Poems and Prayers

Maybe.


I used to pray to Jesus and the Father and the Holy Ghost. Always surrounded by stuffed animals, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in no voice at all, sometimes with eyes closed, sometimes with eyes open and focused beyond the white paint on my ceiling; I'd pray almost every night. But, when I ceased to believe in a personal god, I ceased to pray. It's not that I believed god actually answered letters, but I believed he read and filed them, and that these files of heaven were of some inconceivable importance, and those beliefs eventually went up in smoke. And though I still pray from time to time, it's more conscious and therefore not the same.


I used to write poems almost every day, but I don't any more, and it may also be related to belief. It's true I don't place much faith in an audience, that I don't particularly like or respect poetry's readership. But, I think my belief in The Poets has taken a harder hit than my belief in The Audience. It's very difficult to mythologize The Poets (and all historical figures for that matter) these days when Charles Bernstein has a facebook account and Eileen Myles leaves embarrassing comments on stupid blogs and I see dozens of badly-snapped unflattering photos of whatever contemporary figures are in whatever pinchbeck pantheon. I resurrect God so I can thank Him that Creeley died before he could start a twitter account.

Exposure is bad for immortality. A myth can only exist, grow, thrive -- in the shadows --like many fungi. If William Blake were alive today, getting his picture taken by amateurs with digi cameras at some book signing, sleazily chatting up some pretty grad student . . . well, there would be no William Blake.

I have no reason to believe venerated poets of the past would have behaved any differently from how the best minds of my generation behave on the internet today. I'm more and more convinced literature is the product of a time and not a personality. That if the great poets were alive today they'd suck as bad as we do. And though there has been tremendous change since life a century ago, even greater is the change in how the past gets transmitted -- the volume of shit that documents our flaws and mistakes and vulgarity -- that attests how non-unique we all really are. That what looks like gold in the shadows of the past would look like a bolus of squill in the lights of today.

But this is good to know, in the end. Disappointing at first, but still leaves me something to aspire to -- not a personality but a time that can mold a personality. Or simply a time other than our own. To work the culture so the culture can form people better than me, or at least different from me, in times to come. But is poetry an effective way to work the culture, even on a small scale? the doubt erodes my poetic zeal.

But then I don't use the internet for a few days, and I'm filled with the enthusiasm of the newly converted all over again.


I'm posting this to prove my point.

Faceless Shakespeare

Reading the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses, I'm reminded how when characterizing a business man, I borrowed from the vocabulary of Shakespeare's critics. Myriad-minded, 'everyone & no-one,' negative capability, and so on.

The Business man as a ghostly thief of a man, who enters and leaves the minds of others through whatever unlocked aperture available. A kind of angelic 'Bob.'

I write this in connection with my brief analysis of The New Canon and my recommendation that an author be first and foremost a salesman of words not only for the author's stake, but for the interest of future readers, which is called 'literature.'

Shakespeare employed his pen, economically speaking. The same bloviators who invoke mythic Proteus and kabbalistic Ominform to describe its multiplicity dismiss with bile a businessman's enterprising multiplicity. The one is mysterious, awesome, empathic. The other: shady, trite, avaricious.

Make it new, make it sell.

Tiger Tiger Tiger: America, a prophecy

realized I didn't need to change a word.

. . .

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night :
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears :
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night :
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Usher beat Ghostface to it

If I had to place a bet on what mainstream musician would be the first to popularize men getting sexed by a dom with a strap-on dong in a song, I'd go all in on Ghost. I mean what other wally champ bigs up Sponge Bob Pants, raps about bed-wetting, holds high his cuckold horns for the world to see, gets all nostalgic for being whipped with a belt, and admits to men how much he loves them on every album?

But Ghost was a little slow here. And Usher comes through with a new single that does for sub-males what Sir-mix-a-lot did for thick women. I salute his courage. I read Labryinth of Solitude, I know the stigma attached to male submissive behavior in urban and latino culture-- in all western culture since the end of the Golden Age -- so much applause goes the way of Good Mr. Raymond IV.

btw the link above can be slow, so the song can also be found on his myspace page. It's called "Trading Places."

My new invention

Market volumes are really, really low today . . .

. . .

