Big Bridge’s 15th Anniversary issue is now live.  It contains multitudes.

In the spirit of Porter’s “founds”–which provocatively combine visual poetry, found poetry, and collage–I decided to use whatever materials I had at hand (the MLA convention program and the Alaska Airlines information card about emergency landings) to create a humble homage to the Marcel Duchamp of the poetry world.  Indeed, Dick Higgins has said, “Porter’s Found Poems have the same seminal position as Duchamp’s objets trouvées.”

…if the reader’s expression of his freedom through the text is tolerated among intellectuals (clercs) (only someone like Barthes can take this liberty), it is on the other hand denied students (who are scornfully driven or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning ‘accepted’ by their teachers) or the public (who are carefully told ‘what is to be thought’ and whose inventions are considered negligible and quickly silenced).

–Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching” from The Practice of Everyday Life

While I should–officially–frown upon the destruction of university property, I have to admit that upon entering the Writers House this week for the first time since the fall semester, I was amused to see that someone had presumably taken the creative impulse from the safety of the page to the signage of the building. With the removal of a few letters, the noun “WRITERS HOUSE” was transformed into the verb (perhaps an imperative?) “REHOUSE.” Certainly this act of poaching was in the spirit of the unit on textual appropriation, bricolage, and erasure that I taught last semester in my creative writing workshops.  (One of my students had brilliantly whited out sections of Ellison’s Invisible Man–creating a striking alternate text as well as effectively playing with the theme of in/visibility.) This act of poaching also made me think of a syllabus that I recently drafted called “Poetry, Literary Recycling, and ‘Open Source’ Culture.” Looking at the sign again, I had thought that we could also remove “HO” to make “REUSE.” And out of the missing letters–wherever they may be–we could make “THIS ROW.”

Hyperallergic, “a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art,” has launched a new online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, a venture spearheaded by the editorial collective of John Yau, Thomas Micchelli, Claudia La Rocco and Albert Mobilio.

It is, as Yau states in his introductory essay, “Unassimilated and Inadmissible,” interested in what “is simmering in the zone of the prohibited and unacceptable.”

This edition has a healthy serving of literary conversation including Yau’s review of Ben Lerner’s first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011) and my review of Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research (Futurepoem Books, 2011).  Do take a look and subscribe.

“An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?”
–Jacques Derrida

In today’s print issue of the New York Times, there’s an article called “Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall.”  According to Marc Bekoff, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, the emergent field of ”animal studies” encompasses “anything that has to do with the way humans and animals interact.”  Reading the article made me think back to a debate I had last spring with a former colleague about the validity and value of animal studies.  My colleague had thought that animal studies was bogus interdisciplinarity, a distraction from the pure pursuit of literary learning while I was trying to entertain notions of how animal studies could enrich our reading and understanding of literature.  I had followed up my comments to him with an informal email that included a reading of Rilke’s famous poem “Black Cat.”  This is the poem (in Stephen Mitchell’s translation) from the marvelous book New Poems:

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

And here is what I wrote about the last stanza:

I’m just wondering out loud here now but isn’t this ending as much about interspecies awareness as it is about specularity and metaphor? Or can we say something productive of the fact that the human, the insect, and the feline are being triangulated by what Richards calls the tenor, vehicle, and ground? Here it seems like this epiphanic “shock” is more than what Barbara Herrnstein Smith is calling the “ontological thrill of the animal” (the term is from her book Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human)– it’s about the awareness of another being (a prehistoric fly) by way of a defamiliarized (or rather figured or metaphorized) reflection of the self. And it is an “awakening” of sorts of the “you” by way of an imagined awakening of the cat (“as if awakened”). It seems to me that this epiphany (if we can borrow from Joyce) or this “spot of time” (if we can borrow from Wordsworth) is all about imagining the human as a speck (like the insect) within the long continuum of geologic time; one might call this the “prehistorical sublime.” I am not quite sure what “animal studies” actually is but I would like to imagine that its horizon can be amenable to and enrich the cursory analysis that I’m trying to do here… any thoughts?

My colleague declined to answer, but I was wondering what you all think about what is not quite a field, a field that is in its “prehistoric” state.  Looking back at the Rilke passage again I’m struck how the cat becomes almost a “fossil record” of gazes–the cat as a wondrously absorptive archive of pelt, a languorous and infinite repository for one: “She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen / into her, so that, like an audience, / she can look them over, menacing and sullen, / and curl to sleep with them.”

Rita Dove’s new Penguin anthology has made Amazon’s “Best Books of 2011″ list; while the “bestness” of the book is dubious to say the least, the Dove anthology is surely part of the “best” or at least most notable literary controversies of 2011.  The controversy began with Helen Vendler’s scathing review of the anthology in the November 24, 2011 issue of  The New York Review of Books; Dove has since responded in a letter to the editor and publications such as the The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian have picked up the story.  The argument has truly been an ugly one and  Vendler winds up looking like a racist curmudgeon,  Dove winds up looking like an irresponsible anthologist (and less than eloquent defender of the poets she loves), and Penguin winds up looking absolutely fraudulent in its packaging of the anthology.

Vendler’s biggest gripe about the anthology is that there is too much inclusion and not enough aesthetic discrimination:  ”Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?”  Too much Melvin Tolson, says Vendler, and not enough Wallace Stevens.  This seems like another salvo in the culture wars, a knee-jerk reaction against a multiculturalist agenda. Vendler is rather predictably (and erroneously) presenting “multicultural inclusiveness” and “lasting value” as mutually exclusive.  For Vendler, “lasting value” is somewhat tautologically determined by time itself: “there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff: Which of Dove’s 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?”  Shouldn’t Time, as a personification, be color blind?

Vendler’s awkward passive construction “bestowed” betrays the enormity of her ideological obfuscation.  Time does not somehow magically canonize poets. Poets have staying power because they are anthologized, taught, and written about by critics and scholars such as Vendler herself and her recourse to “the passage of time” and the natural metaphor of “wheat” and “chaff” is disingenuous.  As Roland Barthes has taught us, ideology is nothing more than an effort to pass off the constructed as natural.  The process of winnowing–the exposure of grain to the wind (or a current of air) so that the chaff can be blown away–requires a natural process as well as the intervention of the farmer’s hand.  Poets do not “seep back into the archives” like water; poets are neglected and forgotten.

Vendler observes that “[a]nthologies are wonderful for the young”: “Coming as a young person to this anthology, I would have loved finding such poems.  But I would still have been hungry for more than six pages here of Wallace Stevens, more than a single poem by James Merrill.”  Young people, Vendler is suggesting, will be disserviced by an anthology which “in some cases” gives more space to “black poets” than “better-known authors.”  Vendler fails to imagine a situation in which a young person of color might find inspiration in traditions of writing by non-white authors and unfortunately treats black writing with a patronizing unease:

[D]oesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks ‘confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race’? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches. The excellent contemporary poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Carl Phillips needs no special defense.

Dove’s point–perhaps it could have been more elegantly phrased–that a black woman can write just as well as a white man doesn’t particularly strike me as “hype,” and Vendler’s invocation of Shakespeare, Dante, and Wordsworth seems tendentious in a review of twentieth-century poetry.  One also wonders about the curious split in Vendler’s phrase “permanent historical and aesthetic interest.”  How does this line up with her earlier language of a poetry of “lasting [aesthetic?] value” and a poetry that dwells (one presumes permanently) within “the archives of sociology”?

In her written response to Vendler, Dove unfortunately defends her support of Brooks and Tolson in odd and ultimately ineffective ways.  Dove says, “Evidently the 1950 Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Ms. Brooks to award her the prize in poetry, at a time when there was little talk of diversity in America and the expression ‘multiculturalism’ had yet to enter the public discourse. Analogous praise today, however, amounts in Dame Vendler’s eyes to nothing but ‘hype.’”  By deferring her own judgment to the 1950 Pulitzer committee’s decision, Dove, in a way, plays into Vendler’s criticism that she had not “directly addressed the hard questions of choice.”  If time doesn’t tell, big prize committees will.  The comment also seems unnecessarily self-serving since Dove, herself, won the Pulitzer in 1987.  Had Dove included Brooks’ remarkable poem “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” she could have more convincingly cited an actual passage of innovative writing:

Salve salvage in the spin.
Endorse the splendor splashes;
stylize the flawed utility;
prop a malign or failing light–
but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.

