How to be a poet in Hawai`i — or elsewhere — who opposes imperialism, colonization, the military, and yet appears, as a Euro-American, to embody them? I've worried this issue before on my own blog, and thought I'd think more about it here by way of a new book from BlazeVox by Scott Abels.
Abels, whose MFA is from Boise State in the state of Idaho, notorious for its white supremacists, has lived in Hawai`i for several years now. His thesis forms the basis for his first book, Rambo Goes to Idaho, which moves between Idaho and Hawai`i. As he writes in the first section of “Idaho Conspiracy,” a poem obliquely about moving to Hawai`i: “My Composition 1100 assignment was to guess the titles / of the first five poems on the Poetry and Politics website.” Then this: “The only thing I could come up with was / Hawaii comes before Idaho alphabetically” (49). Abels's move back in the alphabet forces him to look at the problem of American empire, although one senses he did so before his “geographically confusing” move. For the MFA thesis is set up as that of John Rambo, whose thesis signature page comes after two brief proems called “Screenplay” and “Burst.” It is this poem that begins with the lines I appropriated for my title, those that assert that Rambo is good, but is a “product of the world” (9). Anyone who reads post-colonial literature knows the character of the bad English teacher, the one who is a secular missionary, who tells children they are not good enough because they speak Pidgin or another local language, and not the good English that he or she represents. No surprise then that John Rambo “is teaching English” (9), or that his “boss is explaining that English / as a second language / / is essentially the same / as special education” (10). Here special ed is aligned with special forces, by way of a fictional pop cultural icon who is deeply imbricated in American culture since the Vietnam era. While Rambo seems a confusing and confused character, Ronald Reagan famously declared him a Republican. Abels's Rambo is more like a Soviet version of Don Quixote: a little bit silly, hardly a strong-man, prone to noting things like "I am a sparrow to his peacock," about his professor, Paul Bunyan.
Writing about the Rambo films, especially the first, as well as other “action movies” of recent decades, Richard Pope notes that, “The films themselves are politically ambivalent: more fundamentally, they trace a certain diminution of the space of politics, or that space in which decisions about the future of society are made and the public mobilized.” The horrific violence of the Rambo films (here I must confess to having only watched trailers on YouTube) would then mark the strength of an assertion about an uncomfortable ambiguity about national, gendered, racial, and individual identities. While the First Blood title of the first movie denotes its “drawing" of blood, it also gestures to origins. Rambo's are not simple: he is half Navajo, half European American (German or Irish, take your pick). The plots to the films that feature Rambo present him as torn between acting as an enforcer of post-Vietnam War American imperialism and being a victim of it. He has PTSD, he shoots National Guardsmen, he doesn't like missionaries in Asia. Here I rely on John Carlos Rowe's “Culture, US Imperialism and Globalization.” But Anthony Swofford, quoted by Rowe, argues that all war movies are pro-war since Vietnam: “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.”
Abels does not indulge in overt violence in his version of the Rambo saga. Instead, he delves into Rambo's inner (bumbling) life in such a way as to echo a member of the audience of First Blood interviewed in Richard Pope's ethnographic study, “Doing Justice: A Ritual-Psychoanalytic Approach to Postmodern Melodrama and a Certain Tendency of the Action Film” (Cinema Studies 51:2, Winter 2012). That anonymous responder said, “I'm no Green Beret, but I know what it is like to have abilities that are as spectacular as they are worthless. I know the frustration of being kicked around by people who don't recognize or appreciate my worth. But I'm not a Green Beret.” Substitute the word “poet” for Green Beret and you see the odd tightrope Abels walks in his book. Abels's rhetorical stance lies somewhere past irony, within the realm of the absurd, perhaps the only location from which he can negotiate the paradoxes squeezing him from every side. “I'm a big fan / of the fall of man. // I bought the T-shirt,” is one such statement. And, on the next page:
Sincerity is hard for me.
Mañana, aloha. If Schwarzenegger can buy Hummers, then I can have a submarine
while sunshine helicopters better than practically anyone fulfill all hope. (69)
These and many other lines from Abels's book remind me of a line uttered numerous times by Paul Naylor to me on my recent visit to San Diego. “Capitalism forces us to live complicated lives,” he repeated. Rambo--like Schwarzenneger--can embody Emerson's self-reliance only by killing everything in sight. Hope comes dressed as a "sunshine helicopter," like those military helicopters that flew over Paul and me on the beach at Torrey Canyon in San Diego. The film Rambo's occasional violent anti-imperial forays meet Hawaiian poet and sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask's consistent anti-imperialism in her violent fantasy (published in the late 1990s) of beating up a “Racist white woman,” in a poem from Light in the Crevice Never Seen, that begins this way:
could kick
your face, puncture
both eyes.
You deserve this kind
of violence.
No more vicious
tongues, obscene
lies.
Just a knife
slitting your tight
little heart
for all my people
under your feet
for all those years
lived smug and wealthy
off our land
parasite arrogant.
Complexity can make us want certainty; what is most certain is the violence, actual and articulated, of our time. Abels implies that the acquisition of Hawai`i was such an act of attempted certainty: “The President has acquired the last state in the Union / as his generic talisman / toward not getting robbed” (25). What to make of such certitude and the damages it inflicts?
