Cellos.

Tonight, I sat on the grey sofa with a freshly-shorn Radu and listened to Damien Rice with the teens. During Rice’s more cinematic pieces, the teens kept quiet, listening, toying with Radu’s bone. I let myself drift through the rooms and places in which some of those songs first met me. We all drifted a bit. This tandem drifting continued until the youngest noticed the prevalence of cellos, those angles of bows and elbows bent over the wooden curves. “They sort of just wait and hide inside the song and come out when the music curves,” she said very seriously, “—- when it gets sadder.”

Cellos have an extraordinary capacity to take the violin’s lament and deepen it. I said this (or something similar) to the teen, only to find my own mind turning to something I’d read earlier this week.

It behooves mortals
To speak with restraint of the gods.
If, between day and night,
One time a truth should appear to you,
In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it;
Though always unexpressed, as it is,
O innocent, so it must remain.

—  Friedrich Hölderlin

In this passage (which Maurice Blanchot used as an epigraph to The Work of Fire), Hölderlin seems to suggest that the “always unexpressed” remains “innocent” by virtue of never having existed in the world. Never having been subject to its economies of purity and profanation. And I mention it because I find myself resisting this idea of purity associated with the ideal, the never-incarnate, the utterly absent.

Isn’t poetry borne from courting a loosening of binds and divisions? Doesn’t the poem sit down quietly and pluck the tiny pins from its bun in order to feel the world more closely— in the midst of hair falling, in the mist of that half-finished self where language becomes porous?

The Rilkean in me prefers to be rung by a thing, open to its music.

To be rung by. To be wrung. . . .

The poems opens as would a letter to the “quiet friend” named in the first two words. There, at the beginning, he tells us to “feel” how our breath, our “breathing,” creates space around us. “More space,” he says of that interior motion that resembles silence to those who might share a room with us.

Human breath tends to be muted, heard only in the sharp inhalations and exhalations of fear, panic, or excitement. Most of the time, we breath inconspicuously, inaudibly.

Rilke addresses the reader directly, asking them how it feels to be rung by emotion. “Move back and forth into the change,” he says, “What is it like, such intensity of pain?” What is the shape and the detail of this ringing?

“If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine,” Rilke said. (“I make wine from your tears,” sang INXS.) In the darkness that cannot be bound, “in this uncontainable night,” a night so vast that it cannot be held within a single person, subject, or body. There, where the night is too big to hold:

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

The "crossroads” of our senses call for a certain imaginary that permits recognition. While reviewing stills from a home movie made by my father before he and my mother fled Ceausescu’s Romania, I recognized a pattern. This strange combination of boxes and lines on a blanket covered my mother’s legs in Bran, as she sat beneath a tree, using her foot to move a sleeping baby’s stroller back and forth.

That sleeping baby— clueless of what was to come in the years without parents— was me. When glancing at the black and white image, the mind misses the pattern in the colored blanket that sits on the chair as I type. The mind almost misses this connection at the crossroads of the senses…

Poetry is the bell that wrings us. And this demands nothing less than our complete attention. There is music in the waiting, and music in the despair of finding wounds one cannot suture. It is always too late, somehow. And yet, the cello suite teaches us how to phrase such things, as William Bronk notes in the poem below, where feeling is among the things we might never have dared on our own.

The brunette parts.

In a recent, rather wonderful interview, I was asked about “The Krakow Nude,” a poem in My Heresies . . . a poem about the portrait that used to hang in my DC apartment. Although the “nude” isn’t one I’d share online, the first photo from the Krakow series is less provocative, and share-able. To quote Joe Henry’s portrait of Richard Pryor in an entirely different context, almost like I was free…

Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can't bear to watch me land

— Joe Henry, “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”

I’ll see some of you in New York on Friday, which means the world to me, as I stand in a place I’ve always dreamed of entering— and read poems about the ones I cannot see.

"Form and dream destroyed."

1

The world feels both near and far right now, hatching and unhatchable, cast upon the mercy of the gods we invented to save us. The birdsong and the honeysuckle blooms are both present and absent. This aura of illo tempore glosses familiar things.

Richard Hugo, as shared by Tom Snarsky.

The chalices between the caper and caprice, as described by John Cheever in his journals:

An excerpt from John Cheever’s journals.

2

My Heresies also feels near and far; intimate and yet unapproachable. How eerie to type the words “pre-order” in this discontinuous moment, where I am grateful to be read and yet silenced by dread when facing the poems’ struggle with eschatology and teleology, a struggle that believed itself to rest in the past tense, as if MAGA could not happen again.

Hold my chalice, fellow humans. All the beer in the world won’t save us from being burned by the mirrors of this moment.

One lies on the grass “like a worm,” so to speak, only to find that the ‘kind’ of worm matters. The poem, too, is one kind of a worm that alters the soil it moves through.

Thus do leave my worms in the grass next to Franz’s . . . and study the wind in PJ Harvey’s portrait of Catherine, “Patron saint of nothing” — for we are all fashioned by the mouths and memories and music of others. Blessings and curses from the same stone.

The relationality of American fascism.

Contempt.

Contempt is the primary affect expressed by JD Vance. You can watch it crawl across his face during speeches and recent political profiles. Of all the peacocks in the MAGA pageant, he is the most American monster of them all: a product of multiple, intersecting systems including the military which shape the ‘exemplary’ arc of his life, which amounts to a trauma plot with rural bootstraps. Vance goes to Iraq and then studies law at Yale, where he finds himself among the anointed (a prime recruiting ground for fascism, given the sense of entitlement that is cultivated in students who believe themselves to be “the best and the brightest”). One needn’t cite the Kissinger-complex to note the over-large role that Yale played in justifying and legalizing George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” Like his peers, JD rises to the top and marries Usha, who is arguably smarter than him, and who provides him with access to the immigrant family network that positions him to discount speculations about the racism inherent to his obsession with white supremacy (coded as “western civilization). In the process, Vance also masters the elite social networks which enabled his book to be published.

And yet: JD Vance has been robbed of something.

As he stands before the mic in Germany, his eyes glimmer with resentment and rage. Like most MAGA acolytes, Vance sees himself as the perpetual victim. And, much like the evangelical American Christians raging about the “war on Christmas,” Vance polishes the myth of his own persecution.

I have said this before and I will say it again: Christians have never been persecuted in this god-forsaken country. It is precisely this absence of lived experience with actual persecution that enabled James Dobson to build a financial empire by hawking the brand of American Christians as long-suffering, persecuted victims. I am tired of the lies and fake martyrs. MAGA Christianity can’t even handle an eye-roll— they keep so many guns that toddler-shootings have become a regularity here. Your American Jesus wasn’t crucified yesterday. Your macho god is as fake as the Pimp POTUS’ spray tans.

Evil is ordinary resentment huffing supremacist ideology based on sacrificing a scapegoat. It’s not esoteric. It’s not deep. It’s simple. And when it appears among the truly underprivileged, it tends to be aspirational, the result of identifying with the power of the oppressor. This contempt rooted in a sense of entitlement is always representative of power, of having access to power and expecting that access to reap dividends.

In the past month, I have had almost identical conversations with Birmingham residents who voted for Trump. If it is surprising, it should not be. Essentialism fails every test: this is how Kelly Anne Conway and Lauren Boebert advocate for policies that eviscerate the lives of humans with whom they share a gender. Power is power. Wanting power often aligns us with the oppressor.

Because literature does, in fact, matter, I will note that the Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, quietly brought affect studies to the novel; his subject being the men and women who were seduced by Italian fascist ideology. It’s hard not to ponder the blind loyalty that characterizes MAGA: Trump’s flock will follow him anywhere. Much like Netanyahu’s.

And it strikes me that there are several passages in Moravia’s Contempt that speak to the present for me. Here is one of them:

“Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is a form of vengeance, of blackmail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.”

Netanyahu, Trump, Putin—- and the millions of careerists who desire money, power, and glory so fervently that they have invested in silence to assure the ruling classes of their loyalty.

On that note, David Brooks’ recent (desperate) pronunciations fall flat. Like many neoliberal apparatchiks, Brooks argues from the wrong foundation, even as he advocates for mass demonstrations. Worldviews matter: they are the basis from which we imagine a future. It is too easy for the anointed to forget that the US has never been the land of milk and honey for migrant workers and various immigrants. Patriotism, itself, is an increasingly pernicious mist that attempts to unify an opposition to Trump without upsetting the billionaire class that determines US elections since Citizens United.

I am staring very closing into the mirror of Josip Novakovich’s words in Shopping for a Better Country: “I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.” I am leaving this mirror here for those Americans who like to mutter exceptionalist nonsense like “Yugoslavians have always been at war,” as if those wars were not started by extremist nationalists evoking a battlefield humiliation from centuries before in order to condone genocide, massacre, and a maniacal devotion to vengeance.

Contempt. Watch for it. That’s why your Trumpist friends laugh and cheer as the White House issues its latest vulgarity. They may shrug in your presence but, at home and in their cars, they love it. See? They’re getting their revenge. And there is no deeper story, unfortunately. There is no god, no principle, no depth: just contempt for the designated scapegoat.

Happy Harrowing of Hell to all who celebrate.

"That the drizzle will not dim."

Two things, which may appear to be unrelated— but each has its April, so to speak— the first being Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” a composition that would influence John Cage . . .

1

“Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection.”

— Erik Satie

Half a sheet of musical notation scribbled in 1893 by Erik Satie, discovered after his death, would go on to change the course of modern composition. Written above the music, Satie scored the following instructions: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence and serious immobility.” Satie's Vexations parodied what is known in Wagnerian music as the "unendliche Melodie" (unending melody) with an unnervingly skewered piano line including instructions to be prepared for performance "in the deepest silence." 

The story of origins for this tiny composition is as haunting as the piece itself. 

Continual, unrelieved dissonance: this is what Erik Satie's Vexations brought to the world. First published in 1949, it is his longest composition–and the length is defined by repetition, or by the replaying of one page 840 times, exploring a single three-part diminished chord. Robert Olredge calls it “the first piece to explore the effects of boredom, even of hallucination, both on the performer and on the audience, as well as being the first piece to incorporate a period of silent meditation in its performance indication.”

The first known experiment in organized total chromaticism with no sense of direction and no tonal center, "Vexations" renders its notes completely homeless. There is nowhere to return—there is no center to conclude it. Musicologists suggest that if its theme contained the missing letters AN, then this might also be taken as the first experiment in serialism.

On March 21, 1893, Satie began comprising the nine Danses gothiques in an effort to regain "the greater quiet composure and the powerful tranquility of my soul during their tempestuous affair, which lasted from 14 January until 20 June 1893." What's unique about these dances is how they open into a 10-minute sequence of chords, punctuated by surprising harmonic juxtapositions.

Fast forward to April 2nd, a few weeks later, when Satie gave Suzanne Valadon an Easter gift, a composition for her titled Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! It bears his hallmark whimsical signature—and a sketch of Valadon on staves—but there is nothing giddy or light in its shadows. The undertones reach for other pieces; it is written with the same mixture of full-strength and watered-down ink as Vexations.

The only element that stays constant is the bass theme—as Robert Oldredge explains, “when the chord sequence is repeated, the upper parts are inverted, and even if the inner part of the first statement remains at the same pitch the second, it now appears to the listener as an upper melody.”  Oldredge again:

"Just as Vexations divides into two strains in which the upper parts are a mirror reflection of each other, so these upper parts also divide into two exactly symmetrical halves in which the same notes and intervals are variously re-notated enharmonically. Mirrors—in music and poetry.

Satie must have written them in the same time, cut from the same durations, since both pieces have the same tempo marking, and Vexations begins with the same chord with which Bonjour Biqui finishes, as if intended to be an extension of the other. These ambiguous diminished chords represent Suzanne, for they also occur as the first six chords of the nine Danses gothiques, which Satie designated clearly as attempts to work through the relationship. 

Bonjour Biqui and Vexations are the only pieces entirely constructed from these chords. This is how we know Vexations also dates from early April 1893. This is how we know Valadon was the vexation. Satie mentioned the “icy loneliness” that descended after his split, and you can hear it in this piece– not as melodrama but in the plodding banality of repetition, where even the jagged steps that make heartbreak feel unique decline into more of the same. A pain is a pain is a pain is a platitude. There is a Kierkegaardian obsessiveness that winds up bound to repetition, and Satie, too, plays it as it lays in what Sam Sweet has called "the avant-garde's original break-up ballad." 

It took decades for musicians to appreciate the anti-art gestures of Satie's vexations with its deliberate induction of boredom, and the way environmental noise became louder or more disruptive as the drone of repetition continued. 

2

If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower—no soul but perfectly beautiful. 

— Oscar Wilde (in his Letters)

I keep returning to Giovanni Sollima’s Il Bell'Antonio, trying to find words for the way Sollima pushes the cello to its limits, beginning with that turn, exactly at 4:36, dissolving, unraveling, crawling along the edge of sonority, it takes my breath away.

But the shift, itself, is indicated by Kathryn Scott a bit earlier, on the piano, at 3:38—- just before Sollima pulls his left hand away from the cello briefly, holding it aloft, elbow curved, before reapproaching his instrument. Returning to it differently. And perhaps it is the nature of that return that also fascinates me. The way he prepares himself for what is to come.

* Tangent or tango: Sollima’s L'invenzione Del Nero opens with a few chords that sound similar to the ones following his “return” in Il Bell'Antonio. Since I am not a musician, I’m interested in how musicologists, musicians, or those who can read Sollima better than myself think or hear in Sollima’s (maybe) repetitions, particularly in pieces like Fandango (after L. Boccherini), and perhaps others in his Caravaggio. Are any chords being used symbolically? Is this conventional for or to him as a composer? Has he expressed distaste or skepticism about symbolic chords in interviews or text? Sincerely, the over-reader.

Blacktops.

(NARRATOR:) At this point mouth exits the circle.

— Tristan Tzara, The Gas Heart

Sometimes you bump into a photo taken by someone else and are stilled by the realization that it is an aubade. An O!-bawd. A shadow of a former self you cannot redeem without destroying —

I refuse to redeem her.

No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.

Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.

Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

In a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.

From Tristan Tzara’s “Lost” as translated by Heather Green.

En fin, no fin. Every etcetera includes the look backward, and the looking-back, the creature trapped between her presents and the presence of a future anterior.

Or, to quote The Psychedelic Furs—

When in New Orleans . . .

One leaves NOLA Poetry Festival with love and gratitude for the thriving poetry scenes and groups that co-exist in this city—and the poets who commit themselves to nurturing and sustaining them.

With four hours of sleep to my name, after driving bleary-eyed back to Birmingham with Miriam, I am crawling into bed— but not before blowing my gratitude for the past five days to the hardworking board members of NOLA Poetry Festival, whom Bill Lavender credited with the festival’s continuance.

Starting at the end, namely, the Pool Party for Poets . . .

The moon over Rodrigo’s pool.

Dear Rodrigo, thank you for opening your pool to us every year and caring so deeply about poets and poetry and community. Maybe you will see this. May you won’t. Maybe you will find some time to recover from the chaotic beauty that swarms around poets.

Rodrigo's pool around 6:45 pm.

Talking to Carrie Chappell, Bill Lavender, & Amanda Murphy about NOLA poetry, past and present, was a delight.

As usual, I wish I had more photos, if only because I tend to be best at remembering names when there is an image attached.

Grateful to Patrycja Humienik for the poem that she is— and for taking this photo of me and Carrie Chappell that could be a flashback sequence in the film David Lynch never made about poets at the pool.

And happy birthday to Sam Beckett, who wandered through my mind quite frequently on our mutual birthday.

Of course the best games are the ones that have the capacity to surprise us, and before I bow out to share my black pillow with Radu, I leave a hint of games to come, particularly the surrealist THE GAME OF DEFINITIONS, first announced under the title “The Dialogue” in 1928 (or 1934, depending), as published in La Revolution Surrealiste, prefaced by the following observation:

A question? An answer. A simple process of give and take which implies all the optimism of conversation. The two interlocutors pursue their separate thoughts. The occasional affinity, even if contradictory, is imposed by coincidence. A comforting procedure, in short, since there is nothing better than to ask questions, and to reply to them.

Of stayed executions... and eternity.

Once again, I find myself longing for an anthology of translator’s introductions, a collection that focuses on this incredible literary form that gets sidelined and ignored, despite its eloquence.

Take, for example, the translator's introduction to Antonio di Benedetto's Zama, where Esther Allen gives us the 28-year old Dostoyevsky, standing before the firing squad only to be spared execution at the last minute. “Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar,” writes Allen, drawing a parallel to Di Benedetto's own experience during Argentina’s Dirty War, where, “for eighteen months . . . he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad.” Allen tells us that Di Benedetto didn’t face the executioner until twenty years “after writing Zama... which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through twenty years later.”

Time is one of the subjects treated in Zama.

And Time is always a story about death, or our relationship to it as human beings, a species of animal that knows it will die. 

In Zama, the author refuses to locate us within a particular time. This refusal is a power that writers share with the gods and creators of the human condition. Allen’s translation presents a di Benedetto who writes from an imagined future, and creates from the space of the not-yet. She ties up her introduction by quoting Beckett's Molloy, which she describes “as an epigraph to the translation” — a beautiful practice, I think — : “The most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

According to his biographer, Henri Troyat, “the memory of this false execution remained alive in Dostoyevsky's writing.” A false death here becomes a phantom located inside a life.

Aristodemus told Plato (or Socrates) that Pausanias of Athens’ lover, Agathon, offered him a state in which he could “become one with what will never fade.” The urge for eternity strikes the reader as well as the lover.

“…and so this phrase, which we’d passed over unthinkingly every day and which had held itself in reserve, and which, solely by the power of its beauty, had become invisible and remained unknown, comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave.”

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

"Short talk on whatever."

Remember that metaphor brings a new thing into being by strapping one known thing to another known thing and watching it move across the room. Poetry asks its readers for a species of double vision, as two things become a third and yet continue to remain themselves.

— Ann Townsend

i

I adore words. I ogle words that strike a sentence like lightning.

Words have hues, shades, timbre, textures – each word carries its connotations and associations like jangling bracelets on a wrist. When we ignore the connotative meaning of a word, the jangling gets left out of the soundscape. To me, every jangle matters; every sound wants to be heard as part of the poem’s music.

Each word also has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning. 

My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. “Abortion” is one of those words: it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. In many ways, “abortion” gravitates towards meaningless; the abstraction overwhelms its visceral, embodied reality.

I want the forbidden, unspeakable viscerality.

What's interesting about the word abortion is its abstraction. What’s devastating about the word abortion is the socially-constructed shame that prevents us from inhabiting it. An abstraction doesn't feel located within time. It is placeless; the subject displaced from the particular.

I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed.

— Annie Ernaux, Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie

Annie Ernaux’s book about abortion is titled Happening, as translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux  found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to “break” the silence of shame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time. 

Although the book draws upon personal memories, it has been called an “eponymous novel.” Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errata of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. Lit-crit aside, the author is haunted by her abortion: it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Christ. Throughout the book, the speaker wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it.

Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. “I shall have no more power over my text,” Ernaux writes. (Note the translation here into “power over,” a phrase that elicits structuralist theories where “power over” is hierarchical, and associated with patriarchal structures of power that insist on standing ‘above’ the subject, above the body in question . . . a positionality that often gets written as a variation of abjection.) Writing about the abortion will also have its “aftereffects”—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.

“This thing had no place in language,” Ernaux says of abortion (italics mine). It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: “(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.”

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable. Perhaps she is defiant. Certainly, she assumes that readers will trivialize her words, relegating them to the pathetic, or to “pathos,” or to the silo of pathologies.

To quote Ernaux:

The cost of narrating the abortion, for Ernaux, is as significant as the cost of undergoing it. In both cases, she is “determined to go through with it.”

ii

“May my silences become more accurate,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote in a notebook.

When Roethke died, he left 277 notebooks behind; each filled with lines and images for poems, observations, quotations, craft notes to himself, etc. He didn't use all the lines and images in his poems — but he wrote them. And saved them. Here is an excerpt from one of his notebooks, a “pep-talk” if you will:

iii

Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weiner Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.” Your Weimar, her Weiner. Bringing a blade to the machismo inside the Dada circles, Hoch leveraged the connotations of the domesticated knife (i.e. the kitchen knife) to cut up and reshape masculinity.

“The male Dadaists, despite opposing the beer-belly values of the bourgeoisie, were quite capable of reproducing them,” Ben Lerner adds.

Hoch’s photomontage includes a tiny self-portrait:

“A gloom shagged with flags and tending towards violence. The initial fact (anger) is macrocosmic in the sense of being relevant to all occasions.”

Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” is titled after Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage. It is a poem in parts that leans into the curated “reading” of the photomontage in a museum or gallery. One can almost think of it as a series of captions:

Lerner describes Waldrop’s grammatical experiments with periods as “opening a silence within a single thought” rather than granting closure. “In Waldrop’s hands, a period is not the sign of authority but a tiny black hole within its logic,” he says, noting that she “deploys the period as a rest, often magical, in which potential meanings multiply,” and her periods often provide the sort of beat and breath that line breaks accomplish.

Like Hoch, Waldrop takes a form that draws on patriarchal authority—the lecture, the program note, the gallery description—and uses it against itself. There is no greater pleasure, which is not discount the pleasures of being alone with a fresh pack of watermelon sour-straws at midnight.

iv

Abstract subjects lend themselves to lecture forms or short talks. Anne Carson has a series of poems structured as "short talks." She takes a word and expands upon it, twists it, tries to catch its reflection in a rain puddle.

“What’s wrong with your voice?” he said.

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower “like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song.” The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil. But its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which sounds like “a person, unique and singular. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name,” Berger’s friend says, “Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort.”

Archaic language is singular – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity.  

The particular wants new words—it desires to be apprehended in its uniqueness, like the lover rediscovers himself in a nickname– the intimacy of diminutives.

Here’s a poem by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Timothy Adès:

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn't close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

v

IF YOU FEEL INCLINED TO WRITE…. Jot down five words that interest or intrigue you, and pick one (or settle for “birthwort”). Write a short paragraph about it, as if you were writing a catalog entry for a natural history or art museum. Describe the word. Build from associations that are particular to the speaker. Anachronize once or twice, very carefully, with an eye to the particular connotative value of the knife. Take us from the catalog entry into the private gaze of the viewer staring at the dinosaur bones or the painting in the museum. No one would trust that woman to say anything intelligible about the painting— which is precisely why her words are the most interesting ones. Title it short talk on whatever.

NOLA panels and yapping.

Though I am no Duke of Earl
You are my chatelaine
I love the way the world
Drives you insane

Flashbacks first. Doing this cartwheel in a New Orleans park at midnight early last year, where that dark tree resembles a smoke cloud or the soul of a missing dragon in what became into a Radu-riven collage. Looping early Frank Black on the drive down the month before. Walking through various fountains. Sharing beers in an abandoned church near a warehouse. Laughing and walking until my legs hurt in that wonderful that says “you have been walking all day because there is so much to see and if you see down the world stops”.

Between trains, buses, and automobiles, I’ve visited NOLA at least 11 times in the past two years and have grown rather fond of the city, its food, its tree-gnarled sidewalks, its breezes and colors and music and endless nights.

My Heresies comes out on April 29th, which means I won’t be reading or doing any signings at NOLA Poetry Festival. Instead, I will take the opportunity to yap yap yapppp with minds whose company I prefer to my own words. Please for the love of gods and heirloom tomatoes, please come say hi if you see me. Please tell me to stop talking!

If, by chance, you are interested in hearing me yap about my favorite subject (some variation on my usual theme of poetry being life, and life being poetry) alongside other poets whom I admire, this, too, is possible.

The “Sacred and Somatic” Panel will send you home with a list of writing exercises to generate that particular profanation that hovers between ecstasy and nothingness, which seems like the perfect way to prepare for the birthday of Samuel Beckett on April 13th (and yes, I am bringing his plays because it would wretched to miss a chance to do a Beckett line-reading near a tree or a statue or a mural in New Orleans).

How often our words are the ghosts of those we've lost.
So many moments are filled with their endings.

— Richard Jackson, “In the Time of the Living”

May you not rest in peace.
Don't rest, be
waiting always.

— Eugen Jebeleanu, “Without Respite”

A hauntological aside.

"I said confetti": Poems, birds, and metaphors.

“A gargoyle in the shape of a man, whose spinal column and brain have been taken out to make a path for the rainwater”

— Franz Kafka in his 1911 travel diary, while on a trip to Paris with Max Brod

i

Spring-songs and other wing-sprung things abound. In recent travels, I have been collecting birds in my notebooks, particularly pigeons— and thinking (again) about rhyme and repetition in poetry.

Deciding what kind of rhyme to employ, or what sound to repeat, is often part of edits, or part of the fine-tuning in a poem. Using a pure rhyme in a space where you want subtly may argue against itself, when a slant rhyme might do the work of creating tone more effectively. 

There is a poem by Jamaal May that does something remarkable with sound and image. The title, “There Are Birds Here,” carves out a very particular space and a terrain which is both the subject and the figuration.

The way Jamaal May pivots between repetition of the titular phrase and the meta-poetics of the metaphor. He qualifies — I mean, I don’t mean, I said, I was trying to say— and uses the poem as a vehicle for this effort to reclaim the birds from the metaphors others deploy to desecrate his Detroit.

Ruins, too, are beautiful. Only real estate developers and the Gentrification Committees of white supremacy consider the ruins to be an eyesore. This is what I told the man after he commented unfavorably about the crack in a porch tile yesterday!

Look at how much is growing from that crack— and how little we know of it. How much beauty in small doses we seek to extinguish in the name of social or aesthetic hygiene.

I repeat myself. Very well, I —

ii

Repetition: the spice and the vice of life, the strategy of birdsongs and spring’s efflorescence. Again, as if for the first time, April arrives with its lust-throated pink and magenta azaleas; wisteria sprawling over fences, luring bees closer. “Taste me,” it laughs. “If you turn away, I shall hound you with my scent, and plant words like succulence chamois islet zither in your mind, unbidden.” Pollen saturates the air with lust, covers tables and chairs and mailboxes with that gold dust.

“Spring is so blatantly sexual,” I thought while wandering through my favorite alley last night, a route with one single streetlight, a darkness perfumed with the scent of night-flowering vines seducing the moths. It is the same—-and yet different. And it is this difference which fascinates me.

Every April, I revisit Donika Kelly’s “Love Poem: Centaur” — a creature of marvel in its construction and articulation. It sacralizes as it profanes: the poem cannot do one without the other. Determining which line to sacralize by repeating can make a whole poem. In this one by Kelly, the repetition of the last line rubs it into our minds like a hoove pressing hard into dirt.

Like a perfectly tuned instrument, the poem begins with that “Nothing” that seeks to dispel (while perhaps also opening a shadow interpretation).

From the melodious friction between syllables—- the clicks linking “love” to “hooves”, the “burnishing” that expands into “a breaching”— each sound dances with the possibility of change in repetition. No barococo is needed. The poem advances by qualifying its statements—saying one thing, expanding upon it, and then going back to qualify it—before finally ending in those two culminating lines that feel like the whole purpose.

I pound the earth for you.
I pound the earth.

The final reiteration leaves plays into what it leaves off: the “for you” is gone and what follows is act that asserts the transformation of the speaker into creature who pounds the earth.

One sees similar moves in music, — certainly in lyrics, as with PJ Harvey and John Parrish’s multi-layered song, “Black-Hearted Love,” which I happened to loop last April, when writing some of the poems that would become My Heresies, where the lyrics foreground the “you” of the addressee:

And you are my black hearted love
In the rain, in the evening I will come again

Before reiterating this “you” at the end of the line:

I'd like to take you

And then cutting it from the end, leaving:

I'd like to take you to a place I know, my black hearted

Something is repeated; an expectation is set up; a new articulation re-shapes the addressee by defining them with that possessive pronoun. The direction established by the “for you” is extraneous. Although Kelly’s poem doesn’t reach for the possessive pronoun, one might detect it in a similar drive towards defining the other in relation to this space of possibility, what she calls “the point of articulation” fashioned from pursuit of the conditional (i.e. “I would make for you”).

I pound the earth echo-locates what Derrida called “the sort of animal I am.” This strategy of self-portrait as the impossible beast that plys the fantastic… I can't un-hear it. The centaur, this poem, an epistle to a love that locates it inside the body of the imaginary, where the trembling demands an other, a self that is no longer the prior self.

Rhyme, repetition, music, poetry— they make and unmake us. They wander off the track of realism into the realm of the conditional. Scandalous spring! Drizzle as soft as a jazz brush entering the jam! Outrageous pollen stains and weed-studded sidewalks! Azaleas and lascivious vines, I cannot wait to see some of your oracles and librettists in New Orleans next week at the NOLA Poetry Festival!

" --- from a power base?"

THRESHOLDS, COLLARS, AND LONESOME SOCIALITY

“There are architectonic emblems of commerce: steps lead to the apothecary, whereas the cigar shop has taken possession of the corner. The business world knows to make use of the threshold. In front of the arcade, the skating rink, the swimming pool, the railroad platform, stands the tutelary of the threshold: a hen that automatically lays tin eggs containing bonbons. Next to the hen, an automated fortune teller—an apparatus for stamping our names automatically on a tin band, which fixes our fate to our collar.”

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [C2,4]

That “which fixes our fate to our collar” has been on my mind lately, as Yervin’s “Dark Enlightenment” finally begins to percolate through mainstream media which has largely avoided giving substantive, analytic attention to Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA” until now.

Precisely because the MAGA game makes use of postmodernist distances between sincerity and speech, I find myself drawn back to Dada, Situationism, and literature that confronts performativity with humor. Enter the brilliant untelling of Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom, which subtitles itself “a novel” — and gives us the author’s name upside down.

“I had come to the Lonesome Ballroom for this—this singular ideal discourse, this friendliness that didn’t require friendship, this conversation that was perfect precisely because it did not require me to speak,” the narrator tells us in the section excerpted in Cleveland Review of Books.

So what if my fern fell over? It is windy. The speaker’s shadow is lavender. Lavender as the dress Madeline wore when reading at the AWP Midwestern Prose off-site.

NOTABLY, GLENN GOULD COULDN’T CARE LESS WHAT WE THOUGHT ABOUT HIM

A tragic tone often colors the stories we tell of Glenn Gould’s withdrawal from the concert world. But what is tragic to the fern or the fern’s owner may not be tragic to the composer, himself. He had a long love affair with an artist; he made radio documentaries; he wrote criticism and composed music; he wore a scarf that grew into a myth about his extreme hermeticism due to hypochondria. He probably laughed often when encountering the character he’d become in newsprint and text.

Composers often struggle with the demands and travel of performance, exacerbated by pianism. At one point, Gould elected to opt out of the relentlessness. He wanted to play with sound. He wanted to write about music. He wanted to find his true north as metaphor and state of being. He wanted to express his opinions without licking his patrons’ spaghetti straps and mink stoles.

Cait Miller recalls how Gould’s opinions on music caused tension in his performance career, citing his “April 1962 performance of Brahms’ first piano concerto, with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein conducting” where “Mr. Bernstein disagreed with Gould’s interpretation so vehemently that he felt it necessary to warn the audience beforehand.” Bernstein’s comments were preserved in the radio broadcast of that performance.

— which reminds me that one of my favorite literary forms is Gouldian, namely, the self-interview that shapes itself from the shadow of a musical form.

“THE TUXEDOED FALLACY”

Ambivalence and passion meet as text, in the (often unpopular) position Gould assumes before recapitulating it and playing it out. G.G., the performer/composer, argues with g.g., the interviewer.

At stake: the conventional hierarchies in the music world and criticism. The “tuxedoed fallacy”comes up in an interview where the speaker/s jauntily confronts the “noble tutorial and curatorial responsibilities of the artist in relation to his audience”:

I love how Gould plays his ‘persona’ in order to rattle his audience, knowing, of course, that his audiences are multiple, and taking pains to articulate his “tuxedoed fallacy,” pinning it to the act of “display”. The tuxedo provides the illusion that one person stands above the others, not naked at all, but “from a power-base”: the proscenium.

ASIDE ON DIORAMAS AS “DEVICES FOR CHANGING SPACE AND TIME”

“Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, known for his 1839 patent on the daguerreotype photographic technique, began his career as an assistant to the celebrated panorama painter Pierre Prevost. In 1822, Daguerre debuted the diorama, his first device for changing space and time. The diorama differed significantly from the panorama: Daguerre's visitors looked through a proscenium at a scene composed of objects arranged in front of a backdrop; after a few minutes, the auditorium platform rotated, exposing another dioramic opening. The entire diorama building became a machine for changing the spectator's view. Like the diaphanorama— in which translucent watercolors were illuminated from behind— the diorama included semi transparent paintings that could be modified by moving the lights.”

– Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”

"AND I WISH YOU’D STOP USING WORDS LIKE THAT”

Warning: if Gould doesn’t interest you, then the remainder of this post —- devoted to Gould’s self-interview on Beethoven — will be mortifying. “Glenn Gould Interviews Himself about Beethoven” was published In the fall 1972 issue of Piano Quarterly.

In it, Gould teases out the distinction between the “composer”, the “artist”, and the “performer” as constructed by musicology and other discourse:

glenn gould: Mr. Gould, when did you first become aware of your growing doubts about Beethoven?

GLENN GOULD: I don't believe I have any doubts about Beethoven—a few minor reservations, perhaps. Beethoven has played a very important part in my life, and I feel that while the warm glow of his bicentennial celebration remains, "doubts" is a singularly inappropriate word.

g.g.: You must allow me to be the judge of that, if you will, sir. But perhaps you'd care to define some of those "reservations" for us.

G.G.: Certainly. Well, there are moments in Beethoven when I'm a bit perplexed, I confess. For instance, I've never been able really to "draw a bead," so to speak, on the finale of the Ninth.

g.g.: That's a fairly common reservation.

G.G.: Exactly, and it certainly doesn't qualify as a "doubt," in my opinion.

g.g.: I see. In your view, then, it's simply an aversion to isolated moments in his music, is it?

G.G.: Well, of course, I don't mind admitting that I have a built-in bias in regard to Wellington's Victory, or even the King Stephen Overture, for that matter, more or less from first note to last.

g.g.: But among what we may safely call the "mainstream" works, you have no such objection, is that it?

G.G.: No, not exactly. I can't claim to be equally enamored of all the most familiar compositions, certainly.

g.g.: Well, then, which of these works fail to meet with your approval?

G.G.: It has nothing whatever to do with my approval, and I wish you'd stop using words like that. But I suppose, perhaps, I'm less fond of the Fifth Symphony, the "Appassionata" Sonata, or the Violin Concerto.

g.g.: I see. All those works are from what we might think of as Beethoven's “middle” years, aren't they?

G.G.: Yes, that's true.

g.g.: And very significant, too. I suppose, however, like most professional musicians, you have a pronounced penchant for the late quartets and piano sonatas.

G.G.: I listen to them a lot, yes.

g.g.: That's not really what I was asking you, Mr. Gould.

G.G.: Well, those are very problematic works, you see, and I—-

g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, with all due respect, we don't need you to tell us that. If I'm not mistaken, even one of Huxley's characters—what was his name?—

G.G.: Spandrell or something, wasn't it?

g.g.: Yes, thank you—even he committed suicide more or less to the accompaniment of Op. 132, didn't he?

G.G.: That's right. Well, I apologize for the clichés, but those works really are very elusive, you know-very enigmatic, very—

g.g.: How about “ambivalent”?

G.G.: Don't be hostile.

g.g.: Well, then, don't you be evasive. What I'm asking, obviously, is not whether you share the worldwide bafflement in regard to the form of the C-sharp-minor Quartet—I'm asking whether you genuinely enjoy listening to the piece.

G.G.: No.

Acknowledging the role of taste or preference makes the professionals uncomfortable. It’s difficult for a critic to admit their “tuxedo style” is just the window-dressing for a personal opinion, or the stroll of a particular interpretive in the rendition.

Little G tells big G that he needn’t “be embarrassed” for admitting that he doesn’t enjoy listening to the C-sharp-minor Quartet, and then he asks which works attract him. Italics are mine.

G.G: I'm fond of the Op. 18 Quartets, certainly, and the Second Symphony is one of my two favorite works in that genre, as a matter of fact.

g.g.: Very typical. This, of course, is the well-known odd-number-symphony syndrome.

G.G.: No, I assure you, it isn't. I can't bear the Fourth, and I'm not particularly fond of the Pastorale, though I will admit the Eighth Symphony is my favorite among all his works in that form.

g.g.: Hmm.

G.G.: You see, I know you'd like to confirm a cut-and-dried diagnosis, but I really don't think it's quite that simple. You're also trying to establish a chronological bias, obviously, and I don't think that's fair, either.

g.g.: Well, Mr. Gould, I admit that our tests are far from conclusive at this stage, but since you've already confessed your admiration for the Second and Eighth Symphonies, perhaps you'd care to enumerate some other Beethoven compositions for which you have special affection.

G.G.: Certainly. There is the Piano Sonata No. 8, the String Quartet Op. 95. Then there are each of the Op. 31 Piano Sonatas and, believe it or not, the "Moonlight," for that matter. So you see, I just can't be typecast as readily as you might wish.

g.g.: On the contrary, my dear sir, I think, in relation to the Beethovenian canon at least, you've managed to typecast yourself, and with remarkable consistency. Do you realize that every work you've singled out has belonged to what we might call a transition phase—or, rather, one of two transition phases, to be exact—within Beethoven's development?

G.G.: Forgive me, but that's just hogwash. First of all, I can't buy this notion of the Beethovenian plateau. You'd probably like to convince me that every work he wrote is either "early," "middle," or "late" in spirit, and I think that sort of categorizing is every bit as unprofitable as it is unoriginal, if you don't mind my saying so.

g.g.: I don't mind your saying so, and I've noted your defensive reaction to the suggestion. But since you yourself alluded to this yardstick—-this subdivision of Beethoven's creative life into periods—-I simply suggest to you that there is perhaps something significant in the fact that all the works you've mentioned, by that very yardstick to which you've alluded, found him at the time of their composition in a state of, for want of a better word, flux.

G.G.: Every artist is in a state of flux or he wouldn't be an artist.

g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, don't be tedious—-in a state of flux, as I say, if not between the early and middle years, then between the middle and late ones.

In this kerfuffle over “periods,” Gould toys with the structures of critique. And then, he turns around and interrogates the difference between performing and listening as an aesthetic experience. “Of course, you played a great deal of Beethoven in your concerts, didn't you?” g. g. asks.

Notice how this interview moves? Notice how it leans into the fugue as a form? It’s hard for me not to hear it, especially since the fugal form weighed so heavily in Gould’s sense of theory and sound. Speaking of “playing” v. “listening to”:

g.g.: Does this suggest, then, that you found his music, by and large, more fun to play than to listen to?

G.G.: Certainly not. I've already told you that I listen with great pleasure to—

g.g.: — to the Eighth Symphony and the Op. 95 String Quartet, I know. But in your concert-giving days you did play, let's say, the "Emperor" Concerto fairly frequently, after all, yet I haven't noticed it on your list of all-time favorites. So does this suggest, perhaps, that such performances simply provided you with tactile rather than intellectual stimulation?

G.G.: I think that's really uncalled for, you know. I tried very, very hard to develop a convincing rationale for the “Emperor” Concerto.

g.g.: Yes, I've heard some of your attempts at rationalizing it, as a matter of fact, but it's interesting that you say “tried.” I assume this means that you found it difficult to realize a spontaneous musical experience in relation to such performances.

G.G.: Well, if by “spontaneous” you mean an occasion when every note fell into place as though programmed by an automaton, obviously not.

g.g.: No, don't misunderstand me. I'm not speaking of technical felicities or anything as mundane as that. I simply suggest that if you were to play a work by—-who's your favorite composer?

G.G.: Orlando Gibbons.

g.g.: Thank you—by Orlando Gibbons, that every note would seem to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.

G.G.: I don't think I've been guilty of any such differentiation.

g.g.: Ah, but you have, however inadvertently. You see, this armchair analysis of yours compels you to keep trying to like Op. 132, or whatever, but you don't feel obliged to undertake any similar probe in behalf of Mr. Gibbons's Salisbury Pavan, do you? And similarly, the elaborate rationale you concoct in behalf of the Fifth Piano Concerto—whether if you do it very slowly or very quickly it might suddenly and miraculously hang together successfully—isn't matched by any similar apologia when you play Gibbons, is it? Now, I'm sure you'll agree that it's not because Gibbons is less intellectually demanding—

G.G.: Indeed, he's not.

g.g.: —and indeed, given the passage of time from his day to ours, he might even be said to pose the greater re-creative challenge.

G.G.: That's true.

g.g.: But despite that fact, you see, I'm fairly certain that if you sit down to your piano, late at night, let's say —for your own amusement, in any case—it's Orlando Gibbons, or some other composer in regard to whom you evidence no such schizophrenic tendencies, that you'll play, and not Beethoven. Am I right?

G.G.: I don't really see what that proves, and I think—

g.g.: Am I right?

G.G.: But surely I'm entitled to —

g.g.: Am I right?

G.G.: Yes. Can you help me?

g.g.: Do you want to be helped?

G.G..: Not if it involves giving up Orlando Gibbons.

g.g.: That shouldn't be necessary. You see, Mr. Gould, your problem—and it's a much more common one than you realize, I assure you—relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of the means by which post-Renaissance art achieved its communicative power. Beethoven, as I'm sure you'll agree, was central to that achievement, if only chronologically, in that his creative life virtually bisects the three and a half centuries since the demise of your Mr. Gibbons—

G.G.: True.

g.g.: —and it's precisely during that period of three and a half centuries, and specifically at the Beethovenian heart of it, that the creative idea and the communicative ideal began to grant each other mutual concessions.

G.G.: You've lost me.

g.g.: Well, look at it this way. All the works that you've enumerated on your private hate list—

G.G.: It's not that at all.

g.g.: Don't interrupt, please. All those works have in common the idea that their ideology, so to speak, can be wrapped up in one or more memorable moments.

G.G.: You mean motives.

g.g.: I mean tunes. I mean, quite simply, that you, as a professional musician, have clearly developed a resentment pattern in relation to those tunes— forgive me—which represent and which characterize the spirit of their respective compositions.

G.G.: Well, there's nothing very special about the tunes, if you want to call them that, in the "Emperor" Concerto, since you're challenging me on that ground in particular.

g.g.: There's nothing special at all. There is, however, something readily identifiable about them which, by definition, threatens to undermine your interpretative prerogative, don't you see? You resent the fact that, in a work like the "Emperor" Concerto, the elaborate extenuations relevant to those motives have indeed been left in your hands, literally and figuratively, but the raison d'être of those extenuations inevitably devolved upon the kind of motivic fragment that automatically came equipped with certain built-in interpretive biases by virtue of which they can be sung, whistled, or toe-tapped by anyone—any layman.

G.G.: That's nonsense. Mendelssohn's tunes are every it as good as, and far more continuous than, Beethoven's, and I have no objection to Mendelssohn whatever.

g.g.: Ah, precisely substance n's are far more continuous because they relate to a motivic substance which is at once more extended, more complex, and-don't get me wrong, now-more professional.

G.G.: You think so too, then?

g.g: Everyone does, my dear fellow. It's precisely that impossible mixture of naiveté and sophistication that makes Beethoven the imponderable he is, and it's precisely that dimension of his music-that mixture of the professional's developmental skills and the amateur's motivic bluntness—that is at the heart of your problem.

