In my ideal world, we would all have well-read psychotherapists

I'm back from the fun and festivities of LA, sitting here with Lester who is doing some post-shower preening. I thought I'd write my thoughts on the comments to my post below on Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion here instead of in the comments box.

Emotional nakedness in writing can be incredibly interesting. I’m also intrigued by Q’s comment about manipulation, sincerity, and vulnerability. The writing I love most takes risks—sometimes these risks veer more towards intimate emotional vulnerability and sometimes they’re more formal. The writing I like most often plays with some kind of a tension between these two things, and (again), Bellamy’s work is a good example of that—I’m thinking right now of The Letters of Mina Harker, Cunt Ups, and also her recent collection of essays, Academonia. Her subject matter is a choice, and I’d argue that she’s very much in control of it—it’s neither purely conceptual nor unregulated emotional nakedness. She chooses what to write about, what is edited out (or in), appropriates and changes texts, connects them to her own experiences, etc. I suppose I’m trying to say that her work is both emotionally and formally complex, and I see a lot of similarities between the concerns in her work and, for example, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or even Charles Bernstein’s poem "Sentences my Father Used." There’s a lot of personal detail and information in both, and all three writers have a deep commitment to understanding personal experience, and questioning how that experience can be and is represented. Nick Piombino is a writer often associated Language poetry and also a practicing psychotherapist. He’s spent much of his life exploring emotion. His book from Green Integer, Theoretical Objects, is one of my favorites.

I’ve also heard the story about someone suggesting that Bellamy see a therapist after reading her writing. In fact, I’m drawn back to that anecdote again and again. The suggestion that she see a therapist was certainly meant as an insult, and whenever I hear people talk about it they also seem to feel like it was an insult. However, in my perfect world, everyone would see a good psychotherapist. Thinking about, understanding and questioning the structures and narratives behind feelings and emotions doesn’t make those feelings and emotions less real or intimate—instead it can create other possibilities for expressing them and connecting to others. That’s probably another characteristic of the writing I’m most interested in: I like writing that investigates structures of emotion and experience with attention to social and cultural contexts. The poems I love most question their own assumptions and make me question mine.

The ways a poem might question its own assumptions and require its audience to question theirs really depends on the context of the poem. Avant-garde writing isn’t about a specific set of aesthetic moves. It’s about a risky investigation of assumptions—and that investigation involves taking risks in both the form and content of the poem.

Here’s a section from “Avant-Garde Deodorant,” an essay that always makes me feel cheerful. You can find in Mark’s book Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose.

“When it comes to deodorant, I’ve always preferred Gillette’s Avant Garde to either Academic Speed Stick or Bureaucratic Sure. But this may just be personal preference.

“However, the question of the forum, ‘What Does It Mean To Be Avant Garde?’ confuses me. Avant Garde is the deodorant I use, but I’m not at all sure how a person can be a deodorant.

“In any case, it sees clear that one uses a deodorant in order NOT TO STINK. After you take a shower, rub it back and forth under your arm, and the world’s your oyster, that is at least if you believe the commercials.

“Of course, the problem of whether or not you stink has a lot to do with other people. After all, for the most part it will be them, not you, who will notice what you smell like. So whether you stink or not is a matter of social mores…”

A risk in a poem is only a risk in context (a social context, a cultural context, a political context, a gendered context, a linguistic context, a psychological context, a historical context…usually some combination of all of the above and more). The term “avant-garde” itself is tangled up in a variety of contexts, and I’m not interested in stabilizing it.

Ron Sillman has a post which I'm sure you've all seen by now about Conceptual Poetics and Flarf. I'm very good at making connections, and very bad at distinguishing points of contrast, but I do think that Ron's (somewhat lighthearted, I think) suggestion that Flarf is to projective verse as conceptual poetry is to the New York School isn't bad. Although tonally I associate recent Conceptual work more with big Olsonian epics and Flarf with a casual, energetic line and a way of recording daily or seemingly unimportant information in a Frank O'Hara kind of way.

I was also thinking about the footnote to Ron's post:

"From my perspective the great “tragedy” of langpo is that there were no other seriously contesting approaches to poetry. Actualism, which I’ve written about before, dissipated after the death-by-alcoholism of Darrell Gray, and the NY School, gen 3, was never interested in working out its relationship to other poetics, period. Everyone else was pursuing the isolate mode of individualism, still the most popular (and futile) option."

I think of New Narrative in San Francisco and 3rd generation New York School as being the other serious contesting approaches to poetry relative to langpo. But it's true that I can't think of any particular poetics statements. But it's also true that there's a lot I haven't read. Can anyone think of/point me towards something (and by something I mean a piece of writing) that might be an articulated poetics from either group?

Laura Glenum's Hounds of No

We're in the midst of a slight heat wave here on the coast. The guy I buy bread from at the farmer's market told me he thinks the strange weather is a sign of the End of Days, and also of global warming. "It's never colder in Escondido than it is in Carlsbad," he said. I told him that when the oil runs out and the apocalypse comes, I'll be in good shape with my bicycle. He laughed and said that I could ride up into the clouds and away from the horsemen.

So, in light of that discussion about the apocolypse, I thought I'd post my reading notes about Laura Glenum's The Hounds of No. Again, these are reading notes, not a full-fledged review. It will take several days to weed out the typos. I find that when I think "review" I'm unable to say anything useful. So, I write "notes" which later become "essays" or "reviews." So, on to the notes:

I've now actually read Laura Glenum's The Hounds of No (instead of just looking at it and reading every other poem and then skipping to the back to read the end). I really want to like this book. In theory, it's got everything I love:

macular holes, mucus, aliens, pigs, corpses, ovaries, aborted fetuses, sperm, aliens taking over bodies and exploding (again, with lots of mucus), bodies that explode (even without being surrogate alien parents), insects, S&M, parts of bodies (both human and non-human), doll houses, museums, dioramas, tableaux, Victorian wigs...

And more.

This book resonates with all the Modernist literature most dear to me: Mina Loy's "Pig cupid rooting his rosy snout in erotic garbage," for example, or practically every love affair in Djuna Barnes Nightwood. Maybe even H.D's Nights for it's masochistic and symbolic order that finally doesn't lead anywhere definite--"Two straight lines run into infinity." There's even a bit of Breton's Nadja here, although she shows up as something like an exploded mannequin, and the trail left by her plastic body parts doesn't lead any where sacred (even in a profane way).

I like the camp in this book, I appreciate the very obvious critique of female objectification, I like the fact that Glenum seems to care about what both Freud and Lacan have to say about the world (I think this is the first book I've read that quotes from Dora) and is able to critique them without shunning them completely.

In short, this book has many of the concerns of the Feminist avant-garde Modernists I mentioned above, and also New Narrative (There's a lot to unpack in that statement.)

And yet I'm not howling with ecstasy. Which puzzles me. Hounds of No is working with concerns with which I am, um, deeply concerned, but it also feels very familiar. Point #6 of Glenum's "Manifesto of the Anti-Real," is this:

"To be Anti-Real is not to be Surreal. The achievement of Surrealism lies in displacing correspondences, in the poem not arriving. In the Anti-Real, all assumptions are disabled, too, with one difference: the Anti-Real displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence."

Sound's good. But Surrealism is interested in violence, too. Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror is all about violence (and evil, and grotesque bodies, and how when you push these things far enough they become strangely beautiful and, dare I say, sacred), n'est pas? Although I guess he was really pre-Surrealist; they claimed him posthumously, right? I suppose pushing profanity until it becomes holy is a kind of arrival. And the heroine in H.D's Night does arrive at the bottom of a frozen lake, but the text doesn't have anything grand to say about it, except for the fact that the suicide is annoying and puzzling for everyone else still alive, so the text opens up again without arrival.

Surrealism isn't Feminist, of course. In many Surrealist poems, women are sacred entry points to the divine (often very literally) or guides to the mysteries of the universe. They show up naked in the woods at night, or they are lovers like Nadja who embody all that is mysterious, dark, violent (and, you guessed it, sacred) about the night cityscape. A cunt is great as long as it's imaginary. It's been a while since I looked, ahem, at Louis Aragon’s Le Con D’Irene, but still.

Ok. So I like The Hounds of No, but it's finally a little too neat for me to love it. The poems know their contexts--the grotesque, Christianity (which I haven't discussed), Surrealism and psychoanalysis and Feminist critiques of both, nods to critiques of post 9/11 politics--but I'm not sure the language went far enough for me. Let me try to be specific. The moves are really good, but they felt familiar. I keep thinking about Kathy Acker's Kathy Goes to Haiti :

"Is he your husband."
"No. I don't have a husband."
"Listen, you don't understand how things are in Haiti. Women in Haiti don't go around alone."
"What about the women who aren't married. Are there any women who aren't married?"
"They live with their families."
"It's not like that in the United States."
"You can't go to Jacmel alone. You have to have a boyfriend."
"But I don't want a boyfriend. I want to be alone."
"If you don't have a boyfriend, the driver of the Jeep'll become your boyfriend."
"You mean he'll rape me?"
"No. No. There is no violence in Haiti. Anybody can do anything they want in Haiti."

There's nothing formally crazy about that passage, and it's not fair to compare poetry to fiction, maybe, but that passage is super creepy and funny and it plays will all kinds of familiar problematic racial and gender stereotypes and fantasies. The last line makes me laugh and leap out of my skin. I'm not leaping out of my skin with Hounds of No. Maybe because its form creates distance between the reader and the text, and it does so on purpose. And "distance" isn't a code word for saying "it is experimental and uses enjambment and disjunction etc," although it does all of those things and I like all of those things. It's probably more of a code word for "performance," something else I like, especially when thinking about gender.

That doesn't quite describe what I mean when I say that Hounds of No is a bit familiar and that the language was good but didn't go far enough. But I'll have to stop here. I need to eat an early dinner so that I'm not sluggish during yoga this evening.

Maybe part of the problem is that I wasn't raised as a Christian--I've never even been baptized. I enjoyed the performance in Hounds of No, but I think I'd like to feel more threatened by it.