Much as we might want it to, Abels's poetry does not offer us an out, except insofar as it brings that outward violence in, examines its absurdities. And that is not to be sneezed at. Because the problem we arrive at after the violence of imperialism is counter-violence. The issue, as Eunsong Angela K. said to me in a different context in San Diego, is “what to do with power.” My colleague Caroline Sinavaiana writes: "As we know, Trask’s poetry can at times offer a fierce and tender beauty. In my view, this particular poem does neither. As reader here I end up feeling shut out of an experience – that of blatant injustice – which I know all too well. As a Polynesian thinker and cultural worker, I am all too familiar with the scourge of colonial degradation and its neocolonial aftermath. Yes, I have experienced rage. Yes, I understand the situation. But no, I do not find it productive to demonize white folks (of either gender) as a class and threaten violent retaliation, however ‘figuratively.’The question for me is not whether [Trasks's] rage is well-founded. Of course it is. The questions for me is what to do now. How to respond most skillfully? How to step out of the cycle of violence? How to harness the energy of rage, with its considerable power, as fuel for vehicles which can both heal us and restore justice? How to confront and respond to ongoing injustice in ways that strengthen us (and each other), instead of turning the violence against ourselves and our own? I think this poem could point us towards such necessary questions."
By virtue of his subject position, combined with his politics, Abels cannot assume a position of extremity in either direction. His position is an absurd one, but he has thought his way into that absurdity with a courage different from that of his subject. What his work offers back are the very complexities we are heir to, delivered up not as entertainment for the masses, but for those few of us who read poems. In his 2008 review of the last Rambo movie, A.O. Scott noted that, “the movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry.” Abels's poetry is not blockheaded in any way, nor is it particularly cinematic. As work that is neither visual nor violent, it offers us a possible space for meditation, a place from which to contemplate the violence of power, and perhaps another--less entertaining, but more productive--way out of it.
Notes (other than those embedded in the text):
Richard Pope, “Doing Justice: A Ritual-Psychoanalytic Approach to Postmodern Melodrama and a Certain Tendency of the Action Film,” Cinema Journal 51:2 (Winter 2012): 113-136).
John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialims, and Globalization,” American Literary History 16:4 (2004): 575-595.
Caroline Sinavaiana's quotation is from unpublished correspondence.
Stefan Sagmeister (1962-) is among today's most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and the musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. His New York-based graphic design firm is called Sagmeister Inc. At noon on Thursday, December 8, 2011, Sagmeister visited the Kelly Writers House and was interviewed before a live audience by Claudia Gould, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and currently director of the Jewish Museum. Here is an audio recording of the same event. From April through August 2012, the ICA features a Sagmeister exhibit called “The Happy Show.” During that visit to Philadelphia, Sagmeister also met with the fifteen undergraduates in Kenneth Goldsmith's year-long seminar on contemporary writing/contemporary art, a collaboration of the ICA and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Goldsmith asked the students to write ten happy, upbeat truisms during the first day of class and then, on day two, to narrow them down to one. “Do what you want.” “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can today.” “Always mean what you say.” This emphasis on trite wisdom is tied to the ICA's Sagmeister show, an investigation of Sagmeister’s imaginative implementation of typography and ten-year exploration of happiness. A series of works follow a (non)narrative of truisms, or rules to live by, that run through the museum’s second-floor galleries, the ICA’s “ramp” space, and in-between spaces. Social data gathered from psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and anthropologist Donald Symons contextualize these maxims, originally culled from Sagmeister’s diary. At ICA, “The Happy Show” examines the ideology of self-improvement via constructed dicta.
Toward the end of our interview-discussion with Patti Smith on December 9, 2010 — moderated by Anthony DeCurtis — Smith introduced and played a version of “My Blakean Year.” Here is the first stanza of the song:
In my Blakean year I was so disposed Toward a mission yet unclear Advancing pole by pole Fortune breathed into my ear Mouthed* a simple ode One road is paved in gold One road is just a road
* In the performance this word is apparently “Obeyed.”
Pania Press and Titus Books (Old Government House, Auckland, 29 August 2012)
The first thing that I do whenever I go to a poetry conference or symposium is to make a beeline for the booktable.
This is, admittedly, because I generally have a backpack full of my own wares which I’m hoping to flog off to the unwary, but my main motive is actually a strong desire to see what oddities and rarities the others have brought along.
Far more of us than would care to admit it have a cupboard full of old back-issues of magazines and boxes of books from defunct small presses who have gone belly-up. Who else is going to be interested in such things except other writers? Librarians? Antiquarian book collectors? Academics? Funnily enough, I never seem to see any of them putting their hands in their pockets on such occasions.
