October 2023 - Big Bang Poetry

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

We’ve still some things to catch up on since I had to divert my attention to moving all my websites earlier this year. I kept on reading and now I have a big stack of books to review, so big that I had to divey them up into a traditional poetry stack and an experimental stack.

I’ll start with the experimental ones, because even that stack had sub-stacks: the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t. Sometimes I think I have a love-hate relationship with experimental poetry. If the experiment seems generous and comprehensible, I tend to really love it and it inspires me to try similar things: like strike-out experiments, experiments with bilingualism, footnote experiments, poems working side-by-side itself on the page.

However, if the experiments seem solipsistic or just an extension of the meaning-making experiments of parataxis or repeats of 100-year-old strategies modernism, I get annoyed.

Meaning-making is clugey, we get it. It’s hardly following Ezra Pound’s adage to “make it new.” Not that we have to keep up that death-march anyway.

But in any case, this all seems very subjective. Experiments I like fall flat with others.

Yield Architecture by Jake Syersak falls into the later category for me. The book itself is beautiful, which is why I picked it up at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year. But I didn’t even finish it. And there are only a handful of poetry books I can say that about. I can usually stick it out (or skim it out).

This book is described as “an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality” which sounds like part of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. experiments again. There are four sections with names like “Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust” that seems mostly juxtipositional sound experiments, like one called “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself” which contains this untitled snippet:

architecture
              dear architecture,

to begin, I’ve written two-words side-by-side on yellow-lined
              notebook paper:

violet: violence

as a way of testing the bruises a colloseum’s pillars bury into a
              hillside, how the grass gathers around it

(what anchors me in all this?—alarms of nausea, nausea the likes of
              which can only be described as: nausea describes

For example: I wonder, how calmly your waters hold a swan’s gristle

And there’s much more like this going on for 81 pages but we’re done.

Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut was also beautifully printed and does follow a thin kind of sensical narrative but the poems still didn’t quite connect for me.

From “Pedagogy” first stanzas:

He wants to be a teacher, but what
to teach when the world is a tiger,

when even walking out to sneak a smoke
is met by a town where someone

behind a mailbox whips batteries
or unsuspecting afternoon walkers,

The poem “Ghost Does”

Sky ghost prepares lightning.
Electricity ghost is acid on steel.
Thunder ghost speaks to tree ghost.
Tree ghost is you.
Foundation ghost stretches, contracts.
Wind ghost inhales.
Blanket ghost is bandaging.
Slate ghost marks in chalk.
Bone ghost is an echo.
Moon ghost is moon.
Sun ghost is moon ghost.
I am moon ghost.
Branch ghost is arm as body.
Rain ghost is a footprint on cement.
Leaf ghost lifts eyeline.
Tree ghost is waiting.
Tree ghost awaits.
Tree ghost is you.
I am tree ghost.
Tree ghost is moon ghost.
We hide, appear.

More excerpts: https://www.hypertextmag.com/excerpt-robert-kruts-watch-me-trick-ghosts/

Some people still really enjoy these things of almost-meanings. I remember my friend Laura and I used to write these almost-sensical poems in the third grade when we were trying to feel our way into language and didn’t have any real meanings to work with yet. They weren’t quite poems, but wordiness we would put in clouds, like thought clouds but they were really like simulacrums of what we imagined sounding deep and thoughtful writings would be (without any actual deep thoughts because we were eight).

But, at the end of the day, I do support any kind of poet lab/pure experiments no matter whether I can find a practical use for their ideas or not. Everyone is on their own path.

Janet Kaplan’s Ecotones (given to me as a gift in NYC this year for my birthday), is about half-and-half successful for me. There are three sections called Plasma, Chronicles and Technopastoral. Plasma used collages with quotes to make very faint points. Her concern with the vocabulary and typography of technology inspired me to think more about technology poems, especially the connective tissue of communicating in code. I really liked the Chronicles section where there seemed to be more of a person writing there. Technopastoral contained various spatial experiments.

And I think this book helped to clarify for me what it is I’m looking for in experiments, not too much abstraction and intellectualism at the expense of finding a breathing, feeling person somewhere in there living a life. This kind of personhood has been so lacking in experimental poetries (especially but not exclusively the digital ones).

