milk jugs

Denver Art Museum

Here’s a great video from MOMA that I saw last year when K. Wats and I were at AWP NYC. Reminded me of a neat video installation I saw at the Denver Museum, but this one might take the cake:

Creative Criticism

In academia, as in the professional world, there is an understandable rift, a division between those who write creatively, and those who analyze critically.  At a university we categorize these into the Writing majors and English majors, or, those who write versus those who read.  This separation seems as natural a dichotomous relationship as producer/consumer, film director/film critic,  visual artist/ gallery frequenter, chef/diner.  Whereas one creates, the other tests the machinery, the bearings, the quality, and produces opinions as to its usefulness, its beauty, or its craft.  There seems to be the assumption, too, that while the writer dwells in the right hemisphere of the brain, given to fancies and intensely emotive dreams; the reader/critic remains cooly objective, inhabiting the rational left-brain, making analytical notations and rational observations.
But reducing these schools into two separate divisions: writer and critic, draws the assumption that these two do not exist simultaneously, cannot inhabit the same skull or body. One is either creative or analytical. Either a writer or a reader. Either subjective or objective.  We are using the correlative “either/or”, and overlooking the all powerful co-ordinating conjunction, “and”.  Here, in the speculative field of this written investigation,  we will combine the terms “critic”, or “analyst”, with the term “ creative writer” to form a new player in the field of literary criticism: the Creative Critic.
Because I consider myself a writer, one of those flighty, imaginative, groundless dreamers, I entered the realm of literary criticism with a cinching feeling of anxiety and foreboding.  Here we were, writers and burgeoning critics combined in an academic test tube (classroom), learning the finesse of literary criticism. Violent sounding terms like deconstruction, and the death of the author fly across tongues, we speak of suicidal poetry, Freudian desires to kill our predecessors. Freud speaks of the creative writer as a child, acting out fantasies and daydreams through the pen.  These often clinical ways of discussing literature can, to the author, seem at times quite blasphemous, and being in the classroom feels, at times, as though you’ve infiltrated the other party’s secret meetings. Like a skilled and impassioned seamstress who has stumbled into a room filled with people pulling threads apart from the seams to inspect the spacing of each stitch; discussing what it means that violet sleeves were sewn adjacent to a lavender bodice (“Were these two shades of purple a symbolic statement about the gradations of social injustice in Latin America?” ponders one. “No, no,” interjects another, “the seamstress clearly has repressed childhood memories of her purple bedroom and has subconsciously displaced this anxiety into the selection of her fabric palate, it’s brilliantly Freudian.”); debating which precise skirt-to-cardigan ratio produces the highest degree of aesthetic beauty; another group chimes in that the whole notion of the skirt is just a residual manifestation of the ideals of the dominant patriarchal social structure, total marxist propaganda. The seamstress is, understandably, perplexed. This is how her creation is judged, used and viewed?  This was not at all what she’d had in mind.
As the comparable the seamstress in the room, I began to wonder and to investigate how a critic might read literature differently than a creative writer, how they might read similarly, and how each might learn from the other. As a creative writer, it is absolutely eye-opening and, I believe ultimately helpful, to cross into the analytical spectrum and witness how literature is dissected after its birth. In workshops and peer reviews, fellow writers will critique and test the pliability of new work in similar ways, but the literary critic employs a broader and more penetrating analysis.  The writer can learn from this, asking him or herself how the work will be perceived, and noting where the critic is looking for meaning.  Knowing where the work will be judged and found wanting can help a writer become cognizant of these perceptions, and the writer may then choose to alter their forthcoming work accordingly (at the risk of selling out and losing his or her own voice in fear of prospective criticism, perhaps) or to simply listen in on the conversation the work inspires.