Dove also defends giving Tolson fourteen pages to Stevens’ six by the mere fact that Tolson is a writer of long poems.  ”Should Tolson be denied representation,” she asks, “because he writes long poems?”  It is a weak rhetorical question-as-argument.  The anthology isn’t particularly friendly toward long poems–there are no long poem excerpts, for example, by Duncan, Ammons, or Auden, and there is no excerpt from Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” which I find scandalous. Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” is presented as a small discrete poem (as it is usually presented in anthologies) rather than poem XXII in the larger sequence Spring and All.

It is easy to see why Vendler chose to criticize Dove’s anthology; like Robert Archambeau, I find the anthology to be “unusable.”  And Dove’s introductory essay–which Jericho Brown puzzlingly calls “a useful text for introduction to American poetry courses”–is, by turns, reductive, skewed, and inaccurate. Take, for instance, this important contextualization:

To understand the tremendous importance of modernism as a literary movement in America, we must look back to Victorian England…By the end of the nineteenth century, the Victorians’ stolid moral and religious institutions had begun to show cracks: The revelations of Darwinism and rapidly accelerating industrialization, soon to be exacerbated by the horrors of World War I and expanding struggles for workers’ rights, challenged the old order with its God-given statutes of right and wrong.  Sophisticated readers were now less interested in contemplative entertainment than in words that lent meaning to the confusing changes upon them.  Modernism rose from the ruins: Nothing is stable, reality is not necessarily synonymous with truth, truth can be imaginary.

What is striking is that Dove so spectacularly erases any trace of Victorian poetry in “look[ing] back to Victorian England.”  What about the importance of the dramatic monologue–perhaps the most famous form of the Victorian era–to poets like Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Rukeyser, and Hughes?  What about the famous ending passage from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”?  Surely a triple-decker novel could be deemed “contemplative entertainment” but what about this:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This is a poem that precisely documents the erosion of “stolid moral and religious institutions,” that challenges “God-given statutes of right and wrong.” Dove’s essay is simply a shoddy piece of literary history.  There are too many examples to cite.  She often uses a synecdochic logic which distorts the diversity of poets who are often lumped together. For example, she takes Frank O’Hara to be representative of the so-called New York school as a whole: “The concept of the poet as witness (‘I have seen’) informed the observational stance of the New York school…”

But the larger point, I think, is that Vendler’s supposed target–multiculturalism–is (to borrow a phrase from Barbara Herrnstein Smith) a major “straw herring.” In other words, Vendler shouldn’t blame poor multiculturalism on a bad anthology, an anthology that  poorly represents the diversity and innovations of multicultural American poetry in the twentieth-century.  An anthology that would represent such traditions would surely include Gloria Anzaldúa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Norman Pritchard.  Numerous figures from Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s excellent Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006) are not included in Dove’s anthology.  And what about José Garcia Villa, arguably the most important and innovative Asian American writer of the first half of the twentieth century?  Interestingly, Vendler’s review “Are These the Poems to Remember?” is prefaced by a 1948 photograph.

One presumes that the photograph was an easy way for the NYRB to present an icon of canonicity: after all, we have Auden here, we have Bishop, Moore, Schwartz, Jarrell…all of whom are represented in Dove’s anthology.  But what about Marya Zaturenska?  She won the Pulitzer in 1938.  And near the back, in the middle of the frame is Villa, who was born in Manila but lived in the United States for decades.  Surely this poem of his counts as “richly innovative” in its fusion of Dickinsonian intensity and experimental typography:

As,much,as,I,perceive,the,Future,
Lo: the,Future,perceives,me:
A,Mutuality,of,Eyes.

Untanglement,beyond,possibility—
Too,knit,too,knit,together,we!
None,can,effect,suture.

Not,I,if,I,wished: though,I,worked,
Though,I,broke,all,my,life:
Long,Ago,these,Futures,were,Weld:

Architecture,most,pure,most,splendid:
God,Pyramidal,Darkness—
And,I—Fire! climbing,it,climbing,it.

But I am now, of course, on my way to compiling my own anthology.  (For a massive list of important poets excluded from Dove’s anthology see John Olson’s reaction.)

According to Amit Majmudar, “Dove’s anthology is personal and at times polemical; if either she or her publisher, or ideally both, had packaged the contents accordingly, much of this brouhaha might have been avoided.”  I agree.  Majmudar argues that Dove’s anthology invites the expectation ”of a scholarly anthology.”  Yet in Dove’s own introduction she admits that her “panorama of twentieth-century poetry” was “viewed not with a scholar’s dissecting eye but from the perspective of a contemporary poet.”  Dove’s anthology is very much eccentric and personal and to judge it as a responsible, thoroughly-researched scholarly anthology would be to miss the point.  To be fair, I was delighted to find a few surprises: Robert Francis’ “Silent Poem.”  Or Angelina Weld Grimké’s “Fragment.”  Yet the way in which Penguin presented the anthology is completely misleading.  On the back cover, there is a list of nine names in capital letters followed by the phrase “…AND MANY OTHERS.”  The names are:

WALLACE STEVENS

T.S. ELIOT

ELIZABETH BISHOP

ROBERT HAYDEN

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

DEREK WALCOTT

ADRIENNE RICH

JOHN ASHBERY

ANNE SEXTON

When one now thinks about the exclusion of Stevens’ great mid-length and long poems–from ”The Auroras of Autumn” to “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” to “Esthetique du Mal“–one wonders why he is the first one on the list.  One also begins to sense why Vendler, a Stevens scholar, was so outraged by the anthology.  For her, there were too many “others” and not enough well-respected poets which the list was meant to evoke.  This is Penguin’s “summary” of the book that can be found on the publisher’s website:

Penguin proudly presents an unparalleled survey of the best poems of the past century.

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U .S. Poet Laureate, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years. Selecting from the canon of American poetry throughout the twentieth century, Dove has created an anthology that represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities-from styles and voices to themes and cultures-while balancing important poems with significant periods of each poet. Featuring poems both classic and contemporary, this collection reflects both a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern American poetry and outlines its trajectory over the past century.

Phrases like “unparalleled,” “best,” and “full spectrum” surely invite criticism and scrutiny.  They also suggest an anthology that goes beyond a personal selection.  Yet the subtitle of Dove’s introduction is “My Twentieth Century of American Poetry.”

This mislabelling reminds me of Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993).  In another notorious anthology controversy, John Yau took Weinberger to task for including only two black poets out of a total of thirty-five slots.  In a 1994 American Poetry Review piece called “Neither Us nor Them,” Yau wonders where is, among others, Sterling Brown, Henry Dumas, Robert Hayden, Stephen Jonas, Bob Kaufman, Etheridge Knight, Larry Neal, Lorenzo Thomas, Melvin Tolson, and Jay Wright.  In a way, with a subtitle like “Innovators and Outsiders” Weinberger and his publisher were asking for it. In an interview with Kent Johnson, Weinberger had stated that unlike J.D. McClatchy’s Vintage anthology he made no claims that his choices were “simply the best poets.”  Yet Weinberger later substitutes “best” for “enduring interest” under the sign of “truth”: ”I’m sorry but it’s true — among those kinds of poets in that particular historical period, most of the ones of enduring interest happened to be white guys.”

All in all, I think Vendler should have directed her critique at the way in which Dove’s anthology was packaged rather than targeting some imaginary multiculturalist agenda that insidiously wants to dethrone the great white authors.  Dove and Penguin had already provided readers enough reasons to raise their eyebrows and shake their heads.  Vendler didn’t need to give us more reasons to do so.  In the words of Marguerite María Rivas, “Is this the Helen Vendler to remember?”

Next Tuesday, the Electronic Literature Organization will be launching the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2 at The Kitchen.

512 West 19th Street /New York, NY 10011 / (212) 255-5793

ELC/2 includes 63 works in 6 languages from 16 countries. An astounding variety of forms and genres are included: text movies, interactive fiction, poem generators, codework, animations, Second Life excursions, chatbot drama, augmented reality, and games—to name a few. There are works of poetry, narrative, documentary critique, drama and creative non-fiction for screen, gallery, and virtual environment. The Keyword glossary inside each Collection provides definitions of new forms and software, and each of the works is introduced briefly both by the editors and by the authors.

Below are some screen shots and descriptions of the works that will be presented at the reading.

Oni Buchanan, THE MANDRAKE VEHICLES

The Mandrake Vehicles challenges our notions of the normal economy of a poetic text by providing numerous different readings of the same set of letters, in the process concretely moving the graphemical (if not psychological) “subtext” of a poem to the foreground in clever, surprising ways. Transitional animations, in which letters fall, expand and disappear, transport the reader between texts like through a time (or other) sort of warp, a pictorial revelry that brings this seemingly stable, stylistically intricate text to the frontier of linguistic meaninglessness and back.

*

David Jhave Johnston, SOOTH

Johnston brings his exquisite, idiosyncratic—and by turns seductive and strange—visual sensibility into this suite of love poems, which are literally pulled forth from the video image by user interaction. Sooth, like slippingglimpse elsewhere in this collection, is one of a growing number of works that seek to integrate algorithmically animated, interactive text with rich video imagery. Despite the title of Johnston’s work, however, these images and soundscapes can stray far from the type of imagery associated with “love poems,” leading the viewer/user into a compelling meditation on the body, the soul, the subconscious and the desires and fears that plague it. On a national level, Sooth, which slips between French and English based on user interaction, enigmatically addresses the subterranean linkages of the “two solitudes” that is present-day Canada.

*

Illya Szilak, RECONSTRUCTING MAYAKOVSKY

The absurdist spirit of Russian Futurism infuses this work which otherwise resembles a commercial website gone amok. While certain sections feel like conventional narrative literature, others include invitations to imagery theater events, warped Google searches, a manifesto addressed to the future of humanity, a propagandistic movie in support of “Monad Technologies” and other less-definable digital genres. Whether this work is a cry from the past or from the margins of today, the Modernist communicative logic of broadcasting has clearly succumbed to the more prevalent logic of communication today: participation culture. While September 11th is evoked as an illustration for why we need to think “beyond the human” because people gum up the perfections of (military) technology, Reconstructing Mayakovsky as a whole corrupts the panoptic logic of the database, the 19th century novel and the internet itself.

*

Sandy Baldwin, NEW WORLD ORDER: BASRA

In the gaming environment of New Word Order: Basra, the player is invited to read, explore, and destroy words taken from a Billy Collins poem, sample lines of which read, “walk inside the poem’s room/ and feel the walls for a light switch. They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means.” If interpretation itself disfigures poetic language, then the player of New Word Order: Basra makes that violence literal by using an arsenal of weapons (including a crow bar) to disfigure and reconfigure the words of Collins’ poem.

*

Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan, SLIPPINGGLIMPSE

slippingglimpse is a verbal-visual collaboration between a poet, programmer, and videographer. Each of the ten parts consists of a video of moving water associated with a poetic text that can be conventionally read in split-screen format as it scrolls upwards. (The “scroll text” view enables conventional reading only in the sense that the words are stable and the small window has a verso-recto format; otherwise the layout and lineation invites reading on both the horizontal and vertical axes.) One of the central themes of the poetic text is the materiality of writing and image-producing technologies, ranging from stained glass to C++. This theme echoes the mechanics of the text itself, which in broad terms is algorithmically generated in relation to the movements of the water.

On Wednesday night, an angry mob of PSU students rioted and toppled a news van in reaction to Joe Paterno's firing.

William Dowling, a Professor of English at Rutgers University, has been described by the New York Times as “an idealistic absolutist, an intellectual convinced that the thunder of big-time athletics was crumbling the ivory tower of academe.”  Such “absolutism” is evidenced in an Inside Higher Ed interview in which Dowling claims that ”the university is still securely in the hands of the same culture that watches American Idol and reads People magazine.”  I disagree with Dowling’s ”us versus them” attitude and blanket dismissal of consumers of popular culture.  Nevertheless, I have been pondering the PSU scandal and the riots following the firing of Joe Paterno and think that Dowling’s biting critique of Div IA sports in his Confessions of a Spoilsport, a book published in 2007 by (ironically enough) Penn State University Press, is unfortunately relevant once again.

Dowling’s introduction, which is available as a free preview by PSU Press, tells a narrative of the demise of “democratic education” “at the hands of ‘professionalized’ college athletics.”  Dowling recounts the scandal involving Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss, who attempted to frame player Patrick Dennehy as a drug dealer after Dennehy was shot and murdered by fellow player Carlton Dotson, in order to expose ”the separate sphere of reality inhabited by everyone involved in Div IA athletics—players, coaches, academic tutors, Athletics Department personnel, sports-friendly trustees and administrators.”  Dowling also discusses Ohio State football player Maurice Clarett, who maintained eligibility through “bogus grades and credit for nonexistent courses,” and star point guard Tony Cole, who took courses at the University of Georgia such as “Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball” taught by the coach’s son.  Cole received an “A” for the class despite never attending classes or taking the final exam, which had such multiple questions as this one:

    3. How many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a basketball game?

a. 1

b. 2

c. 3

d. 4

The logic of the PSU riots is nicely accounted for in the following passage from Dowling’s book:

When the athletes recognize that they are virtual demigods on campus, real students come to regard themselves as marginally important to the university, less real in the life of the school. When every institutional resource is dedicated—and known to be dedicated—to the support and celebration of specialized physical skills, intellectual talent and the pursuit of learning come to be disregarded and displaced, even, at many schools, despised. In the world of Div IA institutions, the Maurice Claretts and Tony Coles are real. The student who has come to college hoping to learn about Greek philosophy or Renaissance poetry or molecular biology walks the campus as a ghost.

This is the significance of that curious phenomenon, the undergraduate sports riot. The masses of Ohio State students who broke store windows and overturned automobiles in downtown Columbus after their football team beat Michigan, for instance, or the University of Connecticut students who set fires and passed out drunk in public after a basketball victory, were responding to the hallucinatory reality projected by Div IA sports. Dazzled by the celebrity and media power of their teams, students at OSU and UConn and other schools were doing their best to lay claim through postgame rioting and vandalism to the sphere of moral and legal invulnerability already granted to the athletes on their campuses. They were enacting the belief that professionalized sports are the only thing that matters, in just the terms already enunciated by a university whenever new stadiums are funded while library acquisitions are cut, or the coaching staff is enlarged while the honors program is curtailed.

Moreover, Dowling’s indictment of Div IA sports as “a magic sphere” of “powerful men” who “could bestow a cloak of invulnerability” sounds all too familar in light of the seeming complicity of the PSU football machine regarding the sexual assaults allegedly committed by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.  The PSU scandal demonstrates, once again, that we need to rethink the role of Div IA athletics in higher education.

In “The Longing of the Long Poem,” Peter Middleton notes that long poems “resist the support institutions of poetry” since such texts, lacking the easy iterability of lyrics, are “[e]xpensive to print; tricky to handle digitally; too long to be read in their entirety at poetry readings; too big for anthologies; much too big for little magazines to be able to publish anything but short sections; almost always too long to teach within the constraints of a timetable; [and] exorbitantly demanding of a reader’s time.”  While, at 40 pages, my long poem, The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-composition as Explanation (Delete Press, 2011), is not nearly as long as the works that Middleton discusses, I’m thrilled, nevertheless, that Delete Press decided to give my extended project, a mash-up/re-mix/collage of Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” and Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” its wonderful and creative support.

I was extremely happy with all aspects of the book’s editing and fabrication–from the drop caps in the text to the Xylene ink transfers on the cover–but I was especially blown away with the uniquely burned interleafs (two are pictured above) that the book designer produced with the help of a batch of homemade gunpowder.

There was a time when bookbinders placed a tissue interleaf between frontispiece and title page in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together…The transitional space between image and scripture is often a zone of contention.  Here we must separate…Tissue paper for wrapping or folding can also be used for tracing.  Mist-like transience.  Listen, quick rustling.

(from Susan Howe’s The Midnight)

If a conventional tissue interleaf is a liminal divider between text and image–what Howe calls “a zone of contention”–then the interleaf of The Philosophy also doubles as a frontispiece in its own right as it opens the book with an illustration of absence, a literal image of charred decay.

Rather than acting as a “pale or wanly yellow” veil “approaching transparency” (to use Howe’s words again), it’s more like a corroded peephole that, in the case below, fortuitously frames the word “And”–highlighting the fact that the text is, indeed, a radical conjunction of unlike components.

When I first saw a copy of The Philosophy, I wrote to Jared, my editor, who did a tremendous job with the book’s mise-en-page, about how much I liked the overall book-object, and he replied, “You MIGHT like to know that the homemade gunpowder used for the covers involved a wee bit of human urine —- it was literally a necessary part of the recipe, not just a crass introduction. But I assure you the raw ingredients have been thoroughly rendered away —- it is completely safe and cultured and nothing icky remains.”  I then got from Crane, the book designer, a more detailed description of the making of the black powder.  It’s so incredibly beautiful that I feel compelled to quote most of it below:

