Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason
Wolf in a Cage by Josh Grigsby
“One major lesson I had to learn was to become empty and dumb and trusting enough to write every day. For this I needed, at times, blind patience, no theories about art.” –Larry Levis
Thinking about the intangibles of writing is like walking around, drunk, in a pitch-black room the size of an airplane hangar, with ghosts, with disembodied voices, with naked doppelgangers, choking on the fear of bumping into something much larger, much hairier than yourself.
I believe that’s why we talk about craft, the building blocks of a piece of art—light, shadow, line break, sentence. These are necessary to the physical architecture of the thing, certainly, and they’re quantifiable. Humans, we, desire formula and quantitative resources, names and registers. These are easier than dark, open spaces.
But what about the intangibles, the anti-craft, anti-move, anti-self-consciousness of making? What about the inexplicable creates lasting art, something more than pop culture referentiality, more than tricks-of-a-trade? What a friend of mine calls irreducibility?
Many poets and artists have tried to define the “it” factor. Many, to my eye, have succeeded in some way but never in a flesh-and-blood way. Never in a follow-these-eight-easy-steps way. For that, I’m glad.
Garcia Lorca had his duende, hovering at the lip of the wound; Ginsberg said, “the only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush.” Keats sought the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I could go on forever, maybe.
There’s an interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Believer. In it, Kominsky-Crumb describes a similar abstract quality to her comic-making:
“I’m so emotionally charged when I’m doing that, I can’t really control what comes out. It just comes out in a very direct form. In a way, I’m lucky that I can access that. In another way it’s horrible because I can’t refine it or improve it and make it look more, like, acceptable.”
Craft is a given, right? You love an art form so you study it; you dissect its structure. You practice, you imitate. You count syllables, maybe. You look at possible moves, maybe. Sometimes you go to school to understand and synthesize the great traditions in the company of other humans so you don’t have to read poems to your dog all the time. Sometimes you benefit from school. Sometimes you are ruined and reborn [see the Kominsky-Crumb interview for more on that].
But then what? Inevitably, you ask yourself, why does this poem make my heart sing? Why do I feel like I could jump off a building after I read this book? Or, like Dickinson, why does this thing make me feel physically like the top of my head has been taken off?
Q & A 3
If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at roxanegay dot com and we will find you some answers.
Q1: How do you get a poetry manuscript published?
Sam Pink
write a poetry manuscript that you like and show it to people.
Sean Lovelace
That’s a tough one. I would say contests and then send it out to presses who you admire, or who have a sensibility somewhat like your own work. Also, publish the individual poems, build a presence, voice, and you might just get a publisher contacting you, saying, “Do you have a collection?” Like all writng, if it is a strong collection and you believe in it, it will eventually find its place.
Alexis Orgera
So far editors have asked for the chapbooks I’ve published. I’m told you just have to send out relentlessly, particularly to places where the editors’ aesthetic is similar to your own. For instance, I wouldn’t send a manuscript with lots of shit-fuck-goddamns…well, that’s not true. I send everything everywhere.
Fuck You
glow interview with Ed Sanders over at Poetry Daily. If you have seen it, Fuck You. If not, Fuck You.
It’s pretty good to write here, because people leave us alone.
Moves in Contemporary Poetry
Way back in the comments on Danika Stegeman’s poem “Panacea,” a discussion started about “moves” in contemporary poetry, and I mentioned that I’d seen the poet Elisa Gabbert start pretty awesome discussions about “moves” on her own blog and on the Ploughshares blog. Then she posted the following comment: “Hi Mike, I have definitely talked about moves before, moves I like and moves I don’t like and my own signature moves, but haven’t made a real list, certainly not a comprehensive list, certainly not the DEFINITIVE list. Let me know if you want to collaborate on a list of moves for HTMLGiant.”
Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.
Happy New York (Part I)
I don’t think the Rust Buckle Books (more on these in Part II) bee
r can logo (below) is by Brian Calvin, but seeing it reminded me–via Flood Editions, where Calvin’s heads (Half-Mast, 2001, and Killer, 2006) can be found on Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger (2007) and A Mouth in California–that “Head”, his show at Anton Kern, closes on January 16.
I’m sure New Yorkers themselves go elsewhere (where?), but “Goings On About Town” is still my first stop to find out what I get for living where else. Although there’s always an abundance in ART (the above BRIAN CALVIN, WALLACE BERMAN – Jan. 9; “FROTTAGE” – Jan. 17) and MOVIES (Tati–tonight, Trafic–at the MOMA: see also, under ART, OROZCO) that I wish I wasn’t missing, rarely does READINGS AND TALKS make me want to move.
