To say that the transcendental is historically constituted amounts to saying that universality cannot be assigned to it; it is necessary to think of a particular transcendental. But after all, there is nothing more mysterious than what is collectively called a culture. — Guy Lardeau, “L’histoire comme nuit de Walpurgis”
In such manner Guy Lardeau invites us to contemplate a contradiction – the particular transcendental. Contradiction, because one of the attributes of the transcendental is held to be its universal grounds. Contemplation, because that is what the mind does, at least one committed to both a cognitive process and a mode of thought that goes beyond the simply analytical. One concept that may occur to us here is “strategic transcendentalism”: one holds a condition to be transcendental or necessary to perception itself for specific political or tactical purposes. Another phenomenon that may come to mind here is that of the lyric poem: the lyric poem is a construct capable of maintaining equilibrium among contradictions and as such is singly able to accommodate the needs of such a slippery imperative (“negative capability”). Surely the allure of the poem is partly this, and the concomitant promise of mystery without belief. Our texts are the living evidence of an ethics of ambiguity.
I positioned the transcendental lyric in like manner in my essay from the 1990’s “A Flicker At The Edge Of Things.” Things here — “here” variously meaning in what passes for my mind, the room in which I sit and write, America, the shifting continents — flicker, and poetry is still the flicker at the edge. What the language needs at any given moment shifts. The more things change, the more things change. You can never put your river into the same flume twice, because that would already be water under the bridge, and so on and so forth. A fluid foundationalism is always sensitive.
The particularly violent moment that provoked a necessary literary response in the years I started CCP was the Western recoil against the Arab and Islamic worlds. “Orientalism,” so utterly exploited by European colonial powers and so carefully dissected and exposed by the late Edward Said, found a new bloom of its own in the Bush Administration’s version of what we are at war against in the Islamic world. Paid pundits speak of a “clash of civilizations.” The White Man’s burden, which was to civilize the native, was reconstituted as the necessity to bring democracy to those in the Middle East yet too primitive to know this sacred form of government. We know all too well what violence has been unleashed in our names on the basis of these and other related ideological precepts. At the edge of things we watched with horror. In 2001 Andrew Joron wrote in his “The Emergency of Poetry”: “What good is poetry at a time like this? It feels right to ask this question, and at the same time to resist the range of predictable answers, such as: Poetry is useless, therein lies its freedom. Or, poetry has the power to expose ideology; gives a voice to that which has been denied a voice; serves as a call to action; consoles and counsels; keeps the spirit alive.” For Joron, none of these functions suffice. There is only one function that was efficacious. That was the lament. “The lament, no less than anger, refuses to accept the fact of suffering. But while anger must possess the stimulus of a proximate cause – or else it eventually fades away – the lament has a universal cause, and rises undiminished through millennia of cultural mediation. Unlike anger, the lament survives translation into silence, into ruins.”
For me Joron’s lament is resonant, at least of one phase of our writing under the current imperative. The other phase has involved a working with language that might undermine the nauseating dichotomies that underpin the justification of Empire, the clash of civilizations, and the erosion of civil liberties. Poetry is language, and in poetry false dichotomies can best be dissolved, since the false dichotomies themselves are only frozen language.
In my own “Apple Anyone Sonnets” I set out to write a series of poems using only English words derived from Arabic. Later that seemed a further segregation, and I collaged those materials with Shakespeare cut ups and rewrites — the name “Shakespeare” conjuring up the conservative pride and core of “English” — and I kept doing this until I had the “Apple Anyone Sonnets.”
Apple Anyone 5
Why is it my words always touch this particular?
I stay afloat on language I’ve plucked from Sufi summer,
my trysts with words the same one wooed, mascared, talced.
Though the lute of a genii is as outdated as last year’s atlas,
though a belated troubadour sings of checkmate move by move,
yet no monumental rock shall outlast these our silly constructs:
that which glints brightly in such tariffed compositions
is a gazelle among orange groves, a mecca in the mouth.
Here comes a tabby whose scratch will leave a lasting mark,
or else a taffeta from a quarter of town recently hit by bombs,
or all the cotton ever picked, the laborious wizard enslaved inside you.
Why is it my words always touch this one particular?
As the sun is daily both bouncy and flat so we transact
only what we can minaret, darting among damasked ruins.
Languages are interdependent, as are cultures. The texture of one can be raised up and felt in another. Some of the words I used later were discovered to be of Persian origin, or of contested origin. (As for example the word “mulatto”: of course the word “mulatto” would be of contested origin.) That isn’t the point. The point is the one Lardeau makes: there is nothing more mysterious than what is collectively called a culture. Robert Duncan’s observation (since confirmed by many medieval scholars) that the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, presumably the very pinnacle of Christian literary art, is in fact drawn from Islamic Sufi sources, might also be offered as a particular material evidence of the strangely synthetic nature of all culture. Or else Ron Silliman, who writes: “the words are never our own. Rather, they are our own usages of a determinate coding passed down to us like all other products of civilization, organized into a single, capitalist, world economy. Questions of national language and those of genre parallel one another in that they primarily reflect positionality within the total, historical, social fact.”
