.

Junk Shot! with Jennifer Scappettone

On June 11, in the midst of the BP oilspill, Jennifer Scappettone delivered a talk at the Penn/Columbia Poetics Conference: Rethinking Poetics, that, to my mind was one of the few satisfying re-thoughts, and which she described as a "post-Paterson" intervention. Her "Poetics of Enormity" is part of a larger multimedia installation project Exit 43 and questions such key poetic concepts--old and new--such as particularity, ambience, materiality, that, emerging from Williams' attempt to capture the city, shudder in the face of the new "impossible objects"--whole ecologies catastrophized by corporate malfeasance. I will post my first question and her answer as part of a larger dialogue with Scappettone, to be posted in installments as a kind of "junk shot" to the flow of this blog, as it moves towards a foreseeable conclusion.

Milutis: Let's start with a hypothesis. Big poems are about big things (e.g. the epic), small poems are about small things (e.g. haiku). With Paterson, Williams would transform this tendency by using the small to get at the big, (but without the slight-of-hand of, say, Virgil talking about his apiary to describe a military panorama.) Williams works through and ultimately against devices like analogy--with various degrees of success--so that the small keeps its smallness, and the bigness of Paterson is an accumulation of encounters with these particulars rather than a synthesis (5 or 6 books of "clarifying" and "compressing").

So, in what you term a "post-Paterson" intervention,"Poetics of Enormity" (a piece-in-progress for the larger book/installation, Exit 43), you take on the issue of the big, of "enormity," in our current context. You start off "It seems the trouble is enormity," and later, make a pointed reference to Williams' attempt to understand something really beyond his powers of understanding; you rewrite his opening invocation as: "To make a start, out of enormity, and make it particulate, scattering the sum,/The poem a site for the restreaming of post-pastoral, post-Paterson fact in motion/as junk in the limbs."

Given your move from particulars to enormity, how do we START with enormity? What are the devices to get at this enormity? And, if this is an ethical position, is it somewhat quixotically or ironically so, or do you sense a path through the enormous?

Scappettone (sent January 6, 2011): The move away from a modernist—or modernist-cum-late-20th-century-creative-writing-workshop—focus on building a syncretic work out of particulars toward an aesthetic undertaking to confront a massive scale from the start is of course pointed (pointed through dispersion of focus, that is). While our immediate ancestors may have felt themselves to be laying the groundwork for a life of enhanced production, health, and leisure, we found ourselves mired in an epos that perceives itself to be unfolding in the eye of catastrophe, faced by the sublimity of unprofitable alterations in arrangements of resources and power: a widening gap between rich and poor in the face of dwindling provisions, environmental devastation and the invention of new diseases, the collapse of long-performative fictions of value, to take a few salient examples, and the violent conflicts that proceed from these conditions.

Starting from enormity requires a hell of a lot of research. No longer can the poet make a promising start, it seems to me, by pausing to meditate on the minor souvenirs or phenomena of the immediate moment without some sense of their complicity in the greater web of relations. Artists committed to intervening in sublimity as opposed to representing it alone need to take a stab at comprehending the totality of trouble or promise as it is embedded in the medium at hand: language, its structures of feeling and cognition, now and here but also, ideally, over time and across space. Comprehension of systemic workings would permit us to choose our subjects or objects carefully—since part of our trouble as producers is a superabundance of possible willing object/subjects, a need more astutely to search and sift through them, or at least to identify good reasons for reproducing the circumambient tsunami of information/stimuli. Devices for getting at enormity include web researches, naturally and inevitably, but also the obsolescing library, as it turns out our problems aren’t altogether new after all, though our presentism suggests as much. It seems important to include traces of the arduous research process within the work, to function like the drips of painterly epochs past, signatures of care/curation. I don’t see this aspiration, which is also an ethics, as ironic in the least, though perhaps it is quixotic.