The critic, too, has much to learn from the writer. So often, the critic seems to have lost or forgotten his sense of exploration and wonder with the literary form.  Language in the raw and in all of its various arrangements in poetry, fiction, prose, even graffiti’d walls or instructional pamphlets carries all the possibility of the mind, it carries sound and rhythm like musical notation, it creates visual images, scenes, colors and texture like a painting, photograph or mosaic. How extraordinary for these unassuming letters, scratches of a pen or stamps of neat black ink on a clean page, to convey all five senses, and a mind’s worth of memories, they carry the power to build and destroy nations, friendships, to express any experience, emotion, to pass on information and record transaction.
And language, literature, does not exist behind a pane of glass, objects like vases to be scrutinized from a distance from different angles, but with that barrier between object and observer. As centuries of writers will attest, and as the many strings of intertextual works demonstrate, literature is constantly in conversation with itself, mutating through gradations of adaptation and translation of all different sorts. Herald Bloom spoke of this phenomenon in his essay “The Anxiety of Influence”, but as this text identifies the writer’s influence by other writers as a source of anxiety and unease, as a competitive one-upping of literary forefathers,  his interpretation of this is different from my own. I believe that reading other author’s work and engaging with it in thoughtful, meaningful ways––by writing in response to, writing through, reading with intentionality, using creative approaches to literary art––presents an opportunity to not only read in a more engaged and mindful way, but to also write, to join the conversation posed by the first authors and carry it forward.
Rather than viewing literature from behind the pane of metaphorical glass and reading from a purely analytical perspective, I propose that we, as writers and as connoisseurs, as literary critics, break the glass partition and touch the vase, turn it over and upside down, take the vase apart and lay the pieces before us to see the patterns they create on the tile, the beauty of their parts, and reassemble the pieces into something new: a bowl, maybe, or a mask, or a mosaic to be hung on living room walls.  The possibilities of the vase are limited only by the limitations of the mind and imagination.  But there is more to the exercise of disassembling the vase than making something new from the pieces. In taking apart the vase, we can also see how the vase was assembled in the first place. Computer technicians routinely build computers from scrap metal and take apart working machines as part of their education in learning how the object functions properly; bakers create pastries from the basal elements of flour, water, sugar, and the patron tastes only the warm, soft folds of dough, when all have been inextricably combined, and is able to tell nothing of the alchemy of baking.  In order to appreciate, or even fully understand that which we judge, it is helpful to gain respect and knowledge for the object or the process of creation. Some of the best NFL commentators are former players with an intimate knowledge of the experience on the field.  Some of the most interesting conversations about literature are being held among creative writers who are effective in part because they read as writers and as critics of their own and other’s work.
This proposal of a new way of engaging with imaginative work is not a suggestion to replace critical analysis, but as a way to supplement it. Of course there will always be judgment, declarative statements of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, of ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’, there will always be scholars ready to either kill the author or crown him master of the known universe. And these are useful voices, all deserving of attention, but also deserving of questioning and dissent. Why judge what you cannot create? Why not return a spirit of awe, playfulness and joy into the process of understanding and engaging with language? If we approach literary criticism with the understanding that its goal is to break into texts and withdraw meaning, or discover something about the author, the text itself, the reader, or society, let us also understand that the enigmatic nature of language can be handled and unfurled in new, creative, non-traditional ways.