If it is a privilege to be able to allow one’s brain to travel in thousands of directions all at once (and it is), then part of the responsibility of that privilege remains the imagination of positionality in relation to a proposed total grid, just as Silliman argues. Of course this move is dangerous, because it bears a structural resemblance to the imagination of Empire, in which all points are united or yoked into a single system, around a center. This danger is only heightened by the circumstance that “English” is the imperial language. Yet there is no backing away. Consider, then, the direction Kamau Brathwaite takes when exploring the possibilities of Caribbean poetry: “Nation language is the language that is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our NewWorld/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not English in terms of its syntax. And English it certainly is not in terms of its rhythm and timbre, its own sound explosions. In its contours, it is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, would be English to a greater or lesser degree.” (“History of the Voice.”)
Thus the work remains a question of defamiliarizing language as a natural condition, of allowing poetry, a language within a language, to open like a sluice, of changing the language from the inside, of being aware of the silence within words that allows for such liberating motion, of arriving at a new language by way of an exploration of the old. That is to say, American is a post-colonial language too. Individual consciousness liberates itself from the colonies English establishes within it by burning a new language within those very social cities so established by history. If the idea of the transcendental, which implies a detachment from the immediacy of the social, and the idea of the lyric, which implies an ecstatic upswell, still speak to us, it is because they allow us not a greater social mobility (obviously not!) but a mobility in the preconditions of the social, which are dialogue.
Let us resolve to think of transcendental mobility — as a mobile. The poem as a mobile of words and signs, dangled over the crib of the culture, as to stimulate the mind to imagine new combinations. Patriarchal poetry? Perhaps. Matriarchal intentionality? No doubt. Childhood, that deep alembic, crawls to maturity in floods of light. Names of fruit nourish unusual bits of unconscious truth. Attabi was a neighborhood in Baghdad where a certain kind of patterned tapestry was made. The word that named that neighborhood traveled to English as “tabby,” which became a kind of cat that bore a similar pattern in its fur. A tabby has wandered into the room just now. It is the ghost of my former pet. It stares at me blankly, its black nose still black, its expression as empty as when it was alive. That gaze is without meaning until I begin to write. Quite suddenly a real being is gazing back, not a ghost, not a cat either, but a being that overflows its name. A pair of eyes fill with signature and lament: broken, silent, resolute, voiced. They anticipate suns. The words are never just our own.
What this means for me is that one of the imperatives of CCP has been to sustain a conversation with poets writing in the Arabic world, or writing here in a way deeply informed by Arabic language and background. A key publication in that respect has been Banipal, a journal publishing Arabic Literature in translation based in the UK; editor Margaret OBank has appeared in #91 and #50, and co-editor Samuel Shimon on #238. When we haven't had a speaking language in common, it has meant we can still do readings together, the Arabic original followed by my reading of the translation. In that mode I have called and read with the extraordinary Gaza City poet Soumayo el-Sousi for shows #194 and #232, and the equally astonishing Tunisian poet Lamia Makadam #134 and Syrian poet Halla Mohammed (#230). Two of Mahmoud Darwish's translators have appeared on CCP to talk about their translations of the celebrated poet's work: Ibrahim Muhawi (#226) and Sinan Antoon (#189), and I’m only sorry the opportunity slipped through me to call Darwish before he passed away. The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury appears on #106 to talk about his novel The Gate of the Sun; the Arab American journalist Asra Nomani appears in show #61; Palestinian-American poet Nathalie Handel appears in #21 to talk about the anthology she edited The Poetry of Arab Women. Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa read from his book on show #61, while Egyptian born Maged Zaher, who I wrote about several columns back, appears in shows #195, #91, as a guest host in show #81, and, with Egyptian poet Mohammed Metwalli, in show #1. Michael Sells talks about his translations of Ibn Arabi (#21); Victor Reinking talks about his translations of the Moroccan poet Abudallif Laabi in show #4 (it is true that Laabi writes in French, not Arabic). Ammiel Alcalay's discussion of his classic book After Jews and Arabs is for me a crucial one to CCP's self-identity (#200). Although, obviously, neither Afghan nor Pakistani worlds are Arabic worlds I'm going to mention here Zohra Saed's appearence to discuss her anthology of Afghan-American writing by women One Story, Thirty Stories in #227, Afghan-American filmmaker and artist Lida Abdullah's appearence on #32, and the Pakistani-born British intellectual and novelist Tariq Ali, who appeared to discuss his book of essays Protocols for the Elders of Sodom for show #214.
Photo: Courtesy of the White House by Chuck Kennedy
The students in my graduate poetry course on documentary poetry worry about voices. Some of them are writing about persons at risk: a homeless woman who loves to dance, inmates sent to prisons in other states — or locked up here at home. They're also writing about themselves and what they’ve lost, be it a grandfather or a culture or the tangled combination of both. Whose voices can they use? How do they cite what they quote of these voices? Are they potentially causing harm to those whose voices they use? Should they use names? Specify places? Beneath all these questions are worries about themselves, the possibility for self-harm involved in act of speaking out. Surely to put someone else’s words to paper is to implicate yourself. So the question is, how to write voices without superintending them; how to be author without presuming an authority that puts others in psychic or physical danger.
Poetic strategies are more than techniques; they’re ethical choices. I’ve been thinking about two very different approaches to voice this week. The first, by slam poet Jamaica Osorio, takes voice as an outlet for activism. Osorio, who (at 21 years of age) gave the Marjorie Putnam Sinclair Edel annual reading in my department this past Thursday, uses Hawaiian mo`olelo to re-member Hawaiian culture and history. Osorio was introduced by her mentor, Lyz Soto, head of Youth Speaks Hawai`i, as a young woman whose poetry includes “scathing indictments of American imperialism” and equally passionate pleas for “world peace.” Her work was included in the HBO series, Brave New Voices; she performed at the White House in 2009. [See the video of "Kumulipo" here.] Osorio braids together old stories with new ones. She uses spoken word as her form, locating a “potential to be a fluid extension of our literature" there. This is no unambitious project.
The second project using voices is Norman Fischer's Conflict, recently published by Chax Press. Writing groups for veterans of recent (and not so recent) American wars provided the laboratory for this book. Fischer's ambition is more muted than Osorio's. Where Osorio spoke movingly of “feeling transformed” by the act of writing a poem, of “growing” through its many drafts, Fischer's veterans are less transformed than relieved:
“I've been here before ,
breathing this poison”
says a Vietnam vet (52). At the end of the book, Fischer acknowledges that we await “the one not yet here / whom we fear.” For Fischer, the work of witness is crucial, but witnessing still cannot clear the historical path. Yes, “this is sacred work,” as one of the poem's voices tells it, but is perhaps less effective as secular work. Wars will continue; veterans will return, in need of a place to speak their pain.
So how do these poets work with voices? Osorio uses the charisma of the “I” to bind many voices together. One of the most important stories to tell, one she didn't share in her solo performance on Thursday, is about the Hawaiian language. It's the story of a language whose orature and literature use the technique of “kaona,” or layers of meaning, punning, hiddenness. Kaona can be used against authority; authoritymight understand the literal, but not the hidden meanings of the words. In the following clip she and Ittai Wong perform in two languages, English and Hawaiian, expanding the “I” to “we," both inside the performance and outside of it. This does not signify a happy "we," necessarily, but it is certainly multi-vocal. (Welcome to Hawai`i.) . Here is that video, taken in 2009. Osorio's discussion of the poem can be found here, as well. (Wong's mother was my dentist's receptionist for many years, which is perhaps neither here nor there, but evidence of how closely linked are Hawai`i's many communities.)
As she spoke on Thursday, it became clear that Osorio's work is shifting from stark resistance to a tender (but still pointed) approach. Her more recent poems tell love stories by way of the Pele, Hi`iaka and Hopoe mo`olelo, and work to create images and spaces for queer Hawaiians like Osorio by finding (and amplifying) them in an orature that already exists. The poet does not have to be like her ancestors to be authentic, Osorio argued; a flourishing culture requires change.
Norman Fischer's poetic voice is more written than spoken, more subdued than Osorio's. He eschews the performative. (Listen to him here.) Conflict has a lot of white space in it; words scatter across pages like scraps of conversation teased out of silences. His book develops a meditation on the pain of veterans of American wars. It is also, like Osorio's work, poetry that ultimately takes on American imperialism for the pain it inflicts on "its own," as well as others. (Among those killed in America's most recent wars are a dozen men from Hawai`i, as well as many more who were stationed here.) On page 28, a page on which we find a “glass house / below green hills / beneath the tree a shadow,” a quoted voice ends the passage, “you are the others.” Fischer uses these scraps of conversation in altered contexts; only once or twice does he name a speaker by dedicating a section of the poem to him. Voices are both quoted and anonymous, then. Anonymity cloaks the speakers, but their words are revelatory, stark. (The anonymity of voices is to Fischer's work what the kaona are to Osorio's, perhaps, the undercurrent of culture without a named speaker.) Most of these voices are italicized, so we know that Fischer imported them into his field of words. But then there's this:
place name
heartache
toothache
land I love from the mountains
to the prairies
to the oceans white with foam
blood
under the flag
I imagine you are feeling
send you off on your way
try to stay with themselves
Kill them for their own good
Kill them for mine (74)
and we find ourselves in a tangle of patriotic song lyrics, a therapist's intervention, and the mangled voice of American culture, the military, the veteran, the poem itself: “Kill them for their own good,” is “naturalized” bitterly into this text. To read it is to de-naturalizes it, but some of the shock I felt in my reading came of that plain font, as if this were a statement to be believed, a "true fact."
Toward the end of her talk/performance, Jamaica Osorio talked about how spoken word poetry offers the poet more control over audience reception than written word poetry can. She also spoke of how native Hawaiians lack trust, close themselves off from the outside. It was the outside that did so much damage. If her spoken word enacts this lack of trust, even in “Legacy” where every line includes something “she's tried to hide" without quite naming it, then Fischer's written words and unwritten spaces seem to trust the reader's response. His traditions and experiences are of course very different, as he is a Zen priest and much older than Osorio.