Ever abbreviated (possibly defensible in print, but why all the white space online, where this week there were three total readings–no talks–compared to eight pages of movies?), the section is never more so than in its annual capsule announcement of the reading of the year:
A hundred and forty poets and performers, including Penny Arcade, Yoshiko Chuma, Steve Earle, John Giorno, Taylor Mead, Judith Malina, Jonas Mekas, Eileen Myles, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, gather for the thirty-sixth annual marathon reading at the Poetry Project.
What about the other 130 plus poets (from Ana Bozicevic to Magdalena Zurawski) and performers (Philip Glass) and performers (Ostashevsky)? Is there another reading anywhere that, thanks to the Project’s own Arlo Quint (and Emily XYZ) covers every letter? But I guess I shouldn’t quarrel with an alphabet that begins with Penny Arcade and ends with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Indeed I would have gone to hear the listed Ms alone: where else could you find Mead (who turned 85 on New Year’s Eve), Malina (b. 1926 in Germany, godmother of the American avante garde), the Lithuanian born Mekas (godfather of same, turned 87 on Christmas Eve), and Myles (the only Presidential candidate who’s written a speech about Robert Walser?), not to mention Machlin, Marinovich, (Chris) Martin, and Mesmer, among Many More (see list-in-progress, with links, after the leap), in one audience, let alone on one stage?
CAConrad, the poet of the year if ever there were one (when’s the last time anyone had books as good as Advanced Elvis Course and The Book of Frank come out in the same year?), has an anecdote about the most memorable line from the 2005 reading in the comments section of this to-be-revisited list. Can anyone give us some highlights from yesterday’s event? Will anything else in 2010 approach this gathering in sheer skylight? READ MORE >
The Chupacabra Strikes Again (Or, A Letter from My Self on NYE)
(Sam, The World’s Ugliest Dog, chupacabra stand-in)
Dear Self,
It’s 10:30 on New Year’s Eve. You won’t make it until midnight. You’re tired and achy and your head’s swimming. You feel like throwing up.
The moon’s bright, and clouds sling tracks across the sky.
You’ve been thinking tonight, which is ever-dangerous, about why you sit down to write every day. Why do you do this thing that has very little return in the free market? That few people will ever read? That some will hate?
Self, you are too sincere, not nearly ironic enough. You are way too un-cool: hipster-with-a-fannypack-for-a-purse-uncool. Self, I know what you’re thinking—you’ve got books strewn around you on New Year’s Eve, you look drunk—but you’re thinking about urgency, the deep and monstrously incoherent need to believe in something against a backdrop of post-postmodern self-conscious irony, gluttony, and emotional vacancy.
Self, I’ve been reading over your shoulder. You think you do it because READ MORE >
Moyamensing Prison by Charles Bukowski
we shot craps in the exercise yard while the
dummies played ball with a torn-up shirt
wound into a ball
once or twice a day we had to break it up
under a tommy gun from the tower—
some blank-faced screw pointing it at
us, but,
Danika Stegeman Poem
Panacea
We live with glass flowers instead of flowers
that wilt light. Dinosaurs once owned the scene.
I hardly need to mention them to catalog
their numbered bones. A clock flashes on.
I’ll tell you how it will work. Nothing
is more likely to lead to an H-bomb
than the specter. We live in the air death has—
a tightened belt. The individual is some thing
we share until it hurts. I’ll tell you
how it will work. I would leave with you.
The path of life is strewn with bones
and the question is stirring. Nothing recounted
could assure intent hangs a lantern
or hope finds a horse.
Danika Stegeman graduated from George Mason University’s Creative Writing MFA program in May 2009 and co-edits the journal Rooms Outlast Us. She currently lives and works as a librarian, text editor and researcher in Bethesda, MD. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Juked and Noö Journal.
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Ruth Lilly Fellows
This month’s issue of Poetry features a buncha dudes/dudettes who won the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, which if you are like me and had no fuckclue what that means it means they got paid $15 grand for being writers. Awesome, right? People should get money for making words (truly). Let’s look at some of these fifteen-thousand dollar words, no?
Sifting in the Afternoon
by Malachi BlackSome people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antiquechair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rugmy mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have anotherroom, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquetof paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’d want to say if given chance;but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dustand dwindle in a little grid of shadow
on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.
Oh, whoops. Seriously?
How did that blank piece of regurgitated dog anal win the moneys? Surely there are kids in 8th grade writing more interesting pap than that, yeah?
Hold on, let’s take a little look at old Malachi (pen name?)’s bio:
Malachi Black is literary editor of the New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. His work appears widely.
Oh, gotcha.
Excuse me, I was going to write a bunch more about these people, but now I have to take a blood dump, and there are plenty of sitcoms already on TV.
Thanks for killing America a little bit harder, Poetry Magazine.
Sometimes I kinda miss Foetry.
(P.S. If anybody wants to write up a close reading of this poem, or any of the other Ruth Lilly pieces in Poetry, please send it over and we’ll probably run it.)