Entries published during January, 2024

January 27, 2024

Document 101: Loyal to Many Flags

And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.
—Laura Riding, “The Poet’s Corner

From Moscow, under conditions of global duress, comes the online publication of Flagii (Flags), double issue, numbers 16/17. Clicking on this link gets the issue, and for those without Russian, using Google translate or its equivalent yields a sense of the incredible poetic activity going on right now, with an intent to find “allies of any country.” Also breaching the gap are a number of texts with visual properties, in a selection introduced by Vladimir Feshchenko with work by Jackson Mac Low, Bernadette Mayer, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Hannah Weiner, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Susan Howe, and myself (“Introduction to the Letter T”). I am also represented by an interview with Vladimir Koshelev and a translation of a section of Under Erasure by Lisa Kheresh, linked here, as well as the note on a little-known collage by Sylvia Plath that I wrote about on this site in 2010 (here), with commentary in Russian (here). It is not only a real honor to be included in this work but an example of what we should be doing now, connecting across the greatest distances possible, aspiring toward the horizon of “this time we are both.” … More

January 21, 2024

Entry 57: Am I That Name?

COMPLETE RETRACTION!

I write this entry at a moment of reflection, ten years after being asked to write a series of weekly articles as guest poet/critic for the online journal Jacket2. This was offered and accepted in good faith; I would gladly accept such a task in a minute,  any time. Somewhat at a loss for where to begin, I took up the question of “presentism” in relation to the state of the present that was most compelling at the moment—a grim January freeze in Detroit, with its attendant affective states. This was ironic, as the distinction between presentism and historicism I was engaged in thinking through was propelling me toward the essays collected in Questions of Poetics—for some of my use of the term, click here. Let’s say the “presentism” at the moment was history at a standstill, wondering which way it would go—and what the consequences would be. Those consequences, it turned out, were immediate—a three-ring circus of attacks by designated officers of the poetic Left. Here, I am not naming names—but the triumvirate was ready and took the opportunity to stage a bloody attack on my public stance in the discourse of poetics. … More

January 5, 2024

Entry 56: A Poetics of Encounter

A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats

Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia 

“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”

In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trill­ing’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies. … More