G.G.: Do you think so?

g.g: There's no doubt of it. And it's not at all a bad thing, really—a bit anarchistic, perhaps, but, in a way, it's even rather creative—because when you reject Beethoven—

G.G.: But I'm not rejecting him!

g.g: Please! When you reject Beethoven, as I say, you're rejecting the logical conclusion of the Western musical tradition.

G.G.: But he isn't the conclusion of it.

g.g: Well, of course, chronologically he isn't. As I've said, he's really the center of it in that sense, and it's precisely those works which are in the center of his own chronology that disturb you most. It's precisely those works in which an elaborate exposé with which only a professional can cope is related to material with which anyone can identify.

G.G.: Hmm...

g.g.: And that disturbs you, Mr. Gould, because it represents, first of all, a comment upon the role playing, the stratified professionalism, of the Western musical tradition that you, and not without reason, question. No, it's no accident that you prefer those works in which Beethoven was less emphatically his logical-extremist self—the works written on the way to, or in retreat from, that position—the works in which the predictability quotient is lower, the works in which the composer is less concerned with making the mystery of his art explicit.

G.G.: But on the way to, or in retreat from, that position, as you put it, you encounter a much more professional kind of art— Wagner's professionalism, or Bach's, depending on which way you go—and you have to move a long way back, or forward, as the case may be, to encounter a purely amateur tradition.

The self-exposing “gotcha” is central to the fugal motion of Gould’s self-interviews. In fact, one might even be inclined to note that Gould places form first in his writing on music, and he does so in a Platonic manner that plays both with and against Samuel Beckett’s own dialogic modes. Ignore me. Here’s the notorious Emperor penguin!

G.G..: Hmm. Well, do you mean, then, that if I do reject Beethoven, I'm on my way to being an environmentalist or something like that? I mean, I think John Cage has said that if he's right, Beethoven must be wrong, or something of the sort. Do you think I'm harboring a sort of suicide wish on behalf of the profession of music?

g.g.: My dear fellow, I don't think you should be concerned about it, really. Besides, you're quite a moderate, you know— you didn't choose Op. 132, after all . . . You're vacillating. You're not quite sure whether in making that mystery explicit, in exploiting the dichotomy between layman and professional, we do our fellow man a service or a disservice. You're not quite sure whether in opting for an environmental course, which, after all, puts an end to professionalism as we know it, we're getting at some truth about ourselves more immediate than any professional can achieve, or whether, in doing that, we're simply reining in our own development as human beings. And you shouldn't be embarrassed, because Beethoven himself wasn't sure. After all, he didn't write many "Emperor" Concertos, did he? He vacillated, to a degree at least, and I don't see why you can't. It's just that in celebrating Beethoven, you're acknowledging one terminal point which makes your vacillation practi-cable, and now you have to find another one.

G.G.: Well, I feel consoled by that, actually. But there's one thing I don't understand: How did you know I had these doubts?

g.g.: Mr. Gould, it was perfectly obvious— you wouldn't have requested this interview otherwise. You'd have authored the piece as you were asked to do.

G.G.: I see. Well, thank you very much—is there anything else?

g.g: No, I don't think so. Oh, yes—if you don't mind, on your way out, turn down the PA, will you? If I hear another bar of the Eroica, I'll scream.

EN FIN.

A few of my favorite Beethoven performances by Gould, for no reason at all.

Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor "The Tempest": III Allegretto.
Sonata For Piano And Cello in A major: I Allegro ma non tanto.
15 Variations And Fugue in E-flat major: Variations I-XV.

“Ecstasy”. This is the word Gould used to describe his relation to music— to the worlds it opened and created. Rapture can be painstakingly disciplined, a function of heights within constraints, and so I leave you with Gould playing Gibbons. For the ecstasy so palpable that one feels it is almost private, something erotic occurring between two bodies in a world we cannot imagine, except by shadow.

What's in a name?

[Notes from a lecture given in Auburn last year, where I read a few of the poems that would eventually find their way murmuring into My Heresies. Like all thoughts and texts, this one can only speak for its speaker— and it would be horrifying to imagine that any human would decide to make a rule of what one uncertain and self-doubting speaker says. I speak for the “I” that imagines itself. And, with that, add a note of gratitude (so much gratitude) to Rose McLarney, whose new book, Colorfast, deserves your hands, your eyes, your mind, your attention— and to my sister of Eastern pasts and presents, Maria Kuznetsova, who is one the most hilarious, beautiful, brilliant humans I’ve had the chance to gab away with in recent years. Two hours with Maria is peak-living. Read Oksana, Behave! and fall in love.]

"Music causes plethoras in the head." 

— Soranus, 2nd century CE

I’d like to begin this reading with a note on pronunciation, and an appeal to unrelenting awkwardness of this Beckett-style moment in which You— the persons who live in this town whom I am visiting, persons who are possibly affiliated with the university from which I matriculated — have an expectation that I would be something pronounceable. 

Expectations are based on sounds, which is to say language, words gathering together into small parcels of meaning. We gather to hear them. They gather to enable us to encounter each other. Words and humans gather in this uncertain, expansive relationship rooted in a persistent hope that something meaningful can be made of a moment, a view, a life. And so I am surprised tonight to discover something utterly human in me, namely, a melancholy. How sad that anyone would worry about whether they had pronounced my name correctly. How unfortunate that we should gather and be gathered with the fear of mispronunciation among us. 

My father says Americans can't pronounce “Ceausescu” correctly because they don't do diphthongs. Their mouths aren't wired to holding so many vowels in one hut at once without cracking. So I have centered vowels in my poems—crammed and jammed them, making space for unassimilated voices. I am loyal to sounds, and a traitor to any part of the “self” we try to see whole.

This particular melancholy reminds me of an ongoing discussion with my youngest  child— a problem that I find easier to express in a poem, with Tomaz Salamun's little horse in the future anterior. 

[Poem: “I Have An Imaginary Pony”]

My daughter's pony is invisible, but my relationship to her pony is imaginary. I can only imagine what she has imagined to the point of invisibility. And invisibility, here, is the only way she can relate to the pony she cannot own. 

We cannot know each other the way we crave to be known. 

Ah-LEE-nah. Is it wonderful to hear my name pronounced correctly, wherein "correctly" is defined as the way it is pronounced in my native (and very minor) language? Does the thrill of hearing myself pronounced in my first language relate to the power to be one simple thing, one Alina Stefanescu, one constant and stable self? And is there—beneath that thrilling presumption, perhaps— a refusal to be known as one of you, as among you, in your presence, in your language —known as spoken and held in your mouth?

As a reader, it is not your job to acknowledge me, to affirm me, or even to perceive me correctly. I believe that such expectations set us up to fail in beholding one another. It is too much to ask of any human. I keep thinking of Beckett's Godot and the firmament, and the constant question that the two old friends, waiting, ask one another. The endless repetition: Who am I to you? Who will we be to one another? 

To be read is one way of knowing. To be pronounced is another. To be remembered, well, to be remembered as both a blessing, and a curse in any language.

I cannot know myself in the phrasings or interactions that present me— and give me to you, in flashes and stanzas, tonight. To ask of the human the infinitude we hope from the poem is too much. 

Earlier this week, I found myself returning to Michel Foucault, whom I first studied here on this campus decades ago. The Auburn Philosophy Department taught me to think, which is to say, Dr. J covered my papers in red ink – "What does this mean? No more flowers! What are you arguing?" I took every course I could with him, for the thrill of being challenged, for the gift of being taken seriously, worthy of criticism. 

The funny thing about Foucault is that his most famous work in Madness & Civilization relies on an archival history depicting the Ship of the Fools, a boat that carried mad men around. But his peers dragged him through a journal for failing to source the ship of fools. 

It seems that Foucault never actually replied with a credible archival source. The Ship of Fools existed, but did Foucault's ship of fools exist outside his book? This existential question is one of both philosophy and poetry. I found myself on his ship of fools earlier this month, and I wanted to share the first draft of it with you. To be unfinished somehow, and to risk reading the thing-in-creation.

[Poem: “So Foucault Failed to Source the Ship of Fools”]

Who were the mothers in that hospital room of bills that sink us all? Why do we punish the sick and suffering and vulnerable by making it impossibly costly to survive? I return again to Beckett's Godot, which I saw performed in a black box a few weeks ago, and how the first half of the play seems to tell us that only the burdens we carry give us reason to continue. 

I don't know about that. Sometimes I look at other mothers and feel so close to them, even though they are strangers. What could be stranger than this overwhelming love we feel for our children? What could be weirder than the feeling of being subsumed and totally sunk by it?

[Poem: “The Mother Test No One Talks About”]

There's a lovely part among the countless leavetakings in Godot, in the parting scene where the friends shout out "Adieu" again and again, making a refrain of a word in the language that Beckett adopted as his own, namely French. Adieu means goodbye in French but it also could mean to God. Derrida’s notion of leave-taking returns to this ‘a dieu’ that honors the life which can no longer defend itself.

I’m afraid we have very little respect for the dead in the US, and this is legible in the mainstream disregard for poetry and literary forms that bind us to eternity.

I'm not sure what any god means or wants. Certainly, they have demanded a lot of blood from our species over the centuries. The gods do not strike me as good poets, even if many of the humans who love them are.

Speaking of love, I met the man who became my husband in Virginia. I also left the man who became my husband at least 7 times before agreeing to marry him, and then actually following through with it. Adieu, I said to him. Adieu adieu adieu! Sixteen years later, with three kids and a terrible, wonderful schnauzer named Radu between us, I remain amused by how utterly different we are— his Kierkegaard to my strange mix of French continentals and Wittgenstein. 

Here is a poem for him, who is doing the caregiving this week. About how we coexist as strangers to another. How strangeness keeps us interested. 

[Poem: “Separate Bumper Stickers”]

Speaking of strangers, we feel as if we know them— we have seen them before—but we don’t re-cognize them. We know the stranger even though we can’t recognize the stranger. 

The awkward silences are gifts. Silence is terrain studded by landmines: blank, ambiguous terrain which intends to avoid stepping into harm. Yet this approach anchored in avoidance changes the terrain by rendering it dangerous in an unspeakable way. I remember listening to a museum guide describe the avalanche that destroyed a small town in Colorado as a mystery. "It is a mystery," she insisted, when pushed for information. 

All mysteries lean into their silences, the patched secrets which active mining communities keep in order to survive. The words that surround silence are like the signs labeled NO TRESPASSING; they signify the requirements of keeping distance while also challenging us to find a reason. 

Perhaps my obsession with sign-reading is tied to my childhood, or to being the child of Eastern Bloc refugees raised in the American South which is to say: I recognize a barbed silence when I hear it. Recognition commits me less to knowledge than to asking, studying, wondering, chasing. The writer who rejects a borders' imposition of "peace and quiet," the poet familiar with ontological complicity — cannot leave a silence unchallenged. The words with false bottoms demand my attention. What is this expression trying to hide?  And what is this silence denying?