Here’s the booktable in the marae in for BLUFF 06: a poetry symposium in Southland (21-24 April 2006):
Here’s the booktable in the Technological University of Sydney for H O M E & A W A Y 2 0 1 0: A Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium (31/8-3/9/10):
Here’s the booktable in Old Government House, Auckland for SHORT TAKES ON LONG POEMS: A Trans Tasman symposium at the University of Auckland (29-20/3/12):
Let’s face it: with certain (very honourable) exceptions, poetry doesn’t sell. Some of the poetry we love the most has qualities which almost guarantee a lack of market appeal, in fact. A simple survey of the books put out by the major publishers will therefore seldom be a reliable guide to what’s “really going on” in any country’s poetry scene. Hence my interest in small “my basement” presses, fly-by-night publishers, and erratically available imprints. What better place to find them than on such a table, with their authors and proprietors generally close to hand?
The poetry “mainstream” in New Zealand publishing consists, first of all, of the major University presses: AUP (Auckland), Victoria UP (Wellington), and Otago UP (Dunedin). Then come the occasional books issued by the New Zealand branches of publishers such as international giants Random House or Penguin Books, not to mention local specialist publishers such as Craig Potton (Nelson).
After that the picture becomes considerably more complicated.
There are the smaller independent publishers such as Cape Catley (Auckland), Steele Roberts (Wellington), Michael O’Leary’s ESAW [The Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop] (Kapiti Coast), Mark Pirie’s HeadworX (Wellington), and Titus Books (Kaipara), each of which have issued distinguished lists. A newer addition would be Helen Rickerby’s Seraph Books (Wellington).
There are also imprints associated with independent literary magazines: brief (Auckland), Catalyst (Christchurch), and (now) Hue & Cry (Wellington) are three that spring to mind.
After that, we come to what is to me – I must confess – the area of greatest interest: the artier, “fine-printing” presses, the ones whose every production is a conscious artistic statement. These books tend to be slimmer, pricier, and far, far more quirky.
Who am I talking about? Well, I guess the king of the hill would have to be the Holloway Press. Founded by Peter Simpson and Alan Loney at Auckland University in 1994, it continues to publish ornate and expensive poetry and art books. It’s a worthy successor to a grand tradition of such presses in New Zealand literary history: Alan Loney’s own Hawk Press, of course (together with its successors), or the Gormacks’ Nag’s Head Press.
Let’s see. There’s Brendan O’Brian’s Fernbank Studio; there’s Pania Press, the imprint run by my wife Bronwyn Lloyd (with occasional editorial input from me); till a few short months ago, there was Dean Havard’s Kilmog Books, a hugely productive and imaginative press based in Dunedin, which has been driven under by lack of official funding and (one must admit) by the apathy of local book-buyers.
That’s really the point of this piece, in fact. What small presses, as a rule, really lack is not quality – either in contents or design – it’s distribution. Networks of friends, loose alliances between the proprietors of like-minded presses, can make up for this to some extent, but in a retail climate which is now almost exclusively dominated by “sale or return” for the prodcuts of indie presses, most of us feel distinctly reluctant to trust our precious limited-edition books to the back shelf in some huge megastore.
So for the moment you’ll continue to see me running over to the booktable at any reasonably large poetry festival with a big wad of cash (a word to the wise: booktables seldom come equipped with eftpos or credit card facilities – if you’re serious about buying, come prepared) .
And finally, intensest apologies to anyone I’ve inadvertently left off this list. If you’re a small poetry publisher, and you think you should have been mentioned, please do write to me and I’ll try and make up for my oversight in a future post.
I was disturbed on Monday to read a vicious and unwarranted attack on my colleague, Amy Kaplan, in an ad on the Op-Ed page of the Times. This is the (unpublished) letter written in response to the ad.
To the Editor [The New York Times]:
We are professors who teach in universities across this country. We are appalled at the advertisement by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Op-Ed page, April 24, 2012 [see below]) which compares the international movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS) to the Holocaust and ancient blood libels. It also asks that professors who support it be “publicly shamed and condemned.” It grossly distorts the statements of such professors, which are publicly available online and can be verified.
The Horowitz Center’s advertisement seeks to shut down informed debate. Free speech and thought was a crucial right at stake in 1930s Germany and it remains so today. The discussion that took place at the University of Pennsylvania did not use any objectionable language, and included many Jewish participants, including rabbis. Your readers can hear for themselves what was said at www.PennBDS.org. It is Horowitz who uses the language of hatred and bigotry. Even those of us who do not support BDS are alarmed at your carrying an advertisement that misinforms and names individuals who do not have the money that Horowitz has to defend themselves through his chosen medium. We hope you will publish this letter to make this point.
