Selected Criticism, Jeffery Jullich
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Selected Criticism Jeffrey Jullich Publishing the Unpublishable 017 ©2007 /ubu editions Series Editor: Kenneth Goldsmith /ubu editions www.ubu.com 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Aaron Shurin: The Paradise of Forms 5 Standard Schaefer: Nova 9 Leslie Scalapino: New Time 12 Cole Swensen: Try 15 Susan Howe / Susan Bee: Bed Hangings I 17 Graham Foust: As in Every Deafness 24 Rae Armantrout: Up to Speed 25 Michael Scharf: Verité 26 Drew Gardner: Sugar Pill 29 SELECTED BUFFALO POETICS LISTSERV POSTS Class and poetry 39 Lyn Hejinian's 'deen' 41 D=E=E=N 42 A Barnard report: Hannah Weiner 45 Spaced-out 47 Questions on a HOW TO value 49 Submission crucible 52 $3.50 Summer vacation in Scandinavia 54 Alternative 56 Farm implements and rutabagas in a landscape 58 Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown 60 Cut-ups and homosexualization of the New York School (I) 63 Cut-ups and homosexualization of the New York School (II) 65 Simon Perchik 67 Marilyn Monroe - the Emma Lazarus of her day 69 classical meter in contemporary "free verse" poetry Meter Anthology Cola 70 New Formalist Language Poetry 72 Language Prosody - ex. 2: Dochmiacs 74 Language Prosody - ex. 3: hypodochmiacs in Susan Howe's Pierce Arrow 76 Language Prosody - ex. 4: adonics 78 Language Prosody - ex. 5: H.D., Helen in Egypt 85 Timothy McVeigh's face 89 Hannah Weiner's hallucinations and schizophrenia in poetry Hannah's visions 93 Hannah's visions - Barrett Watten's 'Autobiography Simplex' 95 Hannah's visions 99 eulogy for Tove Janesson (Finnish author of the Mummintroll books) 103 3 creative writing pedagogy 104 Sylvia Plath's suicide 106 if Sylvia Plath were alive today 107 innovative language magazines 108 Kenning, the literary journal: "young and 'post-Language'" 109 re: 'Why I was a bad poet' 113 Fence/Housing Works Literary Magazine Benefit 117 The 'great' John Ashbery forgery scandal HOAX: The fake Ashbery/Debrot interview on Read.me 123 read.me deceives on-line bibliographer 124 Debrot virus spreading: answer to an old "Knock knock" joke 125 Jacques and John 128 NEXT: The identity of Yasusada to be revealed! 130 Chinese-English translation 132 are you still alive? 133 the John Miller television report on Osama Bin Laden 135 Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the Twin Towers 143 Truth Has Been Suspended. Indefinitely 146 anthrax and the Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ 08852 150 Harpo's index 152 Virus 156 New Poet: Matty Stepanek 160 New Poet: Values 163 Merbery/Ashrill 2002 167 Craig Dworkin 170 Rachel Back's new book on Susan Howe 176 How to Read Susan Howe 177 Loss Pequeno Glazier's Digital Poetics 184 Working Class Poetry and the Myth of Revolution 188 "a volume of absolutely comparable worth" 191 Theory death What is 'pure zero drive'? (Zombie avant-garde) 195 Who is Sil-Vara? 197 Why poets should read only cereal boxtops (I) 201 Why poets should read only cereal boxtops (II) ` 204 The High Road of Art 206 The Huysmansization of Prose 208 Close reading close readings 213 Review a small press book this year and hang around 216 Of late on the blog 219 Post-election day blues 222 4 Daniel Davidson's Culture Why Daniel Davidson's Culture is not political poetry 226 Addendum on 'absorption' 237 my dog ate the first 17 pages in my copy of Daniel Davidson's Culture 238 'good'/'bad' poetry 243 To blog or not to blog 200 2463 Poetry and reading levels 249 5 Aaron Shurin: The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems In his introduction to the ground-breaking Language Poetry anthology In the American Tree, editor Ron Silliman names the names of the many excluded from the anthology ("A volume of absolutely comparable worth could be constructed"), a long list of those omitted which includes: Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Gerrit Lansing, Douglas Messerli, Leland Hickman, Dennis Cooper, Tim Dlugos, and Aaron Shurin. All gay men. In accordance with the "hermeneutic of suspicion", and in the spirit of gay paranoia (my own), it might be worth asking, these thirteen years after that defining "moment in writing", whether the exclusion of gay males was only