So I say to my students that, while we can protect the speakers of such words from immediate harm, we can't protect them against those conflicts that are "engraved on the tongue" (Fischer, 46). We can't shield them from the “pain” that “comes in waves,” or from the discomforts that even not-writing doesn't ease, as Osorio put it aptly. These voices need to be heard, whether or not we assign names to their speakers, whether they speak directly or by way of the kaona. There's too much at stake for the rest of us not to hear them.
Back in the fall of 2000 we invited nine poets to “read through” their relationship to a modernist poet. They talked and read their own and that modernist’s poems. Each presented for 20 minutes. We recorded the events (three nights) and made audio recordings available (then in RealAudio format). Recently, one of our digital editors, Mike Van Helder, organized all this material, converted the streaming RealAudio files into downloadable mp3s, made the links really easy to use, and copied the poem files onto the PennSound author page of each of the nine poets.
The newly designed “Nine Poets Read Themselves through Modernism” page is here:LINK
Lyn Hejinian on Stein Ron Silliman on Williams Joan Retallack on Stein, Wittgenstein and Cage Charles Bernstein on Benjamin Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Woolf Erica Hunt on Beckett and Baldwin Jena Osman on Reznikoff Bob Perelman on Zukofsky Rae Armantrout on Dickinson
The idea for the project was Bob Perelman's. Kerry Sherin Wright and I hosted and introduced.
tr. from Chinese by HT & KK adapted by Charles Bernstein published in Sybil-- the English language portal of Sibila more on Yao Feng
1 at the plenary meeting three thousand right hands are raised at the same level like a lawn trimmed by a mower
a spring swallow opens its scissors flies above, past my arm I give out a sad, shrill cry
2 her heart broken by men but not Jesus she loves nobody else keeps writing him letters
in this world he’s the only man for her up on the cross always true love
3 master narrowed his eyes suspended his abdominal breathing came to the wok, boiling with oil
he raised his hand to the sky as if he had grabbed a cloud and said sky’s already fried
4 the world is getting warmer glaciers will be melting soon we who love animals should prepare fridges for every penguin
5 tears fall pounding ground forming deep pool
frog at bottom sings song of sky
8 it’s always been like that rivers and mountains stay put even when a county is defeated
it’s always been like that moving forward and forward defying enemy cannons on our own land
numerous enemies who once were brothers
9 for their dinner I was trifling with bok choy and potatoes cutting up dead animals as someone’s chef
for my dinner I either have no appetite no idea what to eat
11 Western luxury-brand sellers kept complaining about the unreliability of their Chinese customers “All of a sudden they vanish: gone abroad or to jail.”
12 the Siberian tiger was paces in his cage relentlessly enough paces to take him back to the Greater Hinggan Mountains
like long-distance running in high school every day round the track three thousand meters so after a few months the distance equaled the Long March to Yan’an
20 every time I open the window I feel like I am opening myself
sky, mountains, and valley knock me out
I close the window open the door and walk away
21 if I’m sky I’d be vast
if I’m sea I’d be deep
if I’m land I’d be fecund
if I’m bald I’d wear no wig
22 the sun set bang! an official clap closed the blue sky
finally approved I looked out the window it was like a dark night gazing at another dark night
27 on the mountainside stripped bare I planted a tree beside an acre of carrots and waited for a rabbit in the shade
not for a person a rabbit
34 hugging his pillow Freud turned off the light and went to sleep
tossing about he’d already booked the reservations for his travels
41 in Tibet in a village with stunning mountains and overflowing streams every comer was sublime but there were flies big flies which I suppose were harmless
even so when I held the butter tea made by Zhou Ma I waved my hands wildly to shoo the flies
42 we’ve gone to Lhasa Shigatse Gyantse Naqu Linzhi put on Tibetan gowns taken pictures with snow mountains and yaks: as visitors we saw Tibet as heaven then went back to the stock market BMWs steaming latte beds with no fleas
43 in a county town I saw a man climb to the end of a bridge, cry out, jump
then there was a crowd of pointing fingers and chattering voice but no sign of the man
the whirlpool was like a life preserver
44 at the Red Market under scarlet lights a fat hawker grabs a frog skins it while chatting with a customer so deft as if he were taking off his gloves
55 autumn’s called off the cicadas days getting colder
in this crazed casino town even leaves yellowed by autumn wind look like gambling chips
gold’s planted in everywhere to grow coins, necklaces, teeth
For the catalog of ICA show of Kathy Butterly, Félix González-Torres, Roy McMakin and Sue Williams, Siegler has included poems by John Ashbery, Robert Kelly, John Yau, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Cole Swensen, Charles Bernstein, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Tan Lin, Craig Dworkin, Frances Richard, Dan Machlin, Marcella Durand, Alan Gilbert, Damon Krukowski, Mónica De la Torre, Jen Bervin, Eileen Myles, and Miles Champion.