{signatures as of 4/27 below ad}
1. Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania 2. Ajay Skaria, University of Minnesota 3. Amy Lang, Syracuse University 4. Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University 5. Anjali Arondekar, University of California, Santa Cruz 6. Ann Pellegrini, NYU 7. Antonio Feros!, !University of Pennsylvania 8. Boris Gasparov, Columbia University 9. Brian Boyd, Columbia University 10. Bruce Robbins, Columbia University 11. Cesare Cesarino, University of Minnesota 12. Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania 13. Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse University 14. Daniel Richter, University of Pennsylvania 15. David Delgado Shorter, UCLA 16. David Eng, University of Pennsylvania 17. David Kazanjian University of Pennsylvania 18. David Lloyd, University of Southern California 19. David Pellow, University of Minnesota 20. David Shorter, UCLA 21. Elizabeth Bernstein, Columbia University 22. Ellen Kennedy, University of Pennsylvania 23. Farah Godrej, University of California, Riverside 24. Gary Fields, University of California, San Diego 25. Gillian Hart, University of California, Berkeley 26. Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania 27. Homay King, Bryn Mawr College 28. Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara 29. Indrani Chatterjee, Rutgers University 30. James English, University of Pennsylvania 31. James Schamus, Columbia University 32. Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University 33. Jean Howard, Columbia University 34. Jean Lave, University of California, Berkeley 35. Jennifer Wenzel, University of Michigan 36. Jigna Desai, University of Minnesota 37. Jim Holstun, SUNY, Buffalo 38. Joel Beinin, Stanford University 39. Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University 40. John Mowitt, University of Minnesota 41. Joseph Slaughter, Cornell University 42. Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania 43. Josie Saldaña, NYU 44. Judith Frank, Amherst College 45. Judith Surkis, Columbia University and the Institute for Advanced Study 46. Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania 47. Katherine Franke, Columbia Law School 48. Kathleen A. McHugh, UCLA 49. Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania 50. Keya Ganguly University of Minnesota 51. Lucy San Pablo Burns, UCLA 52. Manan Desai, Syracuse University 53. Margo Todd, University of Pennsylvania 54. Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University 55. Mark Levine, University of California, Irvine 56. Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania 57. Mayanthi L. Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz 58. Melissa Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania 59. Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania 60. Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 61. Michelle Clayton, UCLA 62. Najam Haider, Barnard College 63. Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania 64. Natalie Melas, Cornell University 65. Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, UCLA 66. Nikhil Pal Singh, NYU 67. Page Fortna, Columbia University 68. Patricia Morton, University of California, Riverside 69. Persis Karim, San Jose State University 70. Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside. 71. Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University 72. Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley 73. Saadia Toor, City University of New York 74. Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley 75. Sabina Sawhney, Hofstra University 76. Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University 77. Shelley Feldman, Cornell University 78. Shu-mei Shih, UCLA 79. Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota 80. Steve Hahn, University of Pennsylvania 81. Susan Edmunds, Syracuse University 82. Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania 83. Taher Herzallah, University of California, Riverside 84. Tariq Thachil, Yale University 85. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota 86. Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania 87. Toorjo Ghose, University of Pennsylvania 88. Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania 89. Vijay Prashad, Trinity College 90. Viranjini Munasinghe, Cornell University 91. Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania 92. Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania 93. Rei Terada, UC Irvine 94. Ravi Palat, Binghamton University 95. Irma T. Elo, University of Pennsylvania 96. Gregory Mann, Columbia University 97. Qadri Ismail, Univerisity of Minnesota 98. Nik Heynen, University of Georgia 99. Shefali Chandra, Washington University St. Louis 100. Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota 101. Ismail Poonawala, UCLA 102. Zohreh Sullivan, UIUC 103. Richard Dienst, Rutgers University 104. Charles E. Butterworth, University of Maryland 105. Gabriel Piterberg, Professor of History, UCLA 106. Jennifer Olmsted, Drew University 107. Katherine C. King, University of California at Los Angeles 108. Dina Rizk Khoury, George Washington University 109. Sondra Hale, Los Angeles (UCLA) 110. Caren Kaplan, Professor, UC Davis 111. Carole S. Vance, Columbia University 112. Karen Brodkin, Professor Emerita, UCLA 113. Lee Zimmerman, Hofstra University 114. Louise Fortmann, UC Berkeley 115. David Klein, California State University, Northridge 116. Barrie Thorne, University of California, Berkeley 117. Ahlam Muhtaseb, California State University, San Bernardino 118. Neil Smith, CUNY 119. Carole H. Browner, UCLA 120. Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas 121. Guy Pollio, Nassau Community College 122. Mona Mehdy, Univ of Texas at Austin 123. Snehal Shingavi, University of Texas, Austin 124. Tim Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania 126. Michael Goldman, University of Minnesota 127. Huma Dar, UC Berkeley 128. Zachary Lockman, New York University 129. Rebecca L. Stein, Duke University 130. Dohra Ahmad, St. John’s University 131. Richard Falk, UCSB 132. Sondra Hale, UCLA 133. Gayatri Gopinath, NYU 134. Shane Minkin, Swarthmore College 135. Lisa Duggan, NYU 136. Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley 137. Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania 138. Christopher L. Chiappari, St. Olaf College 139. Aniruddha Das, Columbia University 140. Thomas Pepper, University of Minnesota 141. Helen Scott, University of Vermont 142. Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak, Columbia University 143. Lisa Hajjar UCSB 144. Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania 145. S. Shankar, University of Hawai'i at Manoa 146. Cindi Katz, CUNY. 147. Nada Elia, Antioch University – Seattle 148. Grace Kao, University of Pennsylvania 149. Pierre Joris, SUNY-Albany 150 Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Boston College 151 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple 152 Rachel Levitsky, Pratt 153 Carla Kaplan, Northeastern University
"He is good, / but he is a product of the world"
Rhetorics of empire in Scott Abels's "Rambo Goes to Idaho"
How to be a poet in Hawai`i — or elsewhere — who opposes imperialism, colonization, the military, and yet appears, as a Euro-American, to embody them? I've worried this issue before on my own blog, and thought I'd think more about it here by way of a new book from BlazeVox by Scott Abels.
Abels, whose MFA is from Boise State in the state of Idaho, notorious for its white supremacists, has lived in Hawai`i for several years now. His thesis forms the basis for his first book, Rambo Goes to Idaho, which moves between Idaho and Hawai`i. As he writes in the first section of “Idaho Conspiracy,” a poem obliquely about moving to Hawai`i: “My Composition 1100 assignment was to guess the titles / of the first five poems on the Poetry and Politics website.” Then this: “The only thing I could come up with was / Hawaii comes before Idaho alphabetically” (49). Abels's move back in the alphabet forces him to look at the problem of American empire, although one senses he did so before his “geographically confusing” move. For the MFA thesis is set up as that of John Rambo, whose thesis signature page comes after two brief proems called “Screenplay” and “Burst.” It is this poem that begins with the lines I appropriated for my title, those that assert that Rambo is good, but is a “product of the world” (9). Anyone who reads post-colonial literature knows the character of the bad English teacher, the one who is a secular missionary, who tells children they are not good enough because they speak Pidgin or another local language, and not the good English that he or she represents. No surprise then that John Rambo “is teaching English” (9), or that his “boss is explaining that English / as a second language / / is essentially the same / as special education” (10). Here special ed is aligned with special forces, by way of a fictional pop cultural icon who is deeply imbricated in American culture since the Vietnam era. While Rambo seems a confusing and confused character, Ronald Reagan famously declared him a Republican. Abels's Rambo is more like a Soviet version of Don Quixote: a little bit silly, hardly a strong-man, prone to noting things like "I am a sparrow to his peacock," about his professor, Paul Bunyan.
Writing about the Rambo films, especially the first, as well as other “action movies” of recent decades, Richard Pope notes that, “The films themselves are politically ambivalent: more fundamentally, they trace a certain diminution of the space of politics, or that space in which decisions about the future of society are made and the public mobilized.” The horrific violence of the Rambo films (here I must confess to having only watched trailers on YouTube) would then mark the strength of an assertion about an uncomfortable ambiguity about national, gendered, racial, and individual identities. While the First Blood title of the first movie denotes its “drawing" of blood, it also gestures to origins. Rambo's are not simple: he is half Navajo, half European American (German or Irish, take your pick). The plots to the films that feature Rambo present him as torn between acting as an enforcer of post-Vietnam War American imperialism and being a victim of it. He has PTSD, he shoots National Guardsmen, he doesn't like missionaries in Asia. Here I rely on John Carlos Rowe's “Culture, US Imperialism and Globalization.” But Anthony Swofford, quoted by Rowe, argues that all war movies are pro-war since Vietnam: “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.”
Abels does not indulge in overt violence in his version of the Rambo saga. Instead, he delves into Rambo's inner (bumbling) life in such a way as to echo a member of the audience of First Blood interviewed in Richard Pope's ethnographic study, “Doing Justice: A Ritual-Psychoanalytic Approach to Postmodern Melodrama and a Certain Tendency of the Action Film” (Cinema Studies 51:2, Winter 2012). That anonymous responder said, “I'm no Green Beret, but I know what it is like to have abilities that are as spectacular as they are worthless. I know the frustration of being kicked around by people who don't recognize or appreciate my worth. But I'm not a Green Beret.” Substitute the word “poet” for Green Beret and you see the odd tightrope Abels walks in his book. Abels's rhetorical stance lies somewhere past irony, within the realm of the absurd, perhaps the only location from which he can negotiate the paradoxes squeezing him from every side. “I'm a big fan / of the fall of man. // I bought the T-shirt,” is one such statement. And, on the next page:
Sincerity
is hard for me.
Mañana, aloha.
If Schwarzenegger
can buy Hummers,
then I can have a submarine
while sunshine helicopters
better than practically anyone
fulfill all hope. (69)
These and many other lines from Abels's book remind me of a line uttered numerous times by Paul Naylor to me on my recent visit to San Diego. “Capitalism forces us to live complicated lives,” he repeated. Rambo--like Schwarzenneger--can embody Emerson's self-reliance only by killing everything in sight. Hope comes dressed as a "sunshine helicopter," like those military helicopters that flew over Paul and me on the beach at Torrey Canyon in San Diego. The film Rambo's occasional violent anti-imperial forays meet Hawaiian poet and sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask's consistent anti-imperialism in her violent fantasy (published in the late 1990s) of beating up a “Racist white woman,” in a poem from Light in the Crevice Never Seen, that begins this way:
could kick
your face, puncture
both eyes.
You deserve this kind
of violence.
No more vicious
tongues, obscene
lies.
Just a knife
slitting your tight
little heart
for all my people
under your feet
for all those years
lived smug and wealthy
off our land
parasite arrogant.
