http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/
Alexis Orgera lives in Florida. She is the author of How Like Foreign Objects, available from H_ngm_n BKS, and two chapbooks: Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). She also writes at The Blog Poetic.
I admit it. I’ve been googling myself again. It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m stalling. Around page nine of my name –a few entries away from the really strange link asking if I want to find intelligence on my father–I stumbled across (not to be confused with Stumbling Upon, which would have been way less creepy) an excellent review in The Rumpus of Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness by Darcie Dennigan. The review includes Walt Whitman’s semen in a conch shell, Peter Pan, Gertrude Stein on a spring day, and lots of oceanic hullabaloo, including shipwrecks. I’m always quoting Leopardi: How easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.
I walked into the Writing Center after teaching a course on copyediting last week and found a tableful of mums-the-word students working away diligently on handmade zines. The table was piled with paper and tape, drawing implements, glue. On a nearby table, DIY snacks: celery, peanut butter, hummus, raisins. Two of our Student Writing Assistants organized said zine workshop, provided guidance and ideas and supplies, and BAM! instant zine community.
[In this series I will think aloud about the multifarious process of publishing a first book.]
The first time I ever cursed was in the fourth grade. I’d just transferred out of Catholic school to public school. I was standing at the door to Mrs. Rogers’ portable classroom, friendless and waiting to be dismissed, when I mouthed the word “shit.” Then I whispered it. Then I said it. Just like that. Shit! I couldn’t stop smiling.
I didn’t feel the same exuberant freedom again until I was 18 and shaved my head. I remember looking into the rearview mirror of my ’86 Le Sabre after I’d buzzed my hair off; I couldn’t stop grinning.
I’m 33, and it just happened for the third time. For weeks I’d been awaiting the publication of my first book, but I’d become petrified of its first poem—that it IS the first poem in the book with its one goddamn, one fucker, and one motherfucker in 20 lines, and that certain people (such as my Italian Catholic grandmother) would read that first poem and get their feathers ruffled, feel disappointed that I’m actually such a no-good heathen. What were my publishers thinking?
This poem will always be the first poem of the book. It’ll always set a tone, which is why it’s the first poem. It’ll be there to remind me that I like to run my mouth (but also to remind me that I enjoy mis-hearings, misunderstandings, and even occasional misanthropy). That’s a lot of pressure for one little guy in a sea of bigger fish (it’s close to the shortest poem in the book).
Then I got my author copies in the mail, and I realized that the language I very deliberately chose for this poem—and every poem—simply embodies my fourth-grade epiphany or my freshman-year hair buzz, those times I used my body as the subject of my own story, pleasuring in the language of the forbidden, simultaneously defining and deferring definitions (the eternal tension of différance), and felt the freedom therein.
Basically, I’m saying that if I ever go to hell, I hope it’s because of my motherfucking mouth. That’s not all I’m saying, but it’s a start.
My friend Joseph P. Wood wrote an interesting article over at Open Letters Monthly titled, “Taxonomy and Grace.” I think his basic thesis is encapsulated in these lines:
“While creative writing in American literature has always had camps, movements (and the prerequisite back-biting and bickering), I believe our current poetic climate is so conflicted and contentious that we have done away with talking about poems on their own organic terms. Let it be clear: I am not arguing for a return to New Criticism nor do I believe in the overtly easy-blame game of it’s the fault of those fucking universities. We live in the 21st century. What’s the point of asking to return to “the good old days” when those days would have excluded the likes of me — a working class, oddly educated, and peculiarly read writer with gaping holes in my canonical knowledge? I’m suggesting that while it is important to attend to our own academic reputations and political and aesthetic convictions, it is more important that we honor the imagination by not solely treating the poem against a singular interpretive mechanism.”
It might initially seem as though Joseph is arguing against the artist pigeonholing herself, right, by ascribing to one philosophical or theoretical stance, and this would be true, but I think he’s also genuinely concerned with the way we read and discuss poetry, the way we disseminate poetry. Has poetry become such an in-club that we can’t love a poem without ascribing it to a school or a movement? Do we have to know a shit-ton about Wittgenstein in order to speak intelligently about a poem? And as for the artist, is joining the club actually the job, or the business, of a poet (insert artist, writer, whatever besides critic)? Shouldn’t we simply write our way into the world? Are we in an age that forces us to straddle the fence between idea-schools and self-expression? What about the movements that aggregate what their members believe and create manifestos? I mean, where’s threshold beyond which the artist is in danger of losing her essential selfhood?
Read the article. Take issue. Praise its inherent belief in beauty and grace.
Steinbeck on rejection:
“I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt–and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails.”
–Lee in East of Eden
Pulp. Fibrous, cellulose pulp. Grass-paper, rag-paper, rag-and-bone, paperweight: in the second century Cai Lun developed a paper process. Tiny little papermills of the mind. Cogs and wheels of papermaking, pulping, rod-and-doweling. And then a lunatic of the senses, the world becomes that, is that, mired in that. Words. Cultural disease, newsprint, papyrus bundles. In the chemical pulping, all our senses. In the mechanical pulping, all trees like a billion Christmases. A cooking process. Waste fortifies chalk and china clay. Watermarks destroy the day and deckle its edges.
We’re all of an age that recycling is second nature. We use the backs of receipts for listmaking—if we use paper at all—before we toss paper into the recycle bin. We read on screen. We mostly do paperless banking, paperless billing, paperless letter writing. We practice efficiency. We download 572 books onto our little reading devices and plow through them candily.
But I’ll tell you what. I got the proof copy of my book in the mail yesterday, and there is nothing in the world like seeing your book in all its pulpy flesh. It is a real object, a hallelujah of paper and ink. It’s a book, which is a thing. I can slip it into my purse and feel it there. It’s the synecdoche of language-as-artifact, a receptacle for artfulness. I wouldn’t be nearly as happy to have a book published in the ether. Look! Here’s my book in the air! No way. I want to see it, feel it, bruise it, lick its spine.
The book industry could stand to cut down its waste, as all industries could. We’re wasteful motherfuckers with our overstocks and our throw aways—even the zoos breed more animals than they can use and sell them to more wasteful idiots who think having exotic pets is fun. Have you seen how much meat your big box grocer throws away weekly? The machine is unwieldy and alive all around us.
But trim the fat. Trim the fat. Don’t throw away the whole goddamn bird.
I picked up Gordon Massman’s The Essential Numbers 1991-2008 at AWP. Nobody told me to; I didn’t know that Blake had said things about it. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This is the most depraved-and-beautiful book of poems I’ve read maybe ever. I mean, Massman’s language forces me read every poem aloud (which is one of my gauges of good poetry); the sheer music of the language propels me down the page, and when I’ve finished every poem, I feel a little sick. I’m glad this book exists in the world. I’m not sure I’ll get through it. Here’s an interview.
In the chapter on capitalization in The Copyeditor’s Handbook–I was just forced to buy a new one because I spilled grouper juice all over my tried-and-true copy; I bought it at Borders for a big-chunk discount because Borders is hightailing it out of my town–so, in this new copy, under the heading “Personal Names and Titles,” is a debate about capitalization. For fuck’s sake, people. If bell hooks or k.d. lang want their names lowercased, what’s the problem? Well, according to Amy Einsohn, who feels like my bff some days, Bill Walsh says this:
Sure, before “k.d. lang” there was “e.e. cummings.” But, as most good dictionaries…and New York Times style recognize, these are logos. The names are K.D. Lang and E.E. Cummings. To bow to the artists’ lowercase demand…deprives readers of a crucial visual cue…
I just read a beautiful translation of Véronique Tadjo’s Queen Pokou by a prof here at New College, Amy Baram Reid. Amy was my professor fifteen years ago; one of my favorite classes in college was her course called New Worlds, New Stories: Women Writing in the Americas. As a matter of fact, I discovered one of my all-time favorite books, Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise, in that course, as well as developing a new appreciation for and understanding of gender politics through literature.
In Queen Pokou, Véronique Tadjo re-imagines the 18th-century Western African legend of Queen Pokou, who according to said legend, threw her baby into a river in order to appease the gods and save her exiled people. The river parted, Pokou’s followers crossed, and the Baole people were born out of Pokou’s cries: “Ba-ou-li. Ba-ou-li (The child is dead).”
This book exists as a series of concentric maybes. It’s beautiful in its rendering of the grief of a mother to, alternately, the fear-inducing power of a queen coming into her own. One iteration of Tadjo’s re-imagining, “The Atlantic Passage” asks, “But what if Abraha Pokou had refused the sacrifice?” and takes Pokou and her son to the Americas via the slave trade.
Being a big fan of retellings in their ability to redistribute power and deconstruct prohibitive worlds, I like what Amy Baram Reid says in the book’s afterword: