And Looked Our Infant Sight Away

Poor Jake, I thought at the time, but really: every new life is like the first fern after a forest fire, radically untouchable.

When I think about your visit back when he was nine days old, I get a little teary.

Contra beginnings, I was actually thinking about endings tonight. Endings of poems. I saw a PBS show about new research on "happiness," and the Princeton prof guesting spoke of people's inability to remember the duration of an emotional event: they mainly remember the ending, or their emotion at the ending.

This correlates brilliantly with people's experience of poems, of course. The ending is always overdetermined -- it drives me crazy. A reading John Ashbery did at MIT in 1997 (Dan Bouchard will remember this) of "Over 2,000 Ilustrations and a Complete Concordance" concluded with such a loud cliched sigh from the audience that in a fit of madness I wrote a term paper calling Elizabeth Bishop's soul "the damp gray of a Presbyterian church" -- !

I make a pact with you, Elizabeth Bishop. I have hated you long enough.

Did I really hate her? I hated the uses people made of her -- particularly in Boston.

Dark Times

I remember holding Jake in my hands for the first time and it literally was my hands because he fit into both my palms and needed no more and it was only days after the war began. I think for everyone America has changed deeply in the last few years and to bring a child into the world at that drastic turn must make it all the more real.

I don't agree with Duncan's isolation and I agree with you about people who don't vote. I just remember a pain in his being that was very palpable. I deep frustration that led him to a shutting down. Or that was my gut-level read of him.

Requirements for Interior Expensiveness

I drafted about five different replies to your post, Maggie, since my first impulse was to launch into arias-n-diatribes about Brown, classrooms, poetics, etc. etc. But I shouldn't get distracted. The refusal to watch the news, like the refusal to vote, feels too much like aristocratic dissociation to me. And this may not be a bad thing to save one's sanity. I'm interested less in saving my sanity than in not becoming a nihilist. I feel dangerously close some days. Everybody agrees we live in dark times; nobody can tell me how to comport myself in accordance with my nature. It's all about what side I'm on -- on the matter of God and Marx most of all. But I can't even commit to vegetarianism. I'm basically an aesthete without an adequate cultural context, chafing at having brought a child into this world where the only verities are power relations and the only certainty is death. Everybody I've talked to who dismisses this has no children of their own.

[5 minutes later] Maybe I just need to get back to nature?

Reply to Soft Bulletin

As an undergrad I had a Professor of German Poetry (Duncan Smith) who was a Marxist and had created the only exchange program between an East German University and an American one. He taught this unusual course where he didn't really care so much if we understood completely the words of the German lyrics. He more encouraged us to perform the poems for the class. At first this meant simply reading the poems out loud. He would have different people read the same poem and comment on the reading style and talk about what was missed by pausing or not pausing or accenting or not accenting in certain places. He believed we could understand just by hearing it correctly. By the time mid-terms came along we had to partner up and make projects out of these poems that became sensual experiences for the class. My friend Greta and I used Rilke's Orphues poem (of course, we were way into Spicer) and created some sort of blind labrynth for our class to walk through. The production involved dry ice. Another project (I can't remember what the point was exactly but I think it was connected to a Holderlin poem) involved a video we made of me walking on a winter beach with a metal detector. What I'm getting at is that Duncan refused to watch the news. He was probably the first person to show me that poetry was a way of looking. And to continue looking through poetry he stopped watching the news. In this he differed from my teachers who were actual poets. They seemed not so eccentric but studious practitioners. Duncan was more of a quirky uncle who gave you permission to play with poetry in a way that a writer wouldn't. For Duncan poetry was about creating a reality where everything was a poem. I remember him pointing out a way of seeing a particular matchbook as a poem. I don't know what I would think of him now that I am a skeptical self-conscious adult but there is a way that his class permitted us to really go head first into the existential questions posed by the lyrics we read. Or just by the act of reading poetry in this world. We really felt what was at stake in the poems. Philosophically and existentially. And this was directly related to the performance of them. The low-tech antics were crucial to freeing our imaginations to fully imagine what was posed by the reading. I remember being shocked when he told me he had several years earlier stopped following the news. He didn't read or listen to the news and he was frustrated with Postmodernism. He was in the Modern Culture and Media Department which was the Mecca of PoMo at Brown and he detested the way PoMo was debunking everything. I think I agree with him now more than I did then. There was a reverence he had for the poetry. He believed whatever motivated it was a real human (intellectual and emotional) need. It was not just about debunking ambigious syntax and coming up with the cleverest and most skeptical reading. It seems that rejecting the news was a way of rejecting a world view -- a skeptical world view. But often the poems he loved most were the ones that revealed a psychic fissure caused by the world outside the poem. He was one of the first people to point out to me that the German word for poetry "Gedicht" comes from the verb "dichten" which means to seal off. For instance if there is a draft in my room I get something to make my windows "dicht." A poem is something that is air-tight sealed-off from the outside. To dichten is to make something so. A poet is a Dichter. One who seals off. But over and over again he showed us in the poems that this wasn't true. There was always a fissure. It seemed that not knowing what was happening in the world was one way he tried to fend off many possible fissures.