Listening to the Arabic
To say that the transcendental is historically constituted amounts to saying that universality cannot be assigned to it; it is necessary to think of a particular transcendental. But after all, there is nothing more mysterious than what is collectively called a culture. — Guy Lardeau, “L’histoire comme nuit de Walpurgis”
In such manner Guy Lardeau invites us to contemplate a contradiction – the particular transcendental. Contradiction, because one of the attributes of the transcendental is held to be its universal grounds. Contemplation, because that is what the mind does, at least one committed to both a cognitive process and a mode of thought that goes beyond the simply analytical. One concept that may occur to us here is “strategic transcendentalism”: one holds a condition to be transcendental or necessary to perception itself for specific political or tactical purposes. Another phenomenon that may come to mind here is that of the lyric poem: the lyric poem is a construct capable of maintaining equilibrium among contradictions and as such is singly able to accommodate the needs of such a slippery imperative (“negative capability”). Surely the allure of the poem is partly this, and the concomitant promise of mystery without belief. Our texts are the living evidence of an ethics of ambiguity.
I positioned the transcendental lyric in like manner in my essay from the 1990’s “A Flicker At The Edge Of Things.” Things here — “here” variously meaning in what passes for my mind, the room in which I sit and write, America, the shifting continents — flicker, and poetry is still the flicker at the edge. What the language needs at any given moment shifts. The more things change, the more things change. You can never put your river into the same flume twice, because that would already be water under the bridge, and so on and so forth. A fluid foundationalism is always sensitive.
The particularly violent moment that provoked a necessary literary response in the years I started CCP was the Western recoil against the Arab and Islamic worlds. “Orientalism,” so utterly exploited by European colonial powers and so carefully dissected and exposed by the late Edward Said, found a new bloom of its own in the Bush Administration’s version of what we are at war against in the Islamic world. Paid pundits speak of a “clash of civilizations.” The White Man’s burden, which was to civilize the native, was reconstituted as the necessity to bring democracy to those in the Middle East yet too primitive to know this sacred form of government. We know all too well what violence has been unleashed in our names on the basis of these and other related ideological precepts. At the edge of things we watched with horror. In 2001 Andrew Joron wrote in his “The Emergency of Poetry”: “What good is poetry at a time like this? It feels right to ask this question, and at the same time to resist the range of predictable answers, such as: Poetry is useless, therein lies its freedom. Or, poetry has the power to expose ideology; gives a voice to that which has been denied a voice; serves as a call to action; consoles and counsels; keeps the spirit alive.” For Joron, none of these functions suffice. There is only one function that was efficacious. That was the lament. “The lament, no less than anger, refuses to accept the fact of suffering. But while anger must possess the stimulus of a proximate cause – or else it eventually fades away – the lament has a universal cause, and rises undiminished through millennia of cultural mediation. Unlike anger, the lament survives translation into silence, into ruins.”
For me Joron’s lament is resonant, at least of one phase of our writing under the current imperative. The other phase has involved a working with language that might undermine the nauseating dichotomies that underpin the justification of Empire, the clash of civilizations, and the erosion of civil liberties. Poetry is language, and in poetry false dichotomies can best be dissolved, since the false dichotomies themselves are only frozen language.
In my own “Apple Anyone Sonnets” I set out to write a series of poems using only English words derived from Arabic. Later that seemed a further segregation, and I collaged those materials with Shakespeare cut ups and rewrites — the name “Shakespeare” conjuring up the conservative pride and core of “English” — and I kept doing this until I had the “Apple Anyone Sonnets.”
Apple Anyone 5
Why is it my words always touch this particular?
I stay afloat on language I’ve plucked from Sufi summer,
my trysts with words the same one wooed, mascared, talced.
Though the lute of a genii is as outdated as last year’s atlas,
though a belated troubadour sings of checkmate move by move,
yet no monumental rock shall outlast these our silly constructs:
that which glints brightly in such tariffed compositions
is a gazelle among orange groves, a mecca in the mouth.
Here comes a tabby whose scratch will leave a lasting mark,
or else a taffeta from a quarter of town recently hit by bombs,
or all the cotton ever picked, the laborious wizard enslaved inside you.
Why is it my words always touch this one particular?
As the sun is daily both bouncy and flat so we transact
only what we can minaret, darting among damasked ruins.
Sufi mascara talc genii atlas troubadour checkmate tariff gazelle orange mecca tabby taffeta cotton wizard minaret damask
Languages are interdependent, as are cultures. The texture of one can be raised up and felt in another. Some of the words I used later were discovered to be of Persian origin, or of contested origin. (As for example the word “mulatto”: of course the word “mulatto” would be of contested origin.) That isn’t the point. The point is the one Lardeau makes: there is nothing more mysterious than what is collectively called a culture. Robert Duncan’s observation (since confirmed by many medieval scholars) that the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, presumably the very pinnacle of Christian literary art, is in fact drawn from Islamic Sufi sources, might also be offered as a particular material evidence of the strangely synthetic nature of all culture. Or else Ron Silliman, who writes: “the words are never our own. Rather, they are our own usages of a determinate coding passed down to us like all other products of civilization, organized into a single, capitalist, world economy. Questions of national language and those of genre parallel one another in that they primarily reflect positionality within the total, historical, social fact.”
