Wailing wall of sound

Al Filreis

I've just read a pre-publication draft of an essay by Maria Damon on the creative world/work of Jewish-Canadian feminist KaI've just read a pre-publication draft of an essay by Maria Damon on the creative world/work of Jewish-Canadian feminist Kabbalah scholar/poet Adeena Karasick. I've read Karasick's Dyssemia Sleaze (2000) and after reading Damon's inspired, breathless essay I'll buy The Empress Has No Closure if not other books as well. Perhaps Maria D. will ask me not to quote this draft, but I'm so taken by Damon's own lyrical verve here that I can't help myself. She begins by describing Rock n Roll's "Wall of Sound" as "an aural cenotaph for those lost in diasporic lines of frightflight." This takes us to Karasick's major piece in Dyssemia Sleaze, "The Wall," which (obviously) refers to, among other things, the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) of Jerusalem. To Damon "The Wall" as a poem is itself "a tsunamic wall of words and images bearing down on the reader, a chaotic pile of junk, a roaring whirl." Then there's this phrase, describing the female performance poet: "the (coded-female) reproductive body spew-shpritzing verb-effluence as it it were a bodily fluid."

Much of this is overstated but I take it — and appreciate it — as Damon's attempt as a critic to be a participant in such a radical Jewish experimental poetics, with plenty of cognizance and self-consciousness that she herself, Damon, commits the imitative fallacy. This is indeed, as she puts it, "the danger of 'falling flat' [that is] always present in such specifically corporealized work and [thus] lends it some of its interest — as in (I can only hope) the overload of corny puns with which I tend to freight my essays." Wow, what a shrewd way of anticipating our objection to aspects of this tour de force (not "The Wall" but Damon's essay about it) that indeed fall flat. So why not? It seems to me all part of what Alfred North Whitehead calls a proposition — a "lure of feeling." (Damon herself quotes this phrase.) If the purpose of such an essay is to get me as reader to read more of its subject — Karasick —then it succeeds in a way most essays I've read about relatively unknown contemporary writers fails. Failure, in a sense, is not an option. Worth the risk.

Damon’s apparently whimsical essay on academic affiliation (published years earlier in a book on the academy*), while also interesting in its own right, seems to me most helpful as a provider of context for this critic’s personal intellectual origins. Affiliation is, after all, a function of the individual’s sense of her life-work. That long ago (as a student at Hampshire College) Damon was encouraged (“trained” is actually her word) to think of intellection in terms of “mode of inquiry” rather than “objects of knowledge” goes a long way toward explaining her orientation to process and her insistence on and devotion to self-disclosure. Non satis scire is or was Hampshire's motto: it is not enough (simply) to know. The literary historian of modern and contemporary poetics cannot (simply) describe, especially when she is actively a part of the scene she is describing.

And so I would suggest that Damon's Karasick essay makes emphatic and structurally/formally appropriate a tendency that Damon obviously feels she’s at her best when giving free reign to it. Even her essay on Alan Sondheim's intrusive/disruptive alienating art, for Damon a more academically rigorous critical performance, makes explicit her desire always “to some degree” to be writing essays which are themselves participants in the disjunctive “bricolagarie” (“repeating, quoting, and [self-]interrupting”) that is her main topic.

Adeena Karasick is a wonderful temptation for the critic who thinks of herself or himself as a writer — to cross from critic to poet or, a bit less obviously, to carry criticism across.

* "Memoirs of a Mutable Thoughter," Affiliation: Identity in Academic Culture, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Nebraska, 2003).

September 10, 2007

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.