The silences in my recent poetry collection are related to Ceausescu's dictatorship, and the things my parents could not say. The cost that their “defecting” posed to their family in Romania. 

[Read from Dor]

Dor, this book, is about a word I wanted to bring over borders— a Romanian word that means so many different things to different people. “Dor” is often compared to saudade as a form of nostalgia. We lost interest in that ancient word until it became a medical diagnosis made by Swiss Dr Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer applied this diagnosis to students, noting that nostalgia created false representations which caused the nostalgic to lose contact with the present, to stop caring. In a sense. But “in a sense” is still only one sense of the matter. (Just as “innocence” is a lie in any discourse including humans with American passports.) There are more senses than the sense implied by the argument. 

Obsessed by a longing for their native land, Hofer's nostalgics experienced something  like homesickness. Hofer's sense still dominates the discourses of nostalgia, the shame of looking backward, the punishment of turning to salt. How interesting that this sense of nostalgia implies a home. 

Reading John of the Cross, I wonder what "home" means to a monk. I wonder if one who has cut so many bonds with the physical, sensual world can experience a "rooted" longing. It must just be god. The ashes of my book's first draft sit in a box on the shelf to the left of my mother's ashes. The poem permits my mother to read the book which appeared after her death. 

[Read two from Dor, including lustration]

In sum, I do not want to be known in the way that pronouncing my name in Romanian would have me be known. I want to be known as I am, right here, in this encounter with You—where you are a poem, too. And what your mouth does with me. I want that. 

I want the ‘me’ that emerges from this, from us, from now. My “I” cannot speak for an other. It cannot and does not. I speak for no country, no community, no flag, no god, no guru, no nation. But there is a world in which we can articulate our impossible hopes aloud, and that world happens to exist above the borders of nation-states, somewhere in the republic of letters as dreamt by poets and writers. There—-and here— and now— I want to be known in the way you imagine my name sounding, in the ambiguous and complicated uncertainty of humans beholding one another— acknowledging our inherent strangeness in this moment of relating, committing to the radiance of that— and—-accepting, perhaps, that the stranger is also one who wishes to be recognized rather than known. Surely, we cannot ever entirely know the difference.

Two poems from my heresies in BOMB.

I tried once before, years ago, to write about Malte, to someone who had been frightened by the book, that I myself sometimes thought of it as a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves and indentations of which are agony, disconsolations and most painful insights, but the casting from which, were it possible to make one (as with a bronze the positive figure one would get out of it), would perhaps be happiness, assent,—most perfect and certain bliss.

— Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lotte Hepner on November 8th, 1915

La vie est là
Qui vous prend par le bras
Oh la la la
C’est magnifique

I am so grateful to everyone who pre-orders My Heresies in the month leading up to its existence. In all honesty, the darkness this year has been very loud for me, and, the way my black dog works often involves extraordinary self-doubt and self-loathing, culminating in self-sabotage. I did not ask for blurbs. Even when friends offered, I felt too ashamed to take them up on those offers.

You might wonder why a writer would feel shame—- especially since we know how shame lies— and the best answer I can come up with is that the last person I wanted to hear from during this US-sponsored genocide of Palestinians was myself. A human can spend the better half of their lives fighting against the ghosts of extremist nationalism only to find these ghosts return in different forms. Language, itself, can hardly hold this. Language can barely make space for the decimation across this planet. And so, one goes silent. One writes in the notebooks and submits nothing. One tries to imagine how best to use ‘your voice’, while despising the sound of your voice.

I am lucky that Ilya Kaminsky said such generous things about the book. I am surrounded by writers, editors, and publishers who encourage me. I am speechless and humbled by that. Ultimately, I am a human who lives more in books than in what my parents called “reality,” which is the space where you learn about publishing and how to line up readings and ‘market’ your own labor. I am still clueless about the business side of writing.

And now, since this book is about the present in its own way, I quote myself in order to speak to my own silences:

Oh la la la, thank you to BOMB magazine for their generosity and the love in that community. Thank you to Eric and Erin and Kristen and Kira for their extraordinary labor in what has been a challenging year for Sarabande. Thank you to all the journals in which these poems were first published. Thank you in advance to all who invite me to talk about poetry and read it and share it, including my peers at New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I shall make a fool of myself next week. It is a joy and pleasure to be a fool for poetry. It is the only foolishness I know by heart.

You can learn more about the poetry collection here, and you can support the incredible work that BOMB has done for decades by purchasing a subscription. You can imagine a world that refuses to accept the given, a world in which empire and the weapons of the most powerful are not celebrated and defended. A world AGAINST GREATNESS. (Fuck Trump and the Neo-Fascist International completely.) You can join Writers Against the War on Gaza. You can support Workshops 4 Gaza and work with Haroon to create a workshop. You can donate to Heal Palestine and commit to the work of love. Either way, no matter what, you make my day by reading this, even if the other things are not possible due to finances. Thank you, humans. Thank you thank you thank you.

"Unsavory thoughts" and vistas.

SOME KIND OF COMPULSION AT PLAY

“What the metaphysics of the industrial revolutions demands is that anything that can be exploited, must be. Some kind of compulsion is at play. An insatiability.”

— Hunter Bolin, “Unworldliness: A Pathology of Humankind (On Günther Anders’s Negative Anthropology)”

*

The libido of late capitalism numbs the imagination. Contemporary novels reflect this paucity of ecstasy, the continuous desolation of being ravished by nothingness, consumed by the undertone of our planned obsolescence. In the era of Televangelical Materialism, the soul is sold to a screen and heaven (or eternity) is an impulse purchase. We don’t even get to argue about what “nous” might mean before handing it along to the wealthy prophets of prosperity and abundance.

“Been to America, been to Europe, it's the same shit.” Clearly, as that wise Canadian known as Destroyer noted, “the idea of the world is no good”:

The terrain is no good / The sea's blasted poem / A twinkle in the guitar player's eye
Cue synthesizer / Cue guitar / Cue synthesizer Wherever you are

At which point I defer/refer to one of my favorite parking lot choreographies in the annals of music video:

“Like everything that's come before, you are gone.”

Several times at AWP, these lyrics met me in the chaos of seeing beloved humans—and missing countless others— at that room known as the Book Fair, averring: “I look around the room, we are a room of pit ponies / Drowning forever in a sea of love ”

There are many ways to drown, and one reckons with this each time drowning occurs differently. I am hungry for writing that reflects the ordinary strangeness of revolutionary conditions, like the shock of remembrance that becomes a presence. At a rest area in Mississippi yesterday, the invitation of clover growing too fast for the mowers, and then reading something that prompted a memory of a similar day in adolescence, when the Mary Kay sales rep parked her pink Cadillac in our driveway and my mom invited her into the kitchen. Her name was Michelle Pearson, she was a “missionary”: a person who lived off the love of others and God’s will, as she put it, in her white fur coat and Tammy Faye eyelashes. Michelle asked money to fund a mission trip to "save the children of Africa" who were "starving without Bibles." I cannot forget that scene, and how it speaks to the nihilism of the present.

INTERLUDE WHEREIN LIBRARY CARDS ARE THE ONLY PASSPORT THAT SHOULD MATTER

THE CHASMS I NEED

“His writing dares to convey so little that it confronts us with the true chasm of ellipsis…”

— Andres Neuman (translated by Robin Myers) on Kafka in an essay on hunger artists for Franz

*

On the road yesterday, passed a dead armadillo which resembled my soul and thought how quickly it all becomes rearview. No one talked about tracking a thing in the rear view before autos. We look back longer at this speed I think.

RIP soul. I shall return with a roadside cross for you. Shall shawl that cross with plethoras of those eternal plastic flowers which promise to last “forever” and are therefore all we can really know of heaven besides radium and cockroaches.

Two books that have been stellar company today:

1. Disintegration Made Plain and Easy, a poetry collection by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi from Piżama Press

2. Unsavory Thoughts, a prosodic creature by Thomas Walton from Sagging Meniscus

Tant pis, I cannot share any of Kiik’s poems yet because the collection will be released in May, but I can encourage you to pre-order it—which I am actively doing.

As for Thomas’ book, it is new and waiting and utterly bingeworthy. Even the epigraphs are tantalizing:

“The Buzzcocks combined punk with a sort of sentimentalism,” I thought to myself while driving yesterday.

“Thomas Walton had my complete attention from the get-go, with the fantastic use he makes of the “preface” as a site of temporal frottage,” I say to you now— enclovered, still admiring the injunction of the titular.

Here you are then: a little pharmakos from Thomas. “A little medicine to make us sick, a little poison to make us well,” which made me think of a part in Swann’s Way, in James Grieve’s translation of Proust, where the speaker says:

Only the day before, had I not wanted to avoid upsetting Gilberte, I would have settled for infrequent meetings with her; but now these could no longer have satisfied me, and my conditions would have been different. For in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes very  harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher—if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is.

Acknowledging that he is “not in this position” with Gilberte, Proust’s speaker says he is determined not to go back to the Swann house. Alas, the pharmakos doesn't serve its function where reverie and love are concerned; for there is “a new pain”:

I also went on telling myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for ages, that I could see her whenever I liked, and that, if I preferred not to see her, I would eventually forget her. But these thoughts, like a medication that has no effect on certain disorders, were quite ineffectual against what came intermittently to my mind: those two close silhouettes of Gilberte and that young man, stepping slowly along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. This was a new pain, but one that would eventually fade and disappear in its turn; it was an image which one day would come back to my mind with all its noxious power neutralized, like those deadly poisons that can be handled without danger, or the small piece of dynamite one can use to light a cigarette without fear of being blown up. For the time being, though, there was another force in me, fighting for all it was worth against the pernicious impulse that kept showing me, without the slightest alteration, Gilberte walking through the twilight: working against memory, trying to withstand its repeated onslaughts, there was the quiet and helpful endeavor of imagination. The force of memory went on showing the pair walking down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, along with other irksome images from the past….

And it is spring, the season before the summering which commits me to my annual Proust re-reading. So many summers of my life are saturated by Proust’s presence, his metaphors and reversals. Friends come and go but Proustian summers manage to remain and continue like the metaphysical baller, himself.

Cue my brain at the rest stop again:

Cue violin sonata for the award-winning rest area in upper Louisiana where I learned that many people are praying for me and other sinners at the RV place! Was also told to “expect excellence from the Lord”! Fantastic slogan-riffing occurring out here. Bavardage with eschaton!

Cue Tristan Tzara’s lament, “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire”, as translated by Mary Ann Caws and marked up with my sublimated ardors and envy of avian creatures that transgress borders continually:

In sum, dim sum, bright green—- and everything that begins in “This quiet”, as with this with poem by Gunter Grass translated by Michael Hamburger and Middleton, shared by Tom Snarsky. All of it so wrong, and so beautiful.

Cue synthesizer.

And you, wherever U R —

Notes on what the programs called "AWP 2025".

Crush my calm you cassavetes
I was sitting tight so quiet quiet
In the dark till the lights came up my heart
— Fugazi, “Cassavetes”

GOPHER INCIDENT

J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle n the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t 'really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.