The Uncontainable

This past summer, I talked to Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Kelly Writers House about her long-term engagement with Williams' Paterson particularly, and long-form poetic works in general. Her "life-poem" Drafts, described by Ron Silliman as "one of the major poetic achievements of our time," continues an engagement with and challenge to Williams' aesthetics; numbering close to 100, DuPlessis' Drafts are more open, polysemic, multiple, and provisional than perhaps Williams' could have let himself perform, but which, it seems, he dreamed in his own imperfect way. DuPlessis has also written critically about Williams in her book The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, which, like her poems, challenges generic considerations, and expands what the critical essay can be. (And by the way, listening to audio of her performances, available on PennSound is a really great way to start navigating her work).
I feel like this audio interview will be one of the last I will be collecting before attempting a reconsolidation of the various materials. As you can probably tell, the content for this blog has been steadily petering, with some renewals here and there, but nonetheless on the fade. It has always been a question for me whether any consolidation is worthwhile or advisable, which is why interviews like those below have been kept in as close to their rawest form (with some mild editing) because I have felt it is better to make them available during the process, rather than to wait and wait for an ideal form that never comes. What would be the ideal? There are so many objects that this blog can be translated into (so then, why not keep as blog?) In fact, there is an application now where I can press a few buttons, enter a few passwords, and voilà! the blog is "slurped" into a book. (This application here may be easier, all you have to do is enter the url impossibleobject.blogspot.com and see what it would look like without having to download any software.) Obviously, that option only would be some kind of conceptual parody of blog specificity, although it may be worthwhile as a textual trace--evidence, like performance photos, and ultimately useful in case Blogger decides to suddenly cease operations or their data gets wiped out in an electromagnetic singularity. Nevertheless, there will be at the very least a few more postings, including an interview (text only) with Jennifer Scappetone, before Impossible Object makes a leap into another medium or into the void.
The following interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis took place on June 10, 2010 in Philadelphia.
I heard this was a really bad poem: (4 min. 23. sec)
Nobody cared about Williams (or the long poem): (2 min. 51. sec)
Marcia Nardi and the lost women of the 50s: (7 min. 11 sec.)
This is the thing that can never be contained: (6 min. 02 sec.)
Unicorn versus plethora: (4 min. 42 sec.)
Paterson's opening passage: (3 min. 50 sec.)
Eros and plethora: (4 min. 26 sec.)
The triadic line, eros, rape: (4 min. 28 sec.)
Staggering identification with beautiful thing: (2 min. 45 sec.)
Language poetry and Paterson: (2 min. 51 sec.)
Visiting Paterson: (1 min. 30 sec.)

All Her Teeth Were Ideas

The other night, while reading "Berenice"--Poe's zombie thriller of dental surgery gone horribly awry--I was reminded of WCW's admiration for flowers with the power to break rock:
"Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel." Poe's wholly fictitious "Nubian geographer" serves as an authoritative stand-in for his own fascination with alternative geographies and other ultima thule. It may be that these territories are less exotic and closer to hand, as can be seen in a picture of grass growing up through curb concrete in an essay by Jonathan Skinner in the new eco language reader. This image, from Cecelia Vicuna's Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water, is an example of what he calls the "third landscape" of "critical corridors and buffer zones" (24) where there is a proliferation of growth that humans can't match to their system of needs. Accordingly, for him, the job of what one might call "ecopoetry" would be a poetics that "attend[s] to the untended as the untended, essentially leaving it alone" (46-7). Whether Asphodel's powers are actual (like the saxifrage) or metaphorical, I don't know enough to say. Ginsberg calls the Asphodel both mad and cultivated, Williams seems to use it precisely to reflect upon how things "tend" (towards the untend or unintend), and "the sea/which no one tends/ is also a garden." I'm dealing with my own "third landscape issues," since a lovely wild vine on my fence was mysteriously cut overnight--suddenly something seemingly "out-of-control" became a locus of variety of exterior forces. I won't go into the whole tangled narrative that evolved out of this intervention, but given that I'm in a weird intersection where I live, on the one hand, next to an inland forest, but on the other next to an airstrip and industrial zones, and, as well, in a neighborhood which has garden walks (which to me have always reeked of a form of neighborhood surveillance and control of landscape aesthetics), these mini-struggles are bound to occur. I can't even start to articulate how that constant image of the plume of oil coming up through the water in the gulf is impacting (no, beating up) my ability to conceptualize these issues. I have tentative plans to talk with Jennifer Scappettone about her work delivered at the Rethinking Poetics conference, which circulates around such issues. And maybe, also back to the gulf. Thalassa!