A kind of soft bulletin

Creative Visualization – I may need some of that. If the flagrant immorality of the Iraq War weren’t enough to turn my hair gray, now we have 24/7 tsunami coverage, and the Mithridatic doses of agony I usually sip from others’ tragedies have passed the poison threshold, thanks to the new TV screens at the Prospect Park YMCA. There I am on the, what do you call it, “Elliptical” during a CNN broadcast of some little boy who held his sisters on his lap while they called “Mama” and drowned – and suddenly I’m like doubling over. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching this stuff? And yet there’s some “If I don’t watch it, who will?” existential despair about it all. A witnessing that may or may not be pointless.

Yesterday evening I accompanied my husband to his firm’s annual winter ball. We made small talk with a woman from Litigation and her date, perhaps the only African-American man in the room, whose savoir-faire struck me. Then the inevitable “What do you do?” revealed that he hosts a cable TV show. “We don’t have cable,” I said at one point, politely exculpating myself for not recognizing him. But my husband did, and said excitedly, “I just saw your show over Christmas, and you took a caller who complained that your guests are too conservative.” (Yes, he remembered that caller.) “Since the election, I feel the media are embracing conservatives—is this true? Is the media afraid of the Republicans?”

Of course not, the man explained: there were equal numbers of liberals and conservatives on the show, and the network employed a cadre of people just to keep statistical track of how many liberals, conservatives, blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. participated, so they could be balanced.

Steve pressed his question though, and the man did admit that since the Republicans did win a second term, they felt emboldened to argue their agendas more aggressively.... I grew more and more disengaged, staring off into the cavernous room with its massive pillars and chandeliers. His expressions, both facial and verbal, were of such a blandness that if this were a movie, his manner would scream *technocratic treachery*.

The conversation didn’t go anywhere, of course, because nobody was seriously going to challenge him. He was an insider; we were all elites, drinking champagne at a company event. Last September at my in-laws, I briefly saw another show on his network wherein a young author was giving a talk on why humanities departments were superfluous at public universities and should be abolished. I didn’t linger there, bearing witness to this atrocity, because it was going to give me a stroke. And I knew not wasting my money on cable TV was the right and good thing, and the money I saved by doing this would go toward books and the time I saved would go toward reading them, and this I would wish for everyone, categorical-imperative-like. But what cut through my moroseness last night was this: as this man and his date detached from the clique, walking away, he called back his parting shot: “And you really should get cable. It’s worth it.” This animated my drinking for the duration of the ball.

New Year, Rainy Friday

The California winter of rain is here, has been here, and gives the impression that it will never not be here. And I am here in the bedroom of a pleasantly empty house with the pup sleeping soundly at my feet. It seems that I my at last return to myself.

The year ended in a series of minor disasters that lasted weeks (inaugurated by the Republican win)and included four car breakdowns and $500 worth of repairs and a possible cancer diagnosis for the pup (that turned out to be nothing but an abscess cured by antibiotics but like the car it took several visits to professionals and a couple of break-downs to diagnose and over $500).

But I have hope for the coming year, especially with Percy's clean bill of health and the "Creative Visualization" book I got right before Christmas. I am imagining that everything is good, so that it will be good. Try it. It doesn't cost anything.

As for poetry, my friend Aaron Kunin called me the other day. He's on his way to Montreal for a few days and wanted to get in touch with a local writer. He's one of my favorite people to talk with. He and Ange. He's read every book and seen every movie and teaches classes like Color in Film. Not like the difference between Black and White and Color but the way a color or colors are used in particular films. He has several great poems in the 3rd issue of NO: A Journal of the Arts. My favorite goes like this:

Girl and Reptile

and girl turns toward
the accident with
an expectant look

as if it had been
a deliberate
attempt to gain her

attention (her tongue
wiping the shredded
inside of her cheek)

and would you eat the
apple (again she
finds herself on the

phone yelling at a
stranger) I would peel
and core the apple

yes little brother
(her face contorted
and her tongue pressing

against her cheek caused
it to bulge) you shall
have an apple too

The flatness of the language -- the cleanliness of the language -- doesn't take any attention away from the surrealistically banal scenario. Almost like a David Lynch domestic scene rendered in poetry. A private violence lurking beneath the surface, in the mouth. An incestuous Adam and Eve though the title implies that the boy is a different species. What if The New Yorker printed this on the same page as the latest Seymour Hersch article? Wouldn't poetry then be contemporary and relevant, finally, obviously so?

Good to be back.

-- M