Took walks and listened to music and scribbled things. Did not see any unicorns but thought about what a gem the Minutemen offered for teaching writing craft during neo-fascism for discussions about how the verb ‘acts upon; the noun, etc… The state, the church, the plans, the waste, the dead, what's the verb behind it all? The do, the how, the why, the where, the when, the what, can these words find the truth?

Make me think (take my head)
Sit me down
Fix a drink
— Archive “Take My Head”

PIGEON BREAK

A different M sits on the sun-slathered stairwell for introverts outside the convivial outdoor cafe area. I don’t recognize him while climbing to the top, in search of yesterday’s pigeons whom I hope to meet again. After I sit down, M comes up the stairs and introduces himself, apologizing —-as we all apologize, afraid to disturb each other— and the pleasure of putting a face to a name becomes mine. As he introduces himself, the warm goo of Los Angeles’ smoggy sun conspires with M to bring me the pleasure associated with meeting writers one admires at a literary conference. They are your interlocutors, your peers, and he has a fiction collection coming out from Dzanc in February. You are elated for him, and for yourself, as a reader. This is all you want: more literary forms that stray from the conventional. His ‘win’ is yours. The pie is never zero sum if you love reading as much as you love writing. You can’t wait for his book. The conversation drifts to the heartbreaking news of John Domini’s sudden death while traveling through Morocco with his wife. Both of us speak of his kindness and generosity as a critic, writer, memoirist, and human being —- before going silent, for it is unthinkable. Always unthinkable, even to those of us who imagine everything. It is never possible to fully accept that a human being who was still dreaming the future can be gone.

The Asterism booth with Josh and Vik.

I love this photo of Vik!

Sheer opportunity determines love, coincidence, local patriotism, and murder.
— Günther Ander

MY PSEUDO PET

The part where a free crocodile named Gorky from Deep Vellum wound up on my forehead. Literature is thriving! Literature is dying! Long live literature! I highly encourage all text-based mammals to join the Deep Vellum Book Club because you will love it and you don’t have to manifest a croc on thine forehead at all. That sort of bad behavior was bequeathed us by the New Critics and the neo-New Critics, who can afford to act badly because the author’s life has no bearing on the text (which is decidedly Anglo-Saxon since New Crit can’t develop a neutral and yet definitive reading when diacritics and brooches appear.

WITH MY LITTLE EYE

I saw some things. Here’s the part where I list them with no intervening apparatus. AZ was wearing a Minor Lit brooch! Okay, it was actually a pin on his lapel “but we cannot do decadence without getting hardcore about brooches,” I thought to myself while imagining AZ’s pin into a brooch without his knowledge or consent. I saw a blur of a tall, cool guy wearing all black whose name was surely Romeo right before we both screamed and I ran over and he picked me up like we were in a really bad Poets Reunite scene from a movie no director would ever screen. It made me so happy. The Malarkey table was wonderful and I gabbed with two writers whom I have been dying to meet and yet—- I did not die! We just chatted even though I had been dying to meet them and no one died at all which is always a miracle. JK made me laugh and we talked about simultaneous orgasms at the top of our vocal range in the cafeteria that served cold waffle fries. Not once did we descend to our ‘inside voices’ and it was a gift to hug OL who has the best bob in poetry and translation. RA HAS NOT CHANGED A BIT AND EVERY TIME WE GAB AT 100 MPS IN BROKEN ROMANIAN THE WORLD GLISTENS AND LOVES ITSELF MOMENTARILY. There was no good food to be had on site so many of us went off-site and hit up the taco trucks or got drinks with maraschino cherries in them. I spoke to exactly 23 of the 189 people I hoped so much to hug which is nothing to boast about at all. I hugged Jill and signed books and we chatted about listening to Tin Tin on audio to improve French language skills. Jad and Dina warmed my whole heart; it was as if they put leg warmers on my aorta and I was elated to chat with them, however briefly. Same for Len and Robert: tiny explosions inside my ribcage. An excess of laughter and foolishness. I am leaving so many humans and encounters out of my little eye list . . .

FIRST SIGNING

Just before I started signing the first copes of My Heresies; LA and Kristen took photos and once could not ask for a more beautiful signing experience. Thank you to the many humans who showed up and purchased books and introduced themselves and brought so much joy into my day. Absolutely gobsmacked to meet fellow Romanian writers.

On the bus, okay, don't say "hi" then
Your tongue, your transfer
— The Replacements, “On the Bus”

THE SMOKE ALARM

On the second night, likely as a result of laughing too much earlier, I am roused from a strange dream by a fire alarm blaring through the hotel loudspeaker. The clock reads 5:18 am (or 5:33, my memories argue amongst themselves like in-laws) and the uncanny part is that the interrupted dream is about fire, which is to say, I dreamt one of the usual Joan of Arc variations that has visited me since childhood. Some parts are the same: the feeling of my hands being tied to a hard thing behind my back, and something atop my head that I can’t read—-something that all the people watching can read and know about me which I cannot learn, lacking hands. Again, that feeling of staring through very hot streams of orange and blue, trying to discern a friend in the masses of people standing and watching. This time, however, it is especially difficult to see through the flames and smoke. My eyes sting. I keep blinking. If I try to speak, smoke fills my lungs and I choke, cough, gasp. There is a familiar figure in the front. I focus on him and squinting in an effort to see his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry for this spectacle.” Everything stings now—-my calves, my arms— and I accept that there is no way he can hear me. After cursing briefly, likely for the last time in my life, I apologize to the book I will never finish, a creature that is as real to me as the books I have finished. Particularly the books I burned. No one is as alive to me as the books I burned to cinder. But now, I am burning (again) and the fire alarm beeps. It goes off again but there is no smoke. K seems to sleeping and I debate whether to wake her. I lay there and stare at the ceiling, surveying my options. We are on the 14th floor, an even number, a number divisible by two and therefore very unlucky, if my past has any bearing on the present. A man’s voice announces that the fire alarm was a “mistake” without specifying the nature of this mistake so I stare at the ceiling a bit longer and try to imagine the mistake, itself.

My favorite skyscraper in downtown L.A. Imagine the skill and effort it took to tag these walls so perfectly. Cheers to the creators of this anti-Chambers of Commerce collaborative mural! Cheers to the birds who live in the eaves! Cheers to the pigeons who congress there!

READINGS & STACKS

I can’t even detail the Asterism Reading and Midwestern Prose Reading here. I simply cannot. They were fabulous and I will do so later— in a post where I also share the books that required me to leave behind a few shirts and socks. It comes to my attention that I have shared almost nothing of what happened of the past five days. A whirlwind. Still reeling from the kindness and love and generosity of my peers. . . and moving towards the things that keep me up at night.

Last things first.

My AWP ended at the only off-site that mattered, the reading for Bruiser magazine, as tended by Mark Wadley— who also opened the show with musical gusto and a fantastic list of wrestling moves.

Relatedly:

To be completely honest, I came to hear Addison Zeller and to see cats and I owe his wife $15.

Intersectionally, at multiple points during the evening, I admired the elevated throne on a wooden platform which is designated as the restroom in the center of the courtyard and which reminded me of a really well-shaped sonnet corona.

Inadvertently, one of the teens kept me texting cat memes during the reading which made me feel very bad about myself, life, teens, cars, je-ne-sais-pas, and je-suis-un-oracle-médiocre.

Addison read about a pig, among other things.

It was intense and he was incredible.

I resented how often I laughed, especially as this laughter (ha ha ha ) occurred in tandem with others, our laughs mingling, cavorting, losing any sense of distinction and turning into a separate wave which then crowd-surfed itself across the room, edging dangerously close to where Addison stood on the stage.

Here’s what he wrote but didn’t read:

Birds Are Writing Now

The birds gave up singing: now they write short stories. In trees, in bushes, on power lines the sentences run from tersely direct to syntactically byzantine. If life was less complicated, it might be different—they might fly, nest, snatch worms from the dirt—but the wait goes on, the fantasizing, and the fantasies dry up, the wait feels endless. They break down what makes a piece tick. They concoct unanticipated similes. Their sentences are clean. Twig by twig, word by word—outlining, workshopping, then death: beaks parted, legs curled, a pile of blowing wings in a driveway. That’s how it is. Cars zoom by, feathers flutter. The stories are often samey.

En-vois.

after (and with) Jeremy Stewart's I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida's 'Envois'

“Doubtless, we are several, and I am not as alone as I sometimes say . . .”

— Jacques Derrida, Envois 

I

I will begin by identifying an interlocutor named “Jeremy Stewart”, whose book, I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida's 'Envois', cites Derrida — “Doubtless, we are several, and I am not as alone as I sometimes say . . .”— page 107. I will begin with a name, a text, and a quotation while acknowledging that my “I” includes others. One of these others took a photo of the above passage a few years ago when poring through Derrida’s Envois, and perhaps it was she who recognized Jeremy’s quotation.

On the same day, a framed photograph fell off the wall and the glass shattered all over the hardwood. I took a photo of this as well, and worked it into a poem that will be published in a book at the end of next month. When coming across Jeremy’s quotation, “recognition” occurred as an immediate perceptual awareness of absence. I felt something was missing, and the feeling chased me into a lingering and somewhat corrosive curiosity. I took my dog for a walk and remembered the photo. Having admitted these coincidences (the photo of the quotation and the broken photo frame), I won’t “begin” again. There is no reason to convince you that beginnings must be rich and verbose. Nothing immaculate exists. No immaculate is actual. “I know what this costs.”

II

In writing about books I have read, or books I have written, or projected works in draft, it is easy to confuse what I have said publicly—- whether spoken or published— with what I have written and left unfinished. There are traces of such things, and it hurts (stings, smarts, burns) to discover that the words remain hidden in my notebooks, severaled in silence.

Uncertainty is where relationship possibilitizes itself, as such, every relationship of value alters its subjects irrevocably, giving them a knowledge that could not have been gained elsewhere. A knowledge about themselves. The touch deforms us, and thus makes us more real, laying the weight of the world in proximity to our bodies and our experience of embodiment. To be touched by another simultaneously wounds us and recreates us.

Derrida said something similar of poetry in a late essay: “No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call the poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart… The poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (of from) the other.”

Traces allude to the wound without speaking for the wound, or evidencing it. The trace is not a presence so much as “simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.” A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing.

III

Speaking of inheritance, Derrida: “In my anticipation of death, in my relation to a death to come, a death that I know will completely annihilate me and leave nothing of me behind, there is just below the surface a testamentary desire, a desire that something survive, get left behind or passed on—an  inheritance or something that I myself can lay no claim to, that will not return to me, but that will, perhaps, remain.”

IV

Dear reader, forget the photos. Pretend I didn’t mention them. But don’t forget that I lied to you when I scoffed at beginnings and repetition. And don’t forget how I defined recognition in relation to the secret I may have kept.