Complexity can make us want certainty; what is most certain is the violence, actual and articulated, of our time. Abels implies that the acquisition of Hawai`i was such an act of attempted certainty: “The President has acquired the last state in the Union / as his generic talisman / toward not getting robbed” (25). What to make of such certitude and the damages it inflicts?
Much as we might want it to, Abels's poetry does not offer us an out, except insofar as it brings that outward violence in, examines its absurdities. And that is not to be sneezed at. Because the problem we arrive at after the violence of imperialism is counter-violence. The issue, as Eunsong Angela K. said to me in a different context in San Diego, is “what to do with power.” My colleague Caroline Sinavaiana writes: "As we know, Trask’s poetry can at times offer a fierce and tender beauty. In my view, this particular poem does neither. As reader here I end up feeling shut out of an experience – that of blatant injustice – which I know all too well. As a Polynesian thinker and cultural worker, I am all too familiar with the scourge of colonial degradation and its neocolonial aftermath. Yes, I have experienced rage. Yes, I understand the situation. But no, I do not find it productive to demonize white folks (of either gender) as a class and threaten violent retaliation, however ‘figuratively.’The question for me is not whether [Trasks's] rage is well-founded. Of course it is. The questions for me is what to do now. How to respond most skillfully? How to step out of the cycle of violence? How to harness the energy of rage, with its considerable power, as fuel for vehicles which can both heal us and restore justice? How to confront and respond to ongoing injustice in ways that strengthen us (and each other), instead of turning the violence against ourselves and our own? I think this poem could point us towards such necessary questions."
By virtue of his subject position, combined with his politics, Abels cannot assume a position of extremity in either direction. His position is an absurd one, but he has thought his way into that absurdity with a courage different from that of his subject. What his work offers back are the very complexities we are heir to, delivered up not as entertainment for the masses, but for those few of us who read poems. In his 2008 review of the last Rambo movie, A.O. Scott noted that, “the movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry.” Abels's poetry is not blockheaded in any way, nor is it particularly cinematic. As work that is neither visual nor violent, it offers us a possible space for meditation, a place from which to contemplate the violence of power, and perhaps another--less entertaining, but more productive--way out of it.
Notes (other than those embedded in the text):
Richard Pope, “Doing Justice: A Ritual-Psychoanalytic Approach to Postmodern Melodrama and a Certain Tendency of the Action Film,” Cinema Journal 51:2 (Winter 2012): 113-136).
John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialims, and Globalization,” American Literary History 16:4 (2004): 575-595.
Caroline Sinavaiana's quotation is from unpublished correspondence.
Stefan Sagmeister seeks happiness
Stefan Sagmeister (1962-) is among today's most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and the musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. His New York-based graphic design firm is called
Sagmeister Inc. At noon on Thursday, December 8, 2011, Sagmeister visited the Kelly Writers House and was interviewed before a live audience by Claudia Gould, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and currently director of the Jewish Museum. Here is an audio recording of the same event. From April through August 2012, the ICA features a Sagmeister exhibit called “The Happy Show.” During that visit to Philadelphia, Sagmeister also met with the fifteen undergraduates in Kenneth Goldsmith's year-long seminar on contemporary writing/contemporary art, a collaboration of the ICA and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Goldsmith asked the students to write ten happy, upbeat truisms during the first day of class and then, on day two, to narrow them down to one. “Do what you want.” “Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can today.” “Always mean what you say.” This emphasis on trite wisdom is tied to the ICA's Sagmeister show, an investigation of Sagmeister’s imaginative implementation of typography and ten-year exploration of happiness. A series of works follow a (non)narrative of truisms, or rules to live by, that run through the museum’s second-floor galleries, the ICA’s “ramp” space, and in-between spaces. Social data gathered from psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and anthropologist Donald Symons contextualize these maxims, originally culled from Sagmeister’s diary. At ICA, “The Happy Show” examines the ideology of self-improvement via constructed dicta.
Patti Smith in honor of William Blake
Toward the end of our interview-discussion with Patti Smith on December 9, 2010 — moderated by Anthony DeCurtis — Smith introduced and played a version of “My Blakean Year.” Here is the first stanza of the song:
In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed* a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road
* In the performance this word is apparently “Obeyed.”
In small press land
Thoughts on booktables
The first thing that I do whenever I go to a poetry conference or symposium is to make a beeline for the booktable.
This is, admittedly, because I generally have a backpack full of my own wares which I’m hoping to flog off to the unwary, but my main motive is actually a strong desire to see what oddities and rarities the others have brought along.
Far more of us than would care to admit it have a cupboard full of old back-issues of magazines and boxes of books from defunct small presses who have gone belly-up. Who else is going to be interested in such things except other writers? Librarians? Antiquarian book collectors? Academics? Funnily enough, I never seem to see any of them putting their hands in their pockets on such occasions.