If it is a privilege to be able to allow one’s brain to travel in thousands of directions all at once (and it is), then part of the responsibility of that privilege remains the imagination of positionality in relation to a proposed total grid, just as Silliman argues. Of course this move is dangerous, because it bears a structural resemblance to the imagination of Empire, in which all points are united or yoked into a single system, around a center. This danger is only heightened by the circumstance that “English” is the imperial language. Yet there is no backing away. Consider, then, the direction Kamau Brathwaite takes when exploring the possibilities of Caribbean poetry: “Nation language is the language that is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our NewWorld/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not English in terms of its syntax. And English it certainly is not in terms of its rhythm and timbre, its own sound explosions. In its contours, it is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, would be English to a greater or lesser degree.” (“History of the Voice.”)
Thus the work remains a question of defamiliarizing language as a natural condition, of allowing poetry, a language within a language, to open like a sluice, of changing the language from the inside, of being aware of the silence within words that allows for such liberating motion, of arriving at a new language by way of an exploration of the old. That is to say, American is a post-colonial language too. Individual consciousness liberates itself from the colonies English establishes within it by burning a new language within those very social cities so established by history. If the idea of the transcendental, which implies a detachment from the immediacy of the social, and the idea of the lyric, which implies an ecstatic upswell, still speak to us, it is because they allow us not a greater social mobility (obviously not!) but a mobility in the preconditions of the social, which are dialogue.
Let us resolve to think of transcendental mobility — as a mobile. The poem as a mobile of words and signs, dangled over the crib of the culture, as to stimulate the mind to imagine new combinations. Patriarchal poetry? Perhaps. Matriarchal intentionality? No doubt. Childhood, that deep alembic, crawls to maturity in floods of light. Names of fruit nourish unusual bits of unconscious truth. Attabi was a neighborhood in Baghdad where a certain kind of patterned tapestry was made. The word that named that neighborhood traveled to English as “tabby,” which became a kind of cat that bore a similar pattern in its fur. A tabby has wandered into the room just now. It is the ghost of my former pet. It stares at me blankly, its black nose still black, its expression as empty as when it was alive. That gaze is without meaning until I begin to write. Quite suddenly a real being is gazing back, not a ghost, not a cat either, but a being that overflows its name. A pair of eyes fill with signature and lament: broken, silent, resolute, voiced. They anticipate suns. The words are never just our own.
What this means for me is that one of the imperatives of CCP has been to sustain a conversation with poets writing in the Arabic world, or writing here in a way deeply informed by Arabic language and background. A key publication in that respect has been Banipal, a journal publishing Arabic Literature in translation based in the UK; editor Margaret OBank has appeared in #91 and #50, and co-editor Samuel Shimon on #238. When we haven't had a speaking language in common, it has meant we can still do readings together, the Arabic original followed by my reading of the translation. In that mode I have called and read with the extraordinary Gaza City poet Soumayo el-Sousi for shows #194 and #232, and the equally astonishing Tunisian poet Lamia Makadam #134 and Syrian poet Halla Mohammed (#230). Two of Mahmoud Darwish's translators have appeared on CCP to talk about their translations of the celebrated poet's work: Ibrahim Muhawi (#226) and Sinan Antoon (#189), and I’m only sorry the opportunity slipped through me to call Darwish before he passed away. The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury appears on #106 to talk about his novel The Gate of the Sun; the Arab American journalist Asra Nomani appears in show #61; Palestinian-American poet Nathalie Handel appears in #21 to talk about the anthology she edited The Poetry of Arab Women. Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa read from his book on show #61, while Egyptian born Maged Zaher, who I wrote about several columns back, appears in shows #195, #91, as a guest host in show #81, and, with Egyptian poet Mohammed Metwalli, in show #1. Michael Sells talks about his translations of Ibn Arabi (#21); Victor Reinking talks about his translations of the Moroccan poet Abudallif Laabi in show #4 (it is true that Laabi writes in French, not Arabic). Ammiel Alcalay's discussion of his classic book After Jews and Arabs is for me a crucial one to CCP's self-identity (#200). Although, obviously, neither Afghan nor Pakistani worlds are Arabic worlds I'm going to mention here Zohra Saed's appearence to discuss her anthology of Afghan-American writing by women One Story, Thirty Stories in #227, Afghan-American filmmaker and artist Lida Abdullah's appearence on #32, and the Pakistani-born British intellectual and novelist Tariq Ali, who appeared to discuss his book of essays Protocols for the Elders of Sodom for show #214.
"Is there anyone out there?"
Kaona / koan: Jamaica Osorio and Norman Fischer voice the conflicts
The students in my graduate poetry course on documentary poetry worry about voices. Some of them are writing about persons at risk: a homeless woman who loves to dance, inmates sent to prisons in other states — or locked up here at home. They're also writing about themselves and what they’ve lost, be it a grandfather or a culture or the tangled combination of both. Whose voices can they use? How do they cite what they quote of these voices? Are they potentially causing harm to those whose voices they use? Should they use names? Specify places? Beneath all these questions are worries about themselves, the possibility for self-harm involved in act of speaking out. Surely to put someone else’s words to paper is to implicate yourself. So the question is, how to write voices without superintending them; how to be author without presuming an authority that puts others in psychic or physical danger.
Poetic strategies are more than techniques; they’re ethical choices. I’ve been thinking about two very different approaches to voice this week. The first, by slam poet Jamaica Osorio, takes voice as an outlet for activism. Osorio, who (at 21 years of age) gave the Marjorie Putnam Sinclair Edel annual reading in my department this past Thursday, uses Hawaiian mo`olelo to re-member Hawaiian culture and history. Osorio was introduced by her mentor, Lyz Soto, head of Youth Speaks Hawai`i, as a young woman whose poetry includes “scathing indictments of American imperialism” and equally passionate pleas for “world peace.” Her work was included in the HBO series, Brave New Voices; she performed at the White House in 2009. [See the video of "Kumulipo" here.] Osorio braids together old stories with new ones. She uses spoken word as her form, locating a “potential to be a fluid extension of our literature" there. This is no unambitious project.
The second project using voices is Norman Fischer's Conflict, recently published by Chax Press. Writing groups for veterans of recent (and not so recent) American wars provided the laboratory for this book. Fischer's ambition is more muted than Osorio's. Where Osorio spoke movingly of “feeling transformed” by the act of writing a poem, of “growing” through its many drafts, Fischer's veterans are less transformed than relieved:
“I've been here before ,
breathing this poison”
says a Vietnam vet (52). At the end of the book, Fischer acknowledges that we await “the one not yet here / whom we fear.” For Fischer, the work of witness is crucial, but witnessing still cannot clear the historical path. Yes, “this is sacred work,” as one of the poem's voices tells it, but is perhaps less effective as secular work. Wars will continue; veterans will return, in need of a place to speak their pain.
So how do these poets work with voices? Osorio uses the charisma of the “I” to bind many voices together. One of the most important stories to tell, one she didn't share in her solo performance on Thursday, is about the Hawaiian language. It's the story of a language whose orature and literature use the technique of “kaona,” or layers of meaning, punning, hiddenness. Kaona can be used against authority; authority might understand the literal, but not the hidden meanings of the words. In the following clip she and Ittai Wong perform in two languages, English and Hawaiian, expanding the “I” to “we," both inside the performance and outside of it. This does not signify a happy "we," necessarily, but it is certainly multi-vocal. (Welcome to Hawai`i.) . Here is that video, taken in 2009. Osorio's discussion of the poem can be found here, as well. (Wong's mother was my dentist's receptionist for many years, which is perhaps neither here nor there, but evidence of how closely linked are Hawai`i's many communities.)
As she spoke on Thursday, it became clear that Osorio's work is shifting from stark resistance to a tender (but still pointed) approach. Her more recent poems tell love stories by way of the Pele, Hi`iaka and Hopoe mo`olelo, and work to create images and spaces for queer Hawaiians like Osorio by finding (and amplifying) them in an orature that already exists. The poet does not have to be like her ancestors to be authentic, Osorio argued; a flourishing culture requires change.
Norman Fischer's poetic voice is more written than spoken, more subdued than Osorio's. He eschews the performative. (Listen to him here.) Conflict has a lot of white space in it; words scatter across pages like scraps of conversation teased out of silences. His book develops a meditation on the pain of veterans of American wars. It is also, like Osorio's work, poetry that ultimately takes on American imperialism for the pain it inflicts on "its own," as well as others. (Among those killed in America's most recent wars are a dozen men from Hawai`i, as well as many more who were stationed here.) On page 28, a page on which we find a “glass house / below green hills / beneath the tree a shadow,” a quoted voice ends the passage, “you are the others.” Fischer uses these scraps of conversation in altered contexts; only once or twice does he name a speaker by dedicating a section of the poem to him. Voices are both quoted and anonymous, then. Anonymity cloaks the speakers, but their words are revelatory, stark. (The anonymity of voices is to Fischer's work what the kaona are to Osorio's, perhaps, the undercurrent of culture without a named speaker.) Most of these voices are italicized, so we know that Fischer imported them into his field of words. But then there's this:
place name
heartache
toothache
land I love from the mountains
to the prairies
to the oceans white with foam
blood
under the flag
I imagine you are feeling
send you off on your way
try to stay with themselves
Kill them for their own good
Kill them for mine (74)
and we find ourselves in a tangle of patriotic song lyrics, a therapist's intervention, and the mangled voice of American culture, the military, the veteran, the poem itself: “Kill them for their own good,” is “naturalized” bitterly into this text. To read it is to de-naturalizes it, but some of the shock I felt in my reading came of that plain font, as if this were a statement to be believed, a "true fact."
Toward the end of her talk/performance, Jamaica Osorio talked about how spoken word poetry offers the poet more control over audience reception than written word poetry can. She also spoke of how native Hawaiians lack trust, close themselves off from the outside. It was the outside that did so much damage. If her spoken word enacts this lack of trust, even in “Legacy” where every line includes something “she's tried to hide" without quite naming it, then Fischer's written words and unwritten spaces seem to trust the reader's response. His traditions and experiences are of course very different, as he is a Zen priest and much older than Osorio.
So I say to my students that, while we can protect the speakers of such words from immediate harm, we can't protect them against those conflicts that are "engraved on the tongue" (Fischer, 46). We can't shield them from the “pain” that “comes in waves,” or from the discomforts that even not-writing doesn't ease, as Osorio put it aptly. These voices need to be heard, whether or not we assign names to their speakers, whether they speak directly or by way of the kaona. There's too much at stake for the rest of us not to hear them.