reading backward/drawkcab gnidaer & Vanessa Place, La Medusa

La Medusa

Vanessa Place, fiction writer, poet, and co-founder of Les Figues Press from LA gave a reading in October, 2008, reading excerpts from her new mixed-genre novel, La Medusa. She wore all black and black hair and, I wrote later, is pretty much the fuckawesomest. And funny. When she laughs it sounds like she’s saying “yeah yeah yeah” back in her throat and it’s a real laugh, which is pretty wonderful. Conceptual artist=conceptual reading.  We, the audience, brought poems and readings that were “currently blowing our minds” and these exerpts were read inbetween the pages of La Medusa that she ripped from her copy of the book and handed to audience members to read aloud, “this way,” she said, “there will never be this exact same reading again.” Rare to find somebody (especially the successful artist type) so un-pretentious, so slightly ironic.  “Readings are awful. You all sit there, and I become the television, and I have no interest in becoming the television.”

She prefaced her reading of the very last page of the book: “Because it seems to be human nature to turn to the back page of a book first, before you even buy it, to see if you like it, I’ll begin by reading the last page of the novel. Backwards.”

Beautiful

am I.

Sentence the word the am I.
Beginning the in and end the in am I.
Dying in living and living in dying am I.
Other the am I. Others the.
Stars the
sees
she and
–– gone I’m,Casper I’m. Bomb the that’s––
says Lady our and, eyes her opens Feena and, onion peeled an as bright
pops moon the and tarwater as black
goes sky the and lift clouds the and something
for hard wishes and eyes her closes Feena, unexpectedly rain…

…why, Daddy why, we why…

…was it what recall don’t I though
,true it’s
significance some of something
said she, blue and pink wearing was she watching
was I, event any in, remember ally
-re don’t I, born was I day the, day this maybe, day one
try, her watched I though, true not that’s
,die mother my watched and Matthew murder to one that told I
light only and light in begat
am I
eyeless
the than terrible more nothing
is there and Narcissus and Medusa am I: confess I

At the end (or was it the beginning?) of the last, jarringly beautiful page of inverted, poetic text, Place paused. Took a breath. And read the same passage from beginning to end.  The contrast, the same words forming new images, inflections, connotations and meanings was startling.

I confess: I am Medusa and Narcissus and there is
nothing more terrible than the
eyeless
I am
begat in light and only light
I told that one to murder Matthew and watched my mother die,
that’s not true, though I watched her try,
one day, maybe this day, the day I as born, I don’t re-
ally remember, in any event, I was
watching she was wearing pink and blue, she said
something of significance
it’s true
though I don’t recall what it was…

…why we, why Daddy, why…

…tomorrow it’ll certainly
rain unexpectedly, Feena closes her eyes and wishes hard for
something and the clouds lift and the sky goes
black as tarwater and the moon pops
bright as a peeled onion, and Feena opens our eyes, and our Lady says
––That’s the bomb. I’m casper, I’m gone––
and she
sees
the stars.
The others. I am the others.
I am dying in living and living in dying.
I am in the end and in the beginning.
I am the word, the sentence.
I am

Beautiful.

There were two stories here. In fact, an entirely different narrative came alive in the first reading, and the way Vanessa read the words was poetic, halting and lovely as they caressed the unusual syntax, intermittently smoothing over and bumping the unfamiliar sounds of inverted lines, syntax. Meaning itself became peripheral and it became about the sounds of the words. There were moments of surprising clarity––combinations fantastically pleasing to the ear precisely because they were jarring, unexpected, because they fell outside predictable rhythms and conventions. At times it sounded like a different language.  The syntax becomes confused, nouns become verbs and the entire experience of being thrown from familiarity heightens the senses. Both reader and writer are aware in a new way.
Reading backward need not be only a frivolous aesthetic game, or simply a way to jolt the synapses. Juxtaposing the inverted reading with the straightforward reading demonstrates the impact each has on the other, and the effect of this contrast on the reader (and, similarly, on the writer acting as the reader of his or her own work). Hearing the words twice, in different combinations and inflections allows us to hear the variations in meaning, the implications of order and expectations (McGall, 10)
It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, in one of her undated journals,
“Did you ever read one of her poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have––a Something overtakes the Mind––” (prose fragment 30)
Dickinson describes an interaction with literature that speaks to the symbiotic relationship of the reader/critic and creator. She speaks of a physicality, a “plunge” that “overturned you” and of that “Something overtak[ing] the Mind.”
Creative interpretation or analysis need not necessarily be an act of writing a new text, but can also be achieved through intentional, involved and creative ways of reading. McGill and Samuels write, “Reading backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels.  When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results.” (8)  It is precisely this unpredictable result achieved through such procedures that make them invaluable in the reading of literature and poetry.  In unfamiliar territories, we are more acutely aware of our surroundings, the sensory input of the situation. Such deformative procedures bring the reader/critic into a more intense degree of engagement with a text. No longer is the reader a passive observer, hypnotically accepting the words and their meanings as given and immutable, but an active scientist who kicks the tires of poetic structure, testing its give. The reader becomes a child, fascinated and attentive.