Here’s the booktable in the marae in for BLUFF 06: a poetry symposium in Southland (21-24 April 2006):
Here’s the booktable in the Technological University of Sydney for H O M E & A W A Y 2 0 1 0: A Trans Tasman Poetry Symposium (31/8-3/9/10):
Here’s the booktable in Old Government House, Auckland for SHORT TAKES ON LONG POEMS: A Trans Tasman symposium at the University of Auckland (29-20/3/12):
Let’s face it: with certain (very honourable) exceptions, poetry doesn’t sell. Some of the poetry we love the most has qualities which almost guarantee a lack of market appeal, in fact. A simple survey of the books put out by the major publishers will therefore seldom be a reliable guide to what’s “really going on” in any country’s poetry scene. Hence my interest in small “my basement” presses, fly-by-night publishers, and erratically available imprints. What better place to find them than on such a table, with their authors and proprietors generally close to hand?
The poetry “mainstream” in New Zealand publishing consists, first of all, of the major University presses: AUP (Auckland), Victoria UP (Wellington), and Otago UP (Dunedin). Then come the occasional books issued by the New Zealand branches of publishers such as international giants Random House or Penguin Books, not to mention local specialist publishers such as Craig Potton (Nelson).
After that the picture becomes considerably more complicated.
There are the smaller independent publishers such as Cape Catley (Auckland), Steele Roberts (Wellington), Michael O’Leary’s ESAW [The Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop] (Kapiti Coast), Mark Pirie’s HeadworX (Wellington), and Titus Books (Kaipara), each of which have issued distinguished lists. A newer addition would be Helen Rickerby’s Seraph Books (Wellington).
There are also imprints associated with independent literary magazines: brief (Auckland), Catalyst (Christchurch), and (now) Hue & Cry (Wellington) are three that spring to mind.
After that, we come to what is to me – I must confess – the area of greatest interest: the artier, “fine-printing” presses, the ones whose every production is a conscious artistic statement. These books tend to be slimmer, pricier, and far, far more quirky.
Who am I talking about? Well, I guess the king of the hill would have to be the Holloway Press. Founded by Peter Simpson and Alan Loney at Auckland University in 1994, it continues to publish ornate and expensive poetry and art books. It’s a worthy successor to a grand tradition of such presses in New Zealand literary history: Alan Loney’s own Hawk Press, of course (together with its successors), or the Gormacks’ Nag’s Head Press.
Let’s see. There’s Brendan O’Brian’s Fernbank Studio; there’s Pania Press, the imprint run by my wife Bronwyn Lloyd (with occasional editorial input from me); till a few short months ago, there was Dean Havard’s Kilmog Books, a hugely productive and imaginative press based in Dunedin, which has been driven under by lack of official funding and (one must admit) by the apathy of local book-buyers.
That’s really the point of this piece, in fact. What small presses, as a rule, really lack is not quality – either in contents or design – it’s distribution. Networks of friends, loose alliances between the proprietors of like-minded presses, can make up for this to some extent, but in a retail climate which is now almost exclusively dominated by “sale or return” for the prodcuts of indie presses, most of us feel distinctly reluctant to trust our precious limited-edition books to the back shelf in some huge megastore.
So for the moment you’ll continue to see me running over to the booktable at any reasonably large poetry festival with a big wad of cash (a word to the wise: booktables seldom come equipped with eftpos or credit card facilities – if you’re serious about buying, come prepared) .
And finally, intensest apologies to anyone I’ve inadvertently left off this list. If you’re a small poetry publisher, and you think you should have been mentioned, please do write to me and I’ll try and make up for my oversight in a future post.
Response to Horowitz's rabid anti-BDS ad in New York Times
I was disturbed on Monday to read a vicious and unwarranted attack on my colleague, Amy Kaplan, in an ad on the Op-Ed page of the Times. This is the (unpublished) letter written in response to the ad.
To the Editor [The New York Times]:
We are professors who teach in universities across this country. We are appalled
at the advertisement by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Op-Ed page, April
24, 2012 [see below]) which compares the international movement for Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions against Israel (BDS) to the Holocaust and ancient blood libels. It
also asks that professors who support it be “publicly shamed and condemned.”
It grossly distorts the statements of such professors, which are publicly available
online and can be verified.
The Horowitz Center’s advertisement seeks to shut down informed debate. Free
speech and thought was a crucial right at stake in 1930s Germany and it remains
so today. The discussion that took place at the University of Pennsylvania did
not use any objectionable language, and included many Jewish participants,
including rabbis. Your readers can hear for themselves what was said
at www.PennBDS.org. It is Horowitz who uses the language of hatred and
bigotry. Even those of us who do not support BDS are alarmed at your carrying
an advertisement that misinforms and names individuals who do not have the
money that Horowitz has to defend themselves through his chosen medium.
We hope you will publish this letter to make this point.
{signatures as of 4/27 below ad}
1. Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania
2. Ajay Skaria, University of Minnesota
3. Amy Lang, Syracuse University
4. Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University
5. Anjali Arondekar, University of California, Santa Cruz
6. Ann Pellegrini, NYU
7. Antonio Feros!, !University of Pennsylvania
8. Boris Gasparov, Columbia University
9. Brian Boyd, Columbia University
10. Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
11. Cesare Cesarino, University of Minnesota
12. Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania
13. Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse University
14. Daniel Richter, University of Pennsylvania
15. David Delgado Shorter, UCLA
16. David Eng, University of Pennsylvania
17. David Kazanjian University of Pennsylvania
18. David Lloyd, University of Southern California
19. David Pellow, University of Minnesota
20. David Shorter, UCLA
21. Elizabeth Bernstein, Columbia University
22. Ellen Kennedy, University of Pennsylvania
23. Farah Godrej, University of California, Riverside
24. Gary Fields, University of California, San Diego
25. Gillian Hart, University of California, Berkeley
26. Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania
27. Homay King, Bryn Mawr College
28. Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara
29. Indrani Chatterjee, Rutgers University
30. James English, University of Pennsylvania
31. James Schamus, Columbia University
32. Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University
33. Jean Howard, Columbia University
34. Jean Lave, University of California, Berkeley
35. Jennifer Wenzel, University of Michigan
36. Jigna Desai, University of Minnesota
37. Jim Holstun, SUNY, Buffalo
38. Joel Beinin, Stanford University
39. Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University
40. John Mowitt, University of Minnesota
41. Joseph Slaughter, Cornell University
42. Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania
43. Josie Saldaña, NYU
44. Judith Frank, Amherst College
45. Judith Surkis, Columbia University and the Institute for Advanced Study
46. Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania
47. Katherine Franke, Columbia Law School
48. Kathleen A. McHugh, UCLA
49. Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
50. Keya Ganguly University of Minnesota
51. Lucy San Pablo Burns, UCLA
52. Manan Desai, Syracuse University
53. Margo Todd, University of Pennsylvania
54. Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
55. Mark Levine, University of California, Irvine
56. Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania
57. Mayanthi L. Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz
58. Melissa Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania
59. Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania
60. Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
61. Michelle Clayton, UCLA
62. Najam Haider, Barnard College
63. Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
64. Natalie Melas, Cornell University
65. Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, UCLA
66. Nikhil Pal Singh, NYU
67. Page Fortna, Columbia University
68. Patricia Morton, University of California, Riverside
69. Persis Karim, San Jose State University
70. Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside.
71. Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University
72. Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley
73. Saadia Toor, City University of New York
74. Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley
75. Sabina Sawhney, Hofstra University
76. Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University
77. Shelley Feldman, Cornell University
78. Shu-mei Shih, UCLA
79. Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota
80. Steve Hahn, University of Pennsylvania
81. Susan Edmunds, Syracuse University
82. Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania
83. Taher Herzallah, University of California, Riverside
84. Tariq Thachil, Yale University
85. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota
86. Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania
87. Toorjo Ghose, University of Pennsylvania
88. Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania
89. Vijay Prashad, Trinity College
90. Viranjini Munasinghe, Cornell University
91. Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania
92. Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania
93. Rei Terada, UC Irvine
94. Ravi Palat, Binghamton University
95. Irma T. Elo, University of Pennsylvania
96. Gregory Mann, Columbia University
97. Qadri Ismail, Univerisity of Minnesota
98. Nik Heynen, University of Georgia
99. Shefali Chandra, Washington University St. Louis
100. Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota
101. Ismail Poonawala, UCLA
102. Zohreh Sullivan, UIUC
103. Richard Dienst, Rutgers University
104. Charles E. Butterworth, University of Maryland
105. Gabriel Piterberg, Professor of History, UCLA
106. Jennifer Olmsted, Drew University
107. Katherine C. King, University of California at Los Angeles
108. Dina Rizk Khoury, George Washington University
109. Sondra Hale, Los Angeles (UCLA)
110. Caren Kaplan, Professor, UC Davis
111. Carole S. Vance, Columbia University
112. Karen Brodkin, Professor Emerita, UCLA
113. Lee Zimmerman, Hofstra University
114. Louise Fortmann, UC Berkeley
115. David Klein, California State University, Northridge
116. Barrie Thorne, University of California, Berkeley
117. Ahlam Muhtaseb, California State University, San Bernardino
118. Neil Smith, CUNY
119. Carole H. Browner, UCLA
120. Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas
121. Guy Pollio, Nassau Community College
122. Mona Mehdy, Univ of Texas at Austin
123. Snehal Shingavi, University of Texas, Austin
124. Tim Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania
126. Michael Goldman, University of Minnesota
127. Huma Dar, UC Berkeley
128. Zachary Lockman, New York University
129. Rebecca L. Stein, Duke University
130. Dohra Ahmad, St. John’s University
131. Richard Falk, UCSB
132. Sondra Hale, UCLA
133. Gayatri Gopinath, NYU
134. Shane Minkin, Swarthmore College
135. Lisa Duggan, NYU
136. Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley
137. Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania
138. Christopher L. Chiappari, St. Olaf College
139. Aniruddha Das, Columbia University
140. Thomas Pepper, University of Minnesota
141. Helen Scott, University of Vermont
142. Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak, Columbia University
143. Lisa Hajjar UCSB
144. Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania
145. S. Shankar, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
146. Cindi Katz, CUNY.
147. Nada Elia, Antioch University – Seattle
148. Grace Kao, University of Pennsylvania
149. Pierre Joris, SUNY-Albany
150 Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Boston College
151 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple
152 Rachel Levitsky, Pratt
153 Carla Kaplan, Northeastern University