In building your book I wanted to pursue my own process of decomposition.  I began to think about the ways in which paper degrades.  Rotting in the ground, exposure to rain, chemicals (I used Xylene, a paint thinner, for the image transfers on the cover), and fire.  Although rain or burying paper in the ground would have created unique and unpredictable patterns of ruin in the paper, these seemed like passive processes, whereas burning paper could achieve some level of stochastic design but in a more involved, active, and risk-exposed situation.   I followed the traditional recipe for Chinese blackpowder: 75% potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, 15% carbon, 10% sulphur.  You can buy potassium nitrate and sulphur in garden stores.  Potassium nitrate is used for removing tree stumps ( tree cellulose is often used in the papermaking process, and I just loved this connection) and sulphur is sold as a soil acidifier.  Or you can purchase these two ingredients in their pure form at online chemistry/chemical websites.  Or you can prepare them yourself, which I would have done however the sulphur takes months to ferment and I didn’t have access to a large amount of land or the equipment used to extract sulpher from feces.  For the carbon, which acts as the fueling agent, I used charcoal.  An ex-marine helped me identify willow wood growing on the banks of the Poudre River in Fort Collins, Colorado.  Willow wood makes a fine grade charcoal because it is low-density and high resin, ideal for the charcoal process.  You do not want a hardwood, it creates too much ash.  I made a gasifier using a 40lb gasoline barrel with the top and bottom cut out and a few slits drilled into the sides to circulate air.  I bought a few paint cans, cut the dried charcoal into small pieces, placed them in the can, sealed it, punched a hole in the top, and threw it in a fire contained in the 40lb barrel.  The process that occurs once the willow wood/paint can is set in the fire is called pyrolysis, which is basically a decomoposition and carbonization of the willow wood in a near oxygen free environment.  Once carbonization happens, the willow wood in the paint can will cease to burn, and so you avoid the risk of burning the wood down into pure ash.  The willow charcoal was them crushed caveman style in a mortar with a pestle, and combined with the sulphur.  On a hot plate, outside, the potassium nitrate is usually dissolved in a pot of water, however instead of water I poured into the potassium nitrate a jar of my stale, sunbaked urine since it accelerates the burn process.  It’s a foul smell.  Next the finely ground charcoal/sulphur mix is stirred in the pot until there is a strikingly beautiful silver-black sludge, of dough consistency, at which point I strained the mixture through coffee filters.  The black powder is now soft like wet sand and can be pressed through a strainer to create a uniform series of pellets  I didn’t want this uniformity.  I chose to break up the gunpowder dough into random, haphazard shapes and sizes (evident I feel in the wild patterns on the Japanese rice paper interleafs) and then set it outside for a day to dry in the sun.  The burns were made on the second story balcony of my attic apartment, with occasional glares from the accountants working in the neighboring building.

Crane’s process truly was a lovely extension and elaboration of my procedure of smelting two familiar texts into something new.  I was struck by how much the “stochastic design[s]” created by the burn patterns greatly resembled the Oxidation Paintings that Andy Warhol executed (with much more direct employment of urine) in the late 1970s.

Warhol had invited friends and acquaintances, such as Victor Hugo and one of his studio assistants, Ronnie Cutrone, to urinate on canvases prepared with copper-based paint.  The uric acid would oxidize the metal to form mineral salts, creating a variety of patterns and textures.  Even if Warhol was merely “taking the piss” out of Jackson Pollock’s style of gestural abstraction, he created a series of extremely beautiful paintings, and I’m delighted that Crane’s use of urine as a burn accelerant can be read as an oblique reference to the Oxidation Paintings.

In any case, each interleaf of The Philosophy is truly a work of art.  My thanks to all the good folks at Delete for their tremendous effort and vision.

*

For some online excerpts of The Philosophy, see Otoliths and So and So Magazine.

POLESTAR POETRY SERIES
SIAMESE DREAM
poems inspired by the epic album

SUNDAY OCTOBER 2
5 PM
CAKE SHOP
(152 ludlow st bet stanton + rivington)

SET LIST:
cherub rock // martin rock
quiet // emily brandt
today // ben fama
hummer // julia cohen
rocket // michael leong
disarm // sean edgley
soma // natalie eilbert
geek u.s.a. // alina gregorian
mayonaise // lisa marie basile
spaceboy // rebecca bates
silverfuck // danniel schoonebeeck
sweet sweet // amanda calderon
luna // carter edwards