Jenn McCreary, Joe Milutis, and Leonard Schwartz (the latter two traveling from the state of Washington) joined Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House to discuss a poem/audiotext created by the radical Scottish poet Tom Leonard. The piece is part of a work called “Three Texts for Tape,” which was recorded by Leonard at his home in Glasgow in 1978 on the poet’s TEAC A-3340S reel-to-reel tape deck. The part of the project discussed in this episode of PoemTalk is “Shelley’s ‘Revolt of Islam.’”
LISTEN TO THE SHOW Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, musician, and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Washington-Bothell. His latest book is Failure, A Writer’s Life (Zero Books, 2013), “a catalogue of literary monstrosities, a philosophy for the unreadable, and a map for new literary worlds.” He’s also the author of Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minnesota, 2006).
Mail received the other day from Joe Milutis, who Skyped into my William Carlos Williams class to talk about Paterson and the work he’s been doing on the impressively audio-rich and intertextual blog New Jersey as an Impossible Object.
I've been thinking lately about Obama's first (first — “first,” you see I’ve said it) inaugural. His choices evince both range and constraint: Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, John Williams, Elizabeth Alexander. I'm reminded that at the blog Last Exit Joe Milutis gave Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem a positive review. To start, he quoted William Carlos Williams as follows: “You’re not putting sugar on cake. You’re building!” Re-reading this review has gotten me thinking about Obama's centrism in general, its problems and possibilities.
Obama once said this: “A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence.”
Joe Milutis came in from Seattle for this session, and met up with Zack Pieper (wandering eastward from Milwaukee), drove down from northeastern Pennsylvania together and joined Al Filreis, our host, and erica kaufman (training southwest from New York) at the Writers House, where it was time to consider a poem that is either specifically about a postage-stamp-sized offbeat haven (the lower East Side of New York of a certain era) or generally about the whole America from which indeed our PoemTalkers gathered. Well, probably both.
Joe calls Alice Notley’s “I the People” a poem writing out the “agon in American culture.” Zack speculates on why Notley was embarrassed by the title (a remark she makes in introducing it): it’s “a gentle parody,” Zack offers, “of the way political language abstracts things,” but troubling is the general over-use (especially on the Left) of the term “the people” in particular. Al ponders the possibly unambiguous skeptical politics of the title (overt): the title, he contends, is red meat for those who want to see leftist politics here, but the body of the poem is less obviously in the liberal-left rhetorical tradition of talk about democratic rights.
For Zack this is a poem full of things people think when they are walking around during the day, but the result is not mundane. On the contrary, it has a mystical quality. Later, following from this, erica offers her ideas on how this poem might be taught under the rubric of the New York School of poetry. But right away erica says its “walking around”-ness is an aspect of the poem she particularly likes: a glimpse at routine thoughts while at the same time a political commentary on the possessive and on the subject.
“I the People” is a poem that makes one wonder: Which comes first in American democracy, the “I” or the “we”? Joe notes that while these are “the two ends of the problem,” the vast middle ground between “I” and “we” is both intimate and fraught.
Williams in the mail
Mail received the other day from Joe Milutis, who Skyped into my William Carlos Williams class to talk about Paterson and the work he’s been doing on the impressively audio-rich and intertextual blog New Jersey as an Impossible Object.