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January 16, 2010

Entry 06: Sylvia Plath’s Collage

Sylvia Plath, collage, 1960.

Like many who identified with the epochal chasm between The New American Poetry and mainstream verse of the 50s and 60s (whose benchmark anthology was Hall, Pack, and Simpson’s New Poets of England and America), I have been skeptical about Sylvia Plath; the cult of her suicide; the Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman quadriviate; and any kind of confessionalism. As mainstays of workshop writing, these figures set in place terms for the personal lyric that is as close to a norm for verse culture as we have had—to the point that it becomes a cultural norm. But in the period since Plath’s mainstream and feminist reception in the 60s and 70s, much has changed. Lyric poetry has come under pressure from Language writing, and revisionist contextual and  gendered readings have opened up Plath’s poetics, allowing one to see her negativity as critical and cultural, not simply formal and expressive.

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January 14, 2010

Entry 05: Criticizing the Poet/Critic

In today’s mail came the current Critical Inquiry (36, no. 2; Winter 2010), which I earlier noticed would contain an essay on George Oppen (John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen”). I had been looking forward to that discussion with interest, in terms of Oppen but also of where poetry criticism seems to be going in CI, after some recent questionable efforts. “Poetry” itself is still a tarnished critical category, with the New Lyric Studies and Conceptual Writing failing to provide direction.

Flipping through, as one might likely do, scanning footnotes and catching the drift, I came up short at the penultimate paragraph: a strained mention of my Constructivist Moment in the service of—what point? That the split between Oppen’s poetics of “integrity” and his Left politics remains problematic, pointing to a tendency in American poetics to presume a convergence of politics and form that collapses under scrutiny? This is the quote:

The fantasy entertained by Barrett Watten of an American “constructivist moment” seeks to arrogate William Carlos Williams and Vladimir Mayakovsky as dialectically linked forefathers for Language Poetry. Watten seems ignorant of the two poets’ meeting in an apartment in East Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village on 19 September 1925. Mayakovsky’s reading was a profound experience for Williams, according to his biographer—a touchstone for epic revolutionary art exposing the bombast of Carl Sandburg, even if its influence cannot be discerned directly in Williams’s poetry. But Williams continued to publish both poetry and prose through the Depression and the period of the Cultural Front . . . . (237–38).

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January 12, 2010

Entry 04: Computer Visualization

One should inscribe the letter A on the heart of one’s shadow.
[Next], without blinking, one should gaze fixedly at the latter A [drawn] at the heart [of the shadow],
And focus one’s awareness upon [the letter A].
Then, once the eyes have grown numb [through strain],
One should look up into the center of the cloudless sky,
At which time one’s own form should become visible in the sky.
One should then know that if the head and body of this [reflected image] are intact, and [the image] is pale in colour,
This is an auspicious sign that there will be no obstacles and that one will not die [imminently].

—Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Gyurme Dorje (159)

GLOSS: in the midst of computer malfunction, visualization exercizes restore a sense of well being. Computers are machines for visualization exercizes, but these must not be accepted as automatic. The letter A stands out beyond the dysfunctional interface. One should stare at the computer until the eyes grow numb and the screen itself disappears. When the screen disappears, one’s own form is made visible. This is the letter A on the heart of one’s shadow.

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January 7, 2010

Entry 03: Mala cosa

This entry takes the place of a previous one, which turned out to be a gateway for malware. I wanted to undertake a small conceptual project, after posting Asa’s logo of Detroit “rising from the ashes,” of searching for the words “deterritorializing Detroit” and putting up the results, for use later perhaps. I did so, and listed the top ten entries, with descriptive copy: theory and techno, Arab Detroit and hiphop, globalization and Fordism were among the links.

The next morning I clicked on one, a theory blog that connected Deleuze and Guattari with Detroit techno. I checked a music site for Drexciya, a techno group from the 90s that has since disbanded—this was the entry point for the malware, which crashed the firewall and set up a fake virus protection program that simulated a virus scan, posted the results, and demanded payment as protection from further threats. Every action I took to bypass it resulted in an error message that said “program infected” or produced another popup.

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January 4, 2010

Entry 02: I wanted to cite a poem . . .

Timed to coincide with the recent meeting of MLA in Philadelphia, a three-hour symposium to develop “best practices” of Fair Use in the citing of poetry was organized by the Poetry Foundation on 30 December, at the Franklin Institute. A notably expert group of poets and critics, led by a Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property lawyer, sought consensus (and divergence) around issues of the citation/appropriation of poetry in critical and creative works and the degree of protection that should be afforded to published, unpublished, and archival material. The process will continue, with the eventual goal of establishing recommendations for Fair Use in citing poetry that would encourage, rather than exploit in various forms of cultural profit-taking, public critical discussion of poetry.

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January 1, 2010

Entry 01: Site Construction

From its launch in January 2010, this site will continuously add new content: writings, events, critical and cultural theory, poetics, and links. The site architecture is built from motifs adapted from Herbert Bayer’s 2,000,000 Mark note produced for the Weimar Republic state of Thuringia—a prescient synthesis of social modernity, modern art, and financial disaster. Many thanks to Asa Watten for his artistic and technical expertise in making this project possible!

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