Fear of disillusion; a point to poetry

I felt a moment's temptation to try and go see Mary Oliver. But what if she's a twit? It was rather upsetting when I went to hear Margaret Atwood, though we're all ambivalent about her these days for being a snotwad about science fiction some of the time, I still have my admirations... and she was cool, but came off as oddly stuckup for someone who is so boasty about growing up in the backwoods.

Anyway I have this nightmare-universe vision suddenly of Oliver being so eastcoast and upperclass that I will want to scream no matter how much i like her poetry. It's so unfair to say this; I know nothing about her!

Considering imitations. People who try to write like Oliver, they bother me more than people who try to write like Ginsberg. Why is that? Certain literary styles that are good in the original but when the emulators spring up, it makes it all seem cheap.

And I imitate her too including the yuppie moments of aetheticization and thoreau-like musing combined and the neat little wrap-up at the end. Sometimes I write that kind of poem and then I'm disgusted with myself. And then i know someone will publish it somewhere because it is easy to grok. It's simple and digestible. And then I feel dirty, a lowdown rotten dirty liar, because my moment of aestheticizing nature is essentially false given the way I live, in an urban/suburban environment, so that it's like this blinder-vision where I'm staring as if hypnotized at a tree or an acorn or a star, when all around me are streets and houses, bags of cheetos, paperclips, trashcans, dinner tables, people going to work. If I were actually living out in the woods like Thoreau it would seem more intellectually honest to write about the tree like it were the most important thing in my world. (Though I read all about how Thoreau's mom or aunt or someone would come and clean his house and bring him his dinner so he could loll about the trails gazing at groundhogs -- so he's rather bogus himself.)

This is not at all a new thought for me; I became obsessed with it when I was about 16 and I set out to try to aestheticize everything and ended up with a lot of that sort of poetry that exalts paperclips and trashcans to positions of tawdry glory. At that age I was filled with a lot of wild determinations like, "I'm going to combine Art and Science in a way heretofore never seen in the history of the entire world!"

And later I tried to feel a spiritual & poetic bond while musing on the nature of the artificial, the spirit of manufactured objects and mass production. I can get in that mode where an empty milk carton is a tragic miracle! The effort required to make it, its moldedness, its nearly severed connection with the things used to make it and with people. But central nature-y things come up, or one is just too conditioned to go around "feeling poetic" when the moon is up, or when gazing at the ocean with no pressure to go anywhere, and the moon and stars become poetic archetypes, part of a pantheon of symbology, and the trashcans, paperclips, urbanness, etc. are harder to internalize. And then one doubts completely whether the aestheticization of everything is a good idea at all! If we accept that poetic musing as part of the process of art or the point of art, then we're lost to poltitical awareness.

So, back to the small precious illusions about other poets: Part of the reason I can believe in Marge Piercy's poems is that I believe in the picture of her I have constructed, that she spends a lot of time in her garden, that she has a huge real-life commitment to composting her lettuce beds. I imagine her recycling everything, and wearing only all-cotton tunic-dresses made by non-sweatshop labor, and you know, the salty Cape Cod wind blowing in her hair. And it kinda ruins it when I imagine her going to K-mart and buying some socks, tampax, and a bag of cheetos and going home to eat the cheetos, grumpily pop some Midol, and watch Tivo-ed episode of "Cops" until she falls asleep in front of the TV, even though surely that or its Marge Piercy equivalent must happen. How unfair that my romantic myth of the poet should interfere with the poetry itself! And that the poetry should construct this unrealistic wind-blown portrait of the poet! Is that really necessary? I don't think it's right!

At poetry readings, part of what we like about them as poets -- I'm thinking of Waverley Writers here, or some other small "page poet" readings around the Bay Area -- is that we see evidence of other people who seem like regular cheeto-consuming people, confessing to those moments of tender aestheticization, of romanticizing some aspect of the world. And that makes them vulnerable, I think, and we mutually recognize the vulnerability of "being like that" and walking around in a sort of fog where we attach our attention to some object-- or situation --and stuff all this meaning into it. We're a little embarrassed. And yet we love it - and admire it when other people do it, no matter how it may seem to the rest of the world like pointless navel-gazing wankery.