V

With dinner guests due to arrive in a few hours, I sat in my car in a parking lot where no one could find me and read Peggy Kamuf's essay, "A plus d'un titre," alongside Jeremy’s fabulous monograph, both of which led me to the uncanny moment on September 22, 2001, when Derrida was awarded the Theodore W. Adorno prize in Frankfurt, on this pseudo-date (since the prize was traditionally awarded on September 11 to coincide with Adorno's birthday, which, in this case, coincided with al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center in New York). 

It was cold in the car, cold enough to warrant gloves and earmuffs, an accessory situation that deranged my note-taking efforts, forcing me to consign some thoughts to memory, most of which did not make it through dinner and the evening. Awarded every three years, the Adorno Prize recognizes work ‘in the spirit of the Frankfurt school’ that spans philosophy, social sciences and the arts. None transgressed these boundaries as consistently and kookily as Jacques Derrida, who, in Tympan, insisted that "it is about this multiplicity, perhaps, that philosophy, being itself situated, inscribed and included there, has never been able to reason."

The multiplicity and polyvocality appears in countless texts, including the post-scriptum of On the Name, where Derrida amends his statement about speech, writing, "More than one, forgive me, one must always be more than one in order to speak, there must be several voices…"

On September 20, 2001, looking out at the audience in Frankfurt, Derrida began his speech, “The language of the foreigner” (as translated by Lucie Elvenin), by recounting a dream spoken by a different voice, a spectre that haunted his own work as well as that of the Frankfurt school. He does this for many reasons, but one of them involves language, particularly the connection between Derrida's French and Walter Benjamin's German. Both men, in this scenario, use languages that are not their 'first languages' in order to communicate an insight. Both men indirectly pose questions about fidelity to language in doing so. 

“To open this modest statement of my gratitude, I will read a phrase, which one day, one night, Walter Benjamin dreamt in French,” Derrida tells his audience, adding that Benjamin “entrusted it in French” to Gretel Adorno, who had become the wife of Theodor Adorno by the time this letter was addressed to her on 12 October 1939. Walter and Gretel carried on a lively correspondence prior to her marriage, and those letters to Gretel Karplus present us with a richer, more flirtatious slant of both persons. But when Benjamin wrote the quoted letter to Gretel, he was interned in what the French authorities called “a camp de travailleurs voluntaires (voluntary workers’ camp),” as Derrida says, and the banality of that arrangement might have lent the dream a more “euphoric” tone. 

In this dream, as described by Derrida, Benjamin said the following to himself in French: “Il s’agissait de changer en fichu une poésie” which Elvenin translates as “It was a case of turning poetry into a kerchief”. But Benjamin “translated this as: Es handelte sich darum, aus einem Gedicht ein Halstuch zu machen,” Derrida says, sharing this German translation with his audience, subtly shifting the terms of his address, while adding that “later we will touch on this ‘fichu’, this kerchief or scarf.” And then — notice how he continues with this plural pronoun— “We will discern in it the letter of the alphabet that Benjamin thought he recognised in his dream. And ‘fichu’, as we will come to, is not any old French word to denote a muffler, shawl or women’s scarf.” 

Briefly, Derrida discourses on the 'fichu', a word which “means different things according to whether it is being used as a noun or adjective”:

The fichu – and this is the most obvious meaning in Benjamin’s sentence – designates a shawl, the piece of material that a woman may put on in a hurry, around her head or neck. But the adjective fichu denotes evil: that which is bad, lost, condemned. One day in September 1970, seeing his death approaching, my sick father said to me, ‘I'm fichu.’

After drawing the correspondence between his father's use of the handkerchief to say, ‘I'm fed up with it,’ Derrida addresses his audience: “Do we always dream in bed, at night? Are we responsible for our dreams? Can we answer for them? Suppose I am dreaming now. My dream is a happy one, like Benjamin’s.” Using the plural pronoun gathers the audience into the questions, or makes them, so to speak, answerable for the response. The coincidences here are the name and the date, to quote Paul Celan, namely, that the Adorno Prize itself was to occur on Adorno's birthday, September 11th, which in that year coincided with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

“I feel I am dreaming—” Derrida tells the audience. To 'feel' that one is dreaming plies the difference between dream and recognition: who am I when I see myself dreaming and what relationship can be said to exist between my dreaming and my personhood? In gently touching this sense of disbelief, Derrida insinuates that the affect isn't limited to the dream as such but related to the confusion between dream and reality, as he seems to suggest in the next line, “Even if the highwayman or the smuggler doesn’t deserve what is happening to him — like the poor student in a Kafka story who believes himself to be called, like Abraham, to the seat reserved for the first in the class — his dream seems happy. Like mine.”

After drawing himself into the Kafka story, and creating parallels between dreams in Prague and dreams along Mount Moriah, Derrida addresses the audience in a series of questions that alight from each other like reflections of pebbling skipping across a lake’s surface. “What is the difference between dreaming and believing that we are dreaming?” Derrida asks the audience:

And, anyway, who has the right to ask that question? The dreamer, plunged deep in his experience of the night, or the dreamer who has woken up? Would a dreamer be able to speak about his dream without waking? Would he know how to name the dream at all? Would he know how to analyse it fairly and even to use the word ‘dream’ knowingly without interrupting and betraying – yes, betraying – sleep?"

[* These happy-seeming dreams remind me of a conversation between Ernest Bloch and Theodor Adorno about utopia. I'm making a note to come back to it later, if the right corridor appears.]

V

Derrida in Archive Fever.

“A phantom can be thus sensitive to idiom,” Derrida said of the ghosted.

In a note to his Adorno Prize speech, Derrida mentions “an odd coincidence”, namely, the co-incidence of Adorno’s birthday with the September 11 attack by al-Quaeda, which meant that a ceremony honoring the anniversary of a birthday had been postponed due to the prize-winner (Derrida) being in Shanghai. The images of fear and mass murder would be permanently linked to this particular date, a date that connected Adorno to Derrida. “A coincidence of anniversary dates is nothing very odd at all, as Derrida points out in ‘Shibboleth’,” Kamuf writes. What stands out is “the coincidence of coincidences, the more than one coincidence that deserves remark and casts an uncanny shadow in ‘Fichus’.”

Derrida’s notes are notable for how they haunt his writings. One could write a book on less; paratext and punctuation (the asterisk, the footnote, the parenthetical, etc.) are the hauntological grammar of the text. They say what gets ghosted by post-Cartesian philosophy. The plurality of selfhood runs in tandem with the plurality of textual devices that memorialize what is missing, or what academic convention prefers to consign to the dustbin of history due to its overly-speculative nature.

Speculation, the speculative, is specular. It plays with light and mirrors. Physics tells us that specular reflection— the name for any ordinary reflection— is “the mirror-like reflection of waves, such as light, from a surface.”

VI

“By leaving this title in the plural and without article I was making a supplementary and still more equivocal use of the ‘s’ that could cover or include the three uses of the word and highlight the possible plurality of these uses, citing them in advance, as it were.” 

— Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man

The supplementary in Derrida’s explanation of his plural (or ‘severaled’) titling for Mémoires for Paul de Man calls to mind a passage in Javier Marias' novel, The Man of Feeling, where the protagonist reproaches his live-in girlfriend for abandoning him as he sleeps, allowing him to sleep unmolested, unattended, open to dreams, at risk of dreaming and becoming subject to dreams— which, of course, is the conceit of the novel itself that opens as a dream in a train. The difference between the artist and the philosopher is their response to this question, for where the philosopher refuses the dream, the poet wavers, pauses, allowing the dream to speak, and risking its dangerous influence. 

Poets and artists “would acquiesce to the event, and to its exceptional singularity: yes, maybe we can believe and admit that we are dreaming without waking; yes, it is not impossible, sometimes, to say, while sleeping, with our eyes closed or wide open, something like a truth that issues from dreaming, a dream’s meaning and reason, which deserves not to sink into the night of nothingness,” Derrida tells us. Night verges on the abyssal— a space that philosophy often consigns to metaphysics, or to the flaky side of life. And here is where Derrida elects to name Adorno himself, drawing "that lucidity, that light, this Aufklärung of a dreamy discourse on dreams" towards the man whose birth is noted on this date: 

“A passage from Minima Moralia reminds us of this,” Derrida continues, adding that he has chosen the passage for two reasons, the first being that “in it Adorno says that the most beautiful dreams are spoilt, harmed, mutilated, ‘damaged’ (besachädigt), hurt by the waking consciousness that tells us that they are pure-seeming (Schein) in the eyes of reality (Wirklichkeit).” And what stands out to Derrida is the coincidence of the hurt Adorno mentions, this beschädigt that also appears in the book's subtitle, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben.

Prying at this difference in use, this distance in signification, Derrida deconstructs the title to indicate “not ‘reflections on’ a life that has been hurt, harmed, damaged or mutilated, but ‘reflections from’ such a life, aus dem beschädigten Leben: reflections marked by pain, signed with a wound.” 

“Signed with a wound.” — this phrase lies at the center of everything Derrida does, as well as the parts of his language that get folded into lyrical works attempting to gloss his pain without addressing it directly. Like Jean Genet and Artaud, the wound is the site that language returns to as well as the fuel for creation. We are of course talking about circumcision, and his complicated relationship with sacrificial rituals that mark one as a ‘member’ of a group. To my knowledge, Derrida is the only cigar-smoking Parisian flaneur of the solitary attic to theorize his refusal to have his own son circumcised? Given the proper future anterior, Kierkegaard would have good reason to envy what Derrida dared.

VII

“I recognize that I love — you — by this: . . . “

A statement Derrida makes in The Postcard, presumably directed towards Christine, his lover, the mother of his son, his mistress, his fin, or en-fin, perhaps. French is lovely that way: it allows the mind to burrow into the abstract noun, to feel it closer to the flesh, and even to visualize it.

En-voi.

En-fin.

This recognition of the irreplaceable wound is how Derrida conceptualized relationships. You can see this in his later texts on friendship as well as the posthumous collection of his elegies that his own peers and friends published after his death. I recognize that you are gone and no one can replace you. No one can be you to me. Never again.

The practice of dedication speaks to this act of naming, drawing a line within text that takes up direction, or moves towards a particular name. Adorno dedicated Minima Moralia to Felix Horkheimer, who would become his partner in theory when they returned to Germany to establish the ‘Frankfurt School’, as well as the co-author of their unfinished Negative Dialectic. In his Adorno Prize lecture, Derrida raises the book’s dedication alongside the title, adding the dedication “explains that its form was influenced by private life and the painful condition of the ‘emigré intellectual’." The second reason he chose this passage — a passage he has still not spoken or revealed— is to "pay homage today to those who instituted the Adorno Prize and respect a certain spirit" that Derrida names as Adorno's "most beautiful legacy," namely, "this theatrical fragment makes philosophy appear in one single act, on one same stage before all other forms."

This series of thirteen en-vois will be continued, as soon as I get a chance to type my notes…

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APPARATUS

Jacques Derrida.
‘Fichus: Frankfurt Address’, trans. Rachel Bowlby, in Paper Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Mémoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed., trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’, trans. John P. Leavery, Jr., in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, trans. Joshua Wilner, rev. Thoamns Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Dutoit and Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
‘Tympan’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans., with additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).