I did love the word pictures in You Would Say That by Robin Tomens, which I received for entering a contest last year. These are completely typographical experiments, literally using words as a visual medium, (which I would usually just classify as visual art), but Tomens does something extra to give a snippet here or there meaning, and so we felt a person was coming through. Some poems were commentary on the process of thinking but not so much that they didn’t strike me as still touching, maybe due to the way they were drawn into the typographical art.

Samples of the text from the pieces:

POETIC GLAMOUR IS NO LONGER WHAT COUNTS MOST
BUT THE INTRINSIC INTERST IN THE THOUGHT

~~~

A KNOWS HE IS NOT READING, AND HAS A
SENSE OF JUST THIS WHILE PRETENDING
TO READ

~~~

IF SOMEONE COULD SEE THE MENTAL PROCESS OF
EXPECTATION

~~~

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

Some images from the book:

James Thomas Stevens’ The Golden Book was a take on the intersection of grammar and love poems, an experiment I was doing myself last year. Stevens’ poems seemed to be so personal, however, as to be almost cryptic.

Based on David Lambuth’s The Golden Book on Writing, a writing guide from 1923, these poems shared titles like The Paragraph, The Sentence, Words, Punctuation.

The opening poem called “A Warning”

Isn’t every
encounter a cross
to bear,
a cultural one?

The small battles.
The volleys.
The flag raisings.

They poems are pretty far removed from their source material, which seems more like a jumping-off point than any attempt to address the rules of writing directly. One I really liked was called “Set Up Sign-Posts” which is an adage of writing any kind of persuasive thesis paper.

Point to your beloved.
Remind him of his progress.
At the end tell him that
you have arrived – and see
that he understand it.

Don’t have him turning over the sheets and
saying with a start: “Oh, that’s all there was to it.

From “Know Where You Are Going”

Know which He you are writing of:

He, the pianist carpenter, or
He, the poet violinist.

In like lions, out like lambs.

I also liked a poem called “Simple Words for Big Ideas” which it hard to even summarize but a poem that covers sex, language and colonization.

Personal story, I worked with Stevens when I was a faculty secretary at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe back in 2013-14. There was tension there between the dean and both the art and writing faculty around who got access to the copier (and me), all which made some of the teachers a bit grouchy. Stevens was initially very grouchy about this and I remember some chastising he gave me for taking over the copier for one of the Dean’s projects. Stevens had an exceptionally messy office. I told him his office was itself a Language poem. But I really liked his poems and he became less grouchy (as did the other faculty) as the semester went on (and I learned to make copies after the faculty left for the day).

More excerpts from the book: https://courtgreen.net/issue-14/james-thomas-stevens

A few weeks ago I picked up the $30 Anne Carson book Float from the local library. It comes in a plastic box and has about 27 loose booklets and front matter pieces inside. They were all disorganized and in disarray.

It was very satisfying to my Skittles-organizing mind to sort all the front matter out. The little booklets could be read in any order although there was a Table of Contents. “Reading can be freefall” the title page claims.

I used the same reading strategy as when our book blub read The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was to read the smallest booklets first, working up to the longest ones. It’s the low-hanging-fruit of reading strategies. The book was like the detritus of Anne Carson’s writing drawer, stuff too small to put anywhere else, culled together to Float in one package. It was only loosely cohesive and again connections depended upon the principle of parataxis, random connections of proximity.

There were ordered lists, long poems, poem sets, theatrical scripts and essays. The booklets kept slipping out of the plastic container all over the floor.

Understandably the book had less cohesion than other Anne Carson collections and I can’t say this was my favorite “book” of hers but it did inspire me to try a few things. I loved “Maintenance,” “Eras of Yves Klein” and “Merce Sonnet,” “Reticent Sonnet” and “Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (In Prose)” from the booklet called “Possessive Used as Drink (Me), A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets.” A few of the essay pieces even inspired me to create an Essay poem and there will be a Cheras poem one day, no doubt.

My favorite experimental book this year was from Unincorporated Territory [guma] by Craig Santos Perez. I picked up this book at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), the museum extension of IAIA, along with the Stevens book.

This is a book about the status of Guam as part of and not part of the United States and how its citizens can feel diaspora even while living in their own place, beyond what even some post-colonized aboriginal groups might feel due to continued militarization. It’s colonization in real time and the book explores what it means to “be home” when the definition of your country is changing. Perez weaves in document-speak and impact statements into a kind of meaning collage. The poems are too difficult to type out so here are some images of my favorite pieces:

The first poem, from the legends of juan malo [a malologue]: