No Socially Shared Metaphysic

Flux Factory has just released its schedule of free tours, parties, meetings, and readings to take place during its happening in Paterson this June. Among other things, I will be hosting Paterson reading group, with meetings and tours throughout June (download the schedule for dates and info.)
The purpose of Flux Factory is to use this month--in cooperation with inhabitants of Paterson--to conceive of a monument for the city. In conceptualizing some kind of urban monument, my two blogs collide. On "The Woonasquatucket Primitive," I already expressed my cynicism at the unchecked proliferation of monuments of all stripe in the Providence riverwalk area, in deference to the more modest interventions of an anonymous artist I recently discovered to be a homeless man. Will this Paterson monument be a "real" monument? Such a thing could provide some sort of sense of public meaning, even though, as Richard Serra pointed out in reference to his anti-monuments "there is no socially shared metaphysic." The last time I was in Paterson, we discovered a depressingly perfunctory tombstone behind chainlink fence commemorating the underground railroad: at the very least, something like this should be given the dignity that is misdirected onto the Lou Costello statue. But a monument is surely a luxury, and perhaps would even be construed as a sign of corruption or frivolity in a city like Paterson, which would be better off investing in the future than the past. It has been suggested that Flux buy a cheap house for urban youth programs. Or, in the end, given that they call themselves "flux," the happening itself could be a kind of dematerialized monument, based on the heightened interactions of people who would not normally have met. The impulse to memorialize in Paterson will undoubtedly meet with a score of paradoxes and ironies. In fact, this preference for future growth over historical past is perhaps based on a false distinction. As Robert Smithson pointed out, New Jersey is precisely the place where the future fails, and its landscape memorializes the ruin of impossible utopian projects.

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy 2

When I first went to Paterson about a year ago, I was struck by the absence of any trace of William Carlos Williams. No monument, no mention in the various “Visitor’s Guides to Paterson” outside the Cultural Center (it was 6 AM on a weekend, so I must admit that I didn’t go in the Cultural Center, but my guess was that inside there was no undue reference to the doctor.) The best I evidence I could find was a place called “Doctor’s Cave Lounge Go-Go Girls.”
What I did come upon was bronze statue of Lou Costello. The statue seemed to be language’s bronze cheer to poetry. The star of films like Buck Privates, Pardon My Sarong, Here Come the Co-Eds, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would have more cultural importance to Paterson than the man who wrote a modernist epic poem about it. Not that the readers of this poem haven’t returned the favor. After all, most poets I have talked to have either never visited the actual place, or if they have, they have not expressed any desire to return, since the poem itself provides better returns on revisiting. But the question that immediately comes to mind is, what really was the better poem . . . Paterson or Who’s On First?? Or maybe, we should instead ask, what was the most influential. Was Who’s On First? a gateway drug for poets like Charles Bernstein, the Henny Youngman of Language Poetry, who wrote “Who’s on first? . . . Only the real is real” (“Whose Language”)?
Or take this passage (please), from Paterson, which seems to deconstruct the question and the pronoun, oscillating between it and I, in ways that are not foreign to Costello’s abuse of “who,” “what,” and “I don’t know”:

Who is younger than I?
The contemptible twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom the dirt
recently gave up?
. . .
A mere stick that has
twenty leaves
against my convolutions.
What shall it become,

Snot nose, that I have
not been?
I enclose it and
persist, go on.

Let it rot, at my center.
Whose center?
I stand and surpass
youth’s leanness.

My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots? (30-31)

[12/2/06 correction: however, later I did find Williams made it onto the timeline inside the Cultural Center, along with Allen Ginsberg, and Al Tangora, "World's Champion Typist."]