Poetry readings and what they mean

When you read a book of poems, you know that someone else has likely read that book, so on one level you become a member of a community of people who have read it and developed a response to it. But you don't have much awareness of that community. Your membership is not active or visible.

For an example of readerly membership, consider old-fashioned library cards. When I was in grade school, I'd check a book out by signing my name on a lined index card that was in the front of the book. The librarian would take the card and date stamp it. I could see on the card in the book a list of everyone else who had read the book before me. I could make myself known to them, and I'd be known as a reader of that book by anyone who read it after me or who had the impulse to look at the card. In this way I became aware of other kids who shared my reading tastes, my interests; as meta-information one level removed I became aware that two or three other kids in the school read as much and as widely as I did.

A poetry reading or spoken word event creates a visible literary community. The sharing of information is visible. You know who's heard what you've heard. Even if you don't say anything, by attending the event you become engaged in public discourse, or potentially engaged.

In blogging communities, the visibility of readership creates strong reading communities. For example, I feel a kinship of shared knowledge with someone who has been a regular commenter on a blog that we both read. I can see not only that they read it, and not only the tenor of their responses, but a glimpse of their level of engagement with the text. I may not know their own blog or their work, but I have a textual relationship with that fellow commenter.

Wanting a lot of people to come to your reading goes way beyond wanting to feel a diva-like popularity. When people come to a reading, their presence magnifies the importance of the event in each others' eyes, because they personally become visible to a larger literary community. They have an opportunity to make connections with other listeners and to have conversations about the work. Events with only 6 people attending can be powerful too, if those 6 people respond strongly and put their information visibily into the mix. If they all go off and write reviews of the event, or poems in response to what they heard, or have a blog discussion the next day, then an event of literary importance has probably occurred.

In literature as it is treated in the literary-academic world, there are authors, readers/listeners, and critics. The categories overlap. It's particularly powerful when we see their strong overlap, for example when poets write poetry about other poets' poems, or when a novel has complex intertextual relationships. When this happens, we as readers realize we have a relationship to the text that is potentially creative and critical. In addition, the subjectivity of the critic is strongly exposed. We also as readers can now see something of the internal library, or the blogroll, the information feed, of the author. As a reader and critic, I want to know the information feed of whoever I'm reading.

I take notes at readings and think about what I'm hearing, about patterns and fashions in poetry. It's difficult to write frankly about what's good and bad in other people's writing without being offensive or hurting people. I'm hoping I can strike a balance: focus on the positive without pulling my punches. I'd like to practice exercising judgement and drawing other people into critical thinking about poetry and translation.

Here's a list of some of the readings and open mics that I have been going to over the last 5 years in the Bay Area:

Waverly Writers, in Palo Alto
Art 21, also in Palo Alto
Writers With Drinks, San Francisco
Kvetsh, San Francisco
Edinburgh Castle, San Francisco
The Saturday Poets, in Burlingame
San José Art League, in the Minor Street house around 2000-2002
Willow Glen Books, San José
Poetry Center San José
Redwood City Not Dead Yet Poets' Society
Various reading at City Lights, Modern Times, Valencia St. Books, Chimera, Kepler's, & other bookstores.

I hope I can expand this list and take a peek into other readings, other scenes that have their own particular thing going. I recently wrote an article for a book on the Waverley Poets on this specific subject: the academic/literary page poets and the spoken word poets don't have a context for judging each others' works, because they don't know each others' information feeds.

I'd like to get some of the people in different scenes around the Bay Area reading or listening to each other, and looking for each others' ways of being intertextual and literary.

Textual and imaginary worlds

I think of books and literature as texts, as information. Texts interconnect with other texts and exist as parts of dynamic systems of reading, interpretation, rewriting, and references. People have relationships with each other, and with objects, and I would argue that their relationships with literary texts fall somewhere in between, because texts carry more complexity than, say, a car or a hammer.

The judgement of literary quality has something to learn from the web's management and judgement of textual information. Context is important. Who is reading is important. Relevence to a specific need, query, person, or community is important.

Introduction

In this blog I'd like to keep notes on information, books, literary/poetry readings, thoughts on writing, and translation projects. I am interested in mixing up my technological and literary worlds; applying blogs, wikis, databases, MUDs, and more to literature, and vice versa.