The Wonder Show of the Universe

I sat down today to try to read some of Marcia Nardi's actually published poetry. I have tried before, but it was too off-putting. Maybe because the genteelly thin poems seemed somehow shamed by the excess of her letters to Williams, as if she was deluded in inventing more crafty modes to squirrel away unacceptable emotions. However today the poems seem strangely compelling--you can hear the resonances of her anger and poverty between the lines, the bitterness twisted up into a bittersweet rhyme, and a kind of Buddhist approach to emptiness and death (although she seems not to have the tools to sugar-coat it as such--this is before the Gary Snyders and the Allen Ginsbergs inform the scene--so there is an interesting unqualified vacillation between despair and resignation; after all, as her letters imply, she still very much wants to be a part of the world that has abandoned her; she has not, for all that, become detached from her desires).
One interesting discovery had to do with her odd repeated references to Thurston or Thurstons, used as one might say something like "the Shakespeares and Homers of our time." It was difficult to search on Google, given that our communal digital brain does not confer the same sort of esteem that Nardi seemed to have for this figure. It couldn't be Thurston Moore or Thurston Howell III for purely historical reasons. Perhaps some legendary robber baron or scientist whose obscure advance became posthumously revolutionary? When I saw this picture, I knew who she was talking about





























Knowing this, these lines become clear:

"And how that magic hat, invisibly
With rabbits filled,
That charmed her in her childhood will suddenly be
Some tattered schoolroom map of six by four
From which new Thurstons wonderfully draw
Real Aetnas"

+++++++++++++++++("Femelle de L'Homme")

"Your thought running from you
Just outside your window
At your call turning by running on
Because you have no face yet
Because it does not know you
Because you are the original Thurston
Waiting
For a world of his own making
In order to be born,
The creator creating to be created
The womb within a womb--"

+++++++++++++++++("Alone with a Poem")

In honor of Marcia Nardi, spend some time with unloved poetry.

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.

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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.)

Falls Cameo

Damn. Even though D. W. Griffith filmed his famous ice floe climax of Way Down East in Connecticut, I'm almost certain that this cutaway is the Passaic Falls . . . which makes perfect sense, since for a long time Griffith worked in the industry when it was still in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just down the road from Paterson.

The Poverty of the Image

The claims of imagism have always seemed to me hyperbolic. There is something more evocative in even the most cliched 19th-century sentence than in a clipped, retentive modernist line--which is sometimes only a self-caricature, more applicable in theory than in practice. But, my suspicion of some of the claims of imagism perhaps comes only when one conceives that the stripped-down poetic image gives more, not less of the reality to which it refers. I've been working through a lot of Bergson lately, and happened upon a good precis of his work, reminding me of the essential poverty of the image:

perception adds nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the image; the transition from image to pure perception is “discernment in the etymological sense of the word,” a “slicing up” or a “selection” (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson, selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living being therefore exhibits a “necessary poverty” (Matter and Memory, p. 38).

Williams' "things," then, as tied to ideas, can only be what Bergson calls "less than things," in that our relation to them subtracts an image of them (thus, they are virtual in the commonly defined way as the simulacrum, but not, for all that, are they purely subjective); subsequently, they return to the reservoir of accumulated images (thus, they become virtual in the more strictly Bergsonian sense of memory inaccessible to action). It is here where the third imagist principle--"as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome"--comes into play. When the image is reduced to data, it can more freely engage in speed, dynamism, mobility--thus, just as the modern VJ can create more lively compositions with YouTube crap than with lyrical HD footage (no pun on HD intended), the modernist reduced the world to fragmented images, which in themselves had little power, but which, when entering into the durational play of the art form, opened up powers inherent in some truer nature of time. (cf. the Bergsonism of Stein.) Yet, our ability to choose those images effectively, pulling them from the virtual to make them commensurable with present action inserts the qualitative, creative impact of the temporal interval on what would otherwise be a moment of pure, unthinking action. (cf. the Theosophical background of Pollock; and to continue and contradict my VJ comparison, more thoughtfully captured images may, then, instigate a more complex experience.) This notion of data that is useful for our bodies is a very powerful way to conceive how Paterson was composed along side of Williams' duties as a doctor, as well as the themes he explores dealing with the usefulness of certain forms of knowledge in pursuit of a "radiant gist."