Writers reading themselves through modernism, circa 2000
Back in the fall of 2000 we invited nine poets to “read through” their relationship to a modernist poet. They talked and read their own and that modernist’s poems. Each presented for 20 minutes. We recorded the events (three nights) and made audio recordings available (then in RealAudio format). Recently, one of our digital editors, Mike Van Helder, organized all this material, converted the streaming RealAudio files into downloadable mp3s, made the links really easy to use, and copied the poem files onto the PennSound author page of each of the nine poets.
The newly designed “Nine Poets Read Themselves through Modernism” page is here: LINK
Lyn Hejinian on Stein
Ron Silliman on Williams
Joan Retallack on Stein, Wittgenstein and Cage
Charles Bernstein on Benjamin
Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Woolf
Erica Hunt on Beckett and Baldwin
Jena Osman on Reznikoff
Bob Perelman on Zukofsky
Rae Armantrout on Dickinson
The idea for the project was Bob Perelman's. Kerry Sherin Wright and I hosted and introduced.
from Desperate Lines by Yao Feng
tr. from Chinese by HT & KK
adapted by Charles Bernstein
published in Sybil -- the English language portal of Sibila
more on Yao Feng
at the plenary meeting
three thousand right hands are raised
at the same level
like a lawn trimmed by a mower
a spring swallow
opens its scissors
flies above, past my arm
I give out a sad, shrill cry
2
her heart broken by men
but not Jesus
she loves nobody else
keeps writing him letters
in this world
he’s the only man for her
up on the cross always
true love
3
master narrowed his eyes
suspended his abdominal breathing
came to the wok, boiling with oil
he raised his hand to the sky
as if he had grabbed a cloud
and said
sky’s already fried
4
the world is getting warmer
glaciers will be melting soon
we who love animals
should prepare fridges
for every penguin
5
tears fall
pounding ground
forming deep pool
frog at bottom
sings song
of sky
8
it’s always been like that
rivers and mountains stay put
even when a county is defeated
it’s always been like that
moving forward and forward
defying enemy cannons
on our own land
numerous enemies
who once were brothers
9
for their dinner
I was trifling with bok choy and potatoes
cutting up dead animals
as someone’s chef
for my dinner
I either have no appetite
no idea what to eat
11
Western luxury-brand sellers kept complaining
about the unreliability of their Chinese customers
“All of a sudden they vanish: gone abroad or to jail.”
12
the Siberian tiger was paces in his cage
relentlessly
enough paces to take him back
to the Greater Hinggan Mountains
like long-distance running
in high school
every day round the track
three thousand meters
so after a few months
the distance equaled
the Long March to Yan’an
20
every time I open the window
I feel like I am opening myself
sky, mountains, and valley
knock me out
I close the window
open the door
and walk away
21
if I’m sky
I’d be vast
if I’m sea
I’d be deep
if I’m land
I’d be fecund
if I’m bald
I’d wear no wig
22
the sun set
bang!
an official clap
closed the blue sky
finally approved
I looked out the window
it was like a dark night
gazing at another dark night
27
on the mountainside
stripped bare
I planted a tree
beside an acre of carrots
and waited for a rabbit
in the shade
not for a person
a rabbit
34
hugging his pillow
Freud turned off the light and went to sleep
tossing about
he’d already booked the reservations
for his travels
41
in Tibet
in a village with stunning mountains and overflowing streams
every comer was sublime
but there were flies
big flies
which I suppose were harmless
even so
when I held the butter tea made by Zhou Ma
I waved my hands wildly
to shoo the flies
42
we’ve gone to Lhasa
Shigatse
Gyantse
Naqu
Linzhi
put on Tibetan gowns
taken pictures with snow mountains
and yaks:
as visitors
we saw Tibet as heaven
then went back to the stock market
BMWs
steaming latte
beds with no fleas
43
in a county town
I saw a man climb
to the end of a bridge,
cry out, jump
then there was a crowd
of pointing fingers and chattering voice
but no sign of the man
the whirlpool
was like a life preserver
44
at the Red Market
under scarlet lights
a fat hawker grabs a frog
skins it
while chatting with a customer
so deft
as if he were taking off his gloves
55
autumn’s called off the cicadas
days getting colder
in this crazed casino town
even leaves yellowed by autumn wind
look like gambling chips
gold’s planted in everywhere
to grow
coins, necklaces, teeth
Figuring Color, edited by Jeremy Sigler
poets on color for Boston ICA show curated by and Jenelle Porter
For the catalog of ICA show of Kathy Butterly, Félix González-Torres, Roy McMakin and Sue Williams, Siegler has included poems by John Ashbery, Robert Kelly, John Yau, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Cole Swensen, Charles Bernstein, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Tan Lin, Craig Dworkin, Frances Richard, Dan Machlin, Marcella Durand, Alan Gilbert, Damon Krukowski, Mónica De la Torre, Jen Bervin, Eileen Myles, and Miles Champion.
Availalbe from DAP.