Do we lose something in the vacuum of predictability? When reading, too, becomes habitual and routine, we are swept in the centrifugal force of that which is expected, our eyes glaze over words, knowing and anticipating that adjective follows verb follows noun. Beginning, then middle, then end. There are patterns. We have spent a great deal of our lives mastering these patterns. So why shrug off linearity and safe predictability by learning new ways of reading? Why experiment with reading backwards, or vertically, from the middle out, reading only nouns or ignoring all but words beginning with vowels?
There is something akin to the child’s wonder at learning to read for the first time, the strain of combining words and discovering context and reason, in this exercise. Re-wire the synapses. If you’ve mastered the bicycle, take off a wheel. Write with your non-dominant hand. Draw faces in the mirror, or with your eyes closed. Walk backward on the path you know best; from your bed, to the desk, to the bathroom, to the office.  Hang pictures upside down and watch the landscapes evolve.
“Poems lose their vital force when they succumb to familiarization,” write McGann and Samuels, and is this, backward reading, not a strategy of estrangement? Read as though you’re learning a language for the first time, where each word is handled carefully, considered important. This is a performative exercise, but also an intellectual one. What would we learn if we turned the world or the word upside down? Down upside word, the or world, the turned we, if learn we would. What?

La Medusa is my ongoing “escape the world” book at the moment, the pre-falling asleep book, the sit-in-the-tub-and-read book, the book I won’t smoke a cigarette without, the one I’m savoring (it’s fragmented screenplay-esque quality lends itself to small portions.), the one I cannot stop underlining.  I’ll refrain from a full-out review (of sorts) until I’ve finished it, but urge you to pick it up and devour.

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/excerpt.htm

http://fc2.org/place/medusa/medusa.htm

also, les figues press   http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/index.php

Unfolding the Cranes

2-D vs 3-D

Three views of the paper crane align vertically down the page, each photograph providing a different angle of the letters written neatly upon the creature’s paper skin.  Nowhere else in the book does the poet reveal the pattern of the lettering, nowhere does she decrypt or decode the bird’s poem.  When giving the pages a perfunctory glance or flipping through, the origami seems  an anomaly; three pages of shapes, folded animals stuck in the centerfolds of a conglomeration of words. Most readers may glance at the pictures, think something to themselves either about the poet’s ingenuity or craft, then will continue turning the page.
Oni Buchanan is a poet and author of two books of poetry: What Animal (2003) and Spring(2007). I met her at her poetry reading and class at Bucknell University . She spoke about her art:

Class: The origami pictures were pretty
Poet: They are poems
Class: But how can you read them?
Poet: What would you have to do to read them?
Class: (silence) I guess you’d have to unfold them
Poet: Right. And how are you going to unfold them?
Class: (silence) Would you make the origami yourself?
Poet: Right! Yes! And then?
Class: Write the letters on the bird the way it shows in the pictures?
Poet: Right! And then?
Class: And then you’d unfold it and read the poem
Poet: Exactly! My point with the origami poems was, in part, that as a reader, you only get a limited part of the poem, only the surface level of any text is available if you don’t engage with it, turn it over and touch it.  You have to be curious enough about the poems to take the effort to physically make the shape, copy down the writing, unfold it and read it.  But once you do that, it’s like you’ve found your own secret little hidden poem. It’s almost like you wrote it yourself, but in a language you didn’t quite understand until you’d finished.  Art is supposed to be interacted with, touched, poked, folded…sometimes you have to get in and do it yourself or it won’t make any sense at all.

I went home that night, folded paper cranes and wrote the the fragmented letters and words with pen upon the paper wings and neck.
I opened the bird’s folds.