She has long legs but waddles with shuffle steps.
Packed trains turn most beauties ridiculous.
I taped two chapsticks together: one for my upper lip
One for my lower lip. I pull it out of my pocket,
And am the envy of all.
When I apply my bilabial ointment, I try not to flaunt it
I’m no show off. Perhaps as I pucker
I do look a bit the aristocrat, beaming class, stealing glances --
Unostentacious --at admirers' faces. Two smart strokes: right to left
Left to right, the envy of all.

Sure, if you have one lip, the classic black chapstick is dapper -- perfect.
No need to conjoin the two caps with a paperclip
To serve as both vincule and handle, practical and delicate
Perfect for tea-time style pinching with pinky extended, not too big, not too small.

Feel free, people -- really -- to steal the idea -- please -- it’s not just for me . . .
For the whole city. I don’t need you exerting your mouth like a cow
As you attempt the impossible, like a one legged man kicking --
Chapstick in your fist, fumbling about your lips, trying to jam one onto two. I mean, wow.
Double up! And if I were you I’d do it now -- before it’s too popular.
And! you can even fasten a chain, or a string, and drape the pair over your neck
Like a cute little baby binoculars.

Couples Culture

Those who use blogs as pulpits always come away looking pathetic. Fancying themselves “voices in the wilderness” who know better than the rest of us, they make a small, sad spectacle of their own inadequacy like a live-streaming, impotent porn star. So it is with the utmost remorse that I ascend onto the soapbox, like a shaking drunk to the town-hall lectern after everyone has vacated.

I am compelled by pure desperation to alternately shout and mutter about what I ALONE know to be the poison of our society, Couples Culture. In brief, Couples Culture is the fixation on human pairing, and the simplistic, Manichean, enslaving, blind, binary notion that that human couple is the basic unit of society. As a result, people do things as pairs that are much more advantageously done as a group: things like sex, ice-skating, movie-going, co-habitating, talking on the telephone, and so on.

Couples Culture breeds enmity among the populace. Friendship is its antithesis. Everyone outside of the couple becomes a threat to wedge the precious pair apart from within, or to pluck them apart from without. The “togetherness” which is ostensibly the lifeblood of the culture is an barricaded, provincial one based exclusion. In reality it precludes true unity of a more public and constructive kind, the kind of which the Greek golden age, the Italian renaissance, and American modernism were made. (The United States Constitution is the achievement of dozens of men who would not go home to their wives.) And to speak personally, I soon learned that in my industry, bachelors (and bachelorettes) are explicitly prized. It’s no exaggeration to say that financial firms’ proper and profitable functioning depends upon unattached workers who have better things to do than go home and share a casserole while debating what compromise of a movie to tack onto the netflicks queue.

While singles keep the economy afloat, spend late nights in the lab curing diseases, and invent computers; while Montparnasse cenacles re-invent art and wu-tang clans reinvent music; what has Couples Culture produced? What literary movements, what political models, what music bands? The White Stripes won’t last and they divorced right before they made it big anyway. It’s fitting that the greatest contribution CC ever made to civilization was the Curies’ discovery of radioactivity -- the atomic process of decay, division, and disintegration.

And I will not even mention how consumer culture is built upon couples culture. How South Africa and Brazil are ruined to mine diamonds to consecrate The Couple (a kind of dark welding symbolized by a hard stone which imprisons light -- for once the ring is on, no more love may enter) I will not mention all the consumer holidays which simultaneously celebrate and exploit a culture where celebration IS exploitation and vice versa.


Turning our attention to what I will mention, from the polis to the individual, CC is syphilis to the citizen's intellect. The choice of an exclusive partner is the epitome of dualistic either-or thinking, and requires all phenomena to be ranked as better or worse, rather than appreciated for unique qualities. If we were permitted to love more than one, in heretical violation of CC, then we would find ourselves open to whole other worlds of possibility, and not only in the sphere of love. But as it is, we must say to ourselves: this is the one, and there is no other. Though we’re finally becoming conscious of pernicious historical and psychological consequences of judeo-christian monotheism, Couples Culture has escaped criticism because it is so deeply ingrained in our lives it goes unnoticed as air.

It's so sweetly baneful because of that invisibility. Spend a day culling American main-stream for examples of an alternative, and come dusk your basket will still be empty. Almost. The great 1990’s situation comedy “Full House” was our Joan of Arc, a great but unconsummated hope. The movie “Three Men and a Baby” is perhaps the most significant film of our era, but its true value goes unappreciated and it is instead applauded for its "cuteness". “Three Men and a Little Lady” is also great, but less so, for it only explores the same territory.