=  no don’t let them
run away they won’t
survive on their own
for the world is
cruel and objective
unswayed by
innocence by sweet noises
and softness
the thing with teeth
comes is hungry
and tears to shreds
the soft, folded ears
the vulnerable belly

(Poem by Oni  Buchanan)

Oni Buchanan’s origami poetry strikes me as a beautiful, poignant metaphor for just the type of enigmatic quality literature possesses, and the reader’s attention and curiosity that it requires. Sometimes, often, even, there are worlds beneath, between and within the folds of text that are available only to those who devote the time to question the birds on the page, to wonder what they hold, and to physically fold the paper, write the words, and unfold them to find poetry.  This is the reader’s responsibility, part of the dialogue between author, text, and the active reader.
Looking at the context of the book as a whole, this poetic experiment is not surprising, nor is it incongruous with the work Oni Buchanan sets out to explore. She is fascinated with the playful nature of language, with its hidden facets, she invents games and verbal codes, extending the challenge to break patterns, find connections, and interact with language in creative, innovative ways to her readers. For this writer, poems are akin to chemical reactions, in that each element is deeply dependent upon those that act upon it. In a lab, as in a poem, an experiment may culminate in an explosion, a noxious gas, or an alchemist’s precious metal.

Oni Buchanan’s poetry is often both conceptually and literally interactive.  Attentive, curious readers are rewarded for taking initiative and breaking the code.  In a series of poems titled “The Mandrake Vehicles”, the poet worked from source texts, finding resources detailing characteristics, facts and folk lore about the mandrake root and created from them blocks of prose compiled of images, phrases and ideas about the root. Through seven stages of deconstruction, Buchanan plucks the “heavier” letters from the lines, leaving the “lighter ones to float as the discarded letters drop as residue to the bottom of the page. The remaining letters push together and form a poem. The process repeats, and by the seventh step, the poet has revealed to herself and to her readers to secret poems that existed within the block of prose from the very beginning––the surrounding field of language needed only to be excavated before the poems could emerge and speak.
Here is another example of Buchanan’s affinity for revealing that which appears to be hidden. She finds poetry within the folds of a bird, a frog, a cube, and within blocks of prose. The Mandrake Vehicles are another beautiful demonstration of deformative and performative operations; a testament to the hidden things one can create, unfold and extract, like a silver string from a scarf.

Poet: The best part, for me, about The Mandrake Vehicles is that there are an infinite number of undiscovered poems hidden in these texts that I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe I never will, but you could. There’s a potential poem embedded in everything you read!

The link to the interactive website featuring The Mandrake Vehicles is:
http://www.conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html

books align the cold

the best kind of mail today–Melissa, a dear, bright, really gifted and SMART classmate of mine have been trading poems and writings over the break. I received a drawn-all-over manilla envelope from her that held my poems that she’d written all over, and also three more versions of the poem, from where she’d chopped up the poem and rearranged the words to make new, interesting versions, combinations, things I wish I’d thought of in the first place. Poetry in conversation=the best kind? Collaboration= something i’m interested in pursuing more of, with wonderful people/writers like melissa, liz, kathryn. Poetry in response to, writing toward, through, away from, in contrast to.

cutting up/collaging poems=something i should do more of.

Excited about books to be read over this next semester. Excited about books in general.

vunderbar booklists for poetry-filled semester.

One Way No Exit  byG.C. Waldrep

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Perfect Paperback) by Michael Theune

Quarantine
by Brian Henry

The Cosmopolitan (Paperback)
by Donna Stonecipher (Author)

Revolver (Kuhl House Poets) (Paperback)
by Robyn Schiff

Famous Last Words (Paperback)
by Catherine Pierce

Garbage: A Poem (Paperback)
by A. R. Ammons

The End of Beauty (American Poetry Series) (Paperback)
by Jorie Graham

The Beginner (Paperback)
by Lyn Hejinian

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence (Paperback)
by Jay Wright

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (New California Poetry) (Paperback)
by Juliana Spahr

The Mooring Of Starting Out (Paperback)
by John Ashbery

More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Paperback)
by George Lakoff

and that’s only 2 out of 3 classes! All are ordered, over $200 spent, but I am adding to that bookshelf that I envision will one day cover all my bedroom/living room/study/bathroom walls. Walls=books, that is my dream. It’s coming along quite nicely.