You may say to me, Do you deny the existence of happy couples? I will respond No, but there were some happy Nazis too. I know how to win an argument. But I will also say that their happiness is pinchbeck and selfish, and that it’s no coincidence couples regularly find themselves “in a family way.” The tedium of the human binary is so excruciating that they resort to child-having, and a birth is uniformly received as a blessing, even if the child is not attractive, displays no aptitude for math, etc.

Curator of fear, Destroyer of old friendships, Protector of heirarchy, and Founder of radioactivity, Couples Culture is an enemy against which I am powerless. I have tried and failed to chip away. So let me bang away at the podium, slobbering my speech, red-faced with booze on my breath, another loser -- but a loser in the battle for good.

from Harrigans

. . .



The future canon will be based upon book sales. Questions like “how and why did so-and-so sell so many books” will take prominence in the classroom.

Scholars will seek ways to quantify other characteristics of literature, but until they succeed, 'book sales' will determine focus. Even if and when someone succeeds at measuring something like the “beauty” of work, those measurements will go on to impact book sales, which means that ‘copies sold’ is likely to remain the determining criterion of canonical merit.

A sizable minority of writers will continue to judge themselves by other, unquantifiable standards. They will continue inveterate pursuits and initiate novel chases wherein they employ language to achieve what have you. However, compared to the main race, these lesser races will attract fewer and fewer competitors. Less competition will mean less development. Within this alternative sector, progress will be slow and results diluted, not only because of fewer entrants into their so-called race, but because of the non-quantifiable definition of their object(s). Some will agree on a general goal, like “beauty,” but disagree as to the definition of its exact nature. Others will seek disparate goals altogether. Consequently, the alternative race will deliquesce into countless little races -- many no race at all, for one horse does not a race make.

However, inasmuch as alternative writers remain united by an opposition to quantifiable standards of literature -- namely 'book sales' -- as the determinant of reputation and canonical merit, their competition will yield some significant results. There will also be the achievements of the occasional and exceptional “lone wolf” to consider. But bear in mind that even if a lone wolf eschews the pack completely, it will still rely heavily on its own genetic code; and, the code will suffer from the lack of competition in the recent past even if its bearer is immune from the competitive circumstance of the moment.

And, regardless of these forces, some alternative writers (many under the protection of a traditionally significant genre -- like poetry) will likely to enter into the canon, much as collegiate women players enter the Basketball Hall of Fame.


In contrast, the competition will only intensify among writers engineering language to achieve market impact; and, out of a fiercer arms race will come fiercer arms. The spectacular achievements borne of this competition will attract yet more attention from scholars, will further solidify ‘book sales’ as the primary characteristic by which literature should be valued, which in turn will sway yet more writers to enter the main race, and so on, until the inevitable exhaustion. The best-sellers will be the "Michael Jordans" of the Hall.


In summary, the study and appreciation of literature will not be exempt from two trends in evidence for all other sectors of human endeavor. Trend one is to better understand the world by relying more heavily on quantitative methods and statistical analysis. This trend reflects the rising role of the quantifiable in our personal value systems. Such quantity-informed value systems were once labeled --pejoratively -- as “materialistic,” but are increasingly called “non-ideological,” a label that has positive connotations. The change in nomenclature hints that such a value system is still in ascent.

Trend two, which likewise cuts across academic and non-academic sectors, is to emphasize a larger structure when analyzing a cultural phenomenon. A book will not be studied so much in and of itself -- whatever that means -- but as an interaction with and a document of a culture as a whole. To study books will increasingly mean to study culture through books, and future scholars will naturally zero in on those books which sell the most copies.

Finally, the present rate (likely only to increase) at which raw linguistic data is generated means that scholars will not have much choice in these matters. In an era where every email and social networking update is archived, scholars will find themsleves in need of increasingly specific material criteria upon which to direct their searches through the infinitudes of words. Everything is now preserved regardless of “quality”, and old notions of longevity are obsolete. In the past, words were preserved according to a trait such as “literary value” which was in fact nothing but an evaluation by an institution which preserved literature, be it a church, a university, or a publishing house. Now, it is not what gets preserved, but what gets read, and what got read will determine what gets preserved in future university canons -- so insists “anthropological interest.”

This is not so much a prediction as an extrapolation of current trends.