seemingly systematic, or if there was some intrinsic feature to their writing, if not their life styles, that warranted exclusion. Characteristic features of the then new "Language Poetry" which Silliman identifies were: a preference for text over speech; non-referentiality, or an abjurance of normative syntax; and a non-ego/persona-based psychology. One might ask whether an innovative poetry that is also gay poetry could be written absent of ego psychology, since so-called identity politics, rooted in the ego of real self, is a necessary determinant of being gay; and, similarly, whether a (gay) community with only the rudiments of an indigenous literature (however prolific those titles may or may not have been by 1986) has an identifying corpus to call upon besides speech or the "oral tradition" of its street life, even by way of resistance. Aaron Shurin, whose career since 1980 is revisited in a Selected Poems, The Paradise of Forms, has spent those two decades in part negotiating between the possibilities of a gay "experimental" poetry and the strictures of a sort of "Language Poetry", inasmuch as he, more than some of the other poets mentioned, maintained a stronger allegiance to the aesthetic of a non-normative or disjunctive syntax. That dialectic has both motivated his writing, and incidentally converted it into a critique of "Language poetries", malgre lui. The tension at times has taken his poetry into an outer fringe where the asyntactical meets convention (love poetry), and at other moments surrendered it to a now-you-see-it/now- you-don’t erotica. Leonard Schwarz’s introduction to his own as it were "anti"-Language Poetry anthology, Primary Trouble, has identified pleasure as a theme omitted by the occasionally Spartan agitprop of that indispensably significant movement: "To call it a new eroticism would also be reductive, but surely this poetry has an ample category for pleasure, a category absent . in language poetry: this poetry sees sexuality as a crucial nexus between the body and the world" (p. 3). And Shurin rarely scrimps on an unashamed indulgence in pleasure — "submission, the rapture of falling", "the mouth makes me fainting from exultation and relief", "from the birth of deliciousness, plant of you", "I marveled about the ecstasy music could create in me" — a sense of excess that often runs overboard (saccharine?) onto the palate — "yet sweet and deep, figures of delight drawn after you", "the sweet smell of psyche", "many other ferocious sweet things". He is compelled by this sub-plot of his to keep the verse open to beauty, if only a fleeting glance of beauty 6 inter-cut with a montage of other elements. And sometimes, since modernism is too expressionistic and post-modernism too ironic to look on beauty bare, that means recourse to a hothouse language of florid sentimentality ("shower of petals", "they rain down their multi-foliate petals"). He dares, for example, to re-admit into his mix of tropes that quintessentially poetical of symbols, the rose itself — "and for a rose a picture of the smell of a rose", "the itchy green that hugs the yellow rose petal", "the cattle are feeding off drowned roses", "her open mouth released her beside the malodorous roses" — but none of them are red. The construction of a language suited to desire and eros forces a motion one step forward, three steps backward, in the age of Desiring Machines, since our contemporary scene runs short on any authentic canzone d’amore: with love poetry, there is a continual, necessary retrieval and rehabilitation of earlier poetries; and Shurin carries out that transhistorical pillage-work not by anachronism, but through occasional echoes, allusion or parody, and by mining the dominant genres that now legislate desire. As early as his second book, he calls up a Shakespeare whom he has more recently returned to in his Involuntary Lyrics, with innuendo. Shurin: "there the tantrum throws go I"; Shakespeare: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I". Elsewhere in the same book, The Graces, it is "The Jabberwocky": "the jaws that ache, the ache that claws, the claws that grab", as if struggling to retrieve from faulty memory how the poem actually goes ("the jaws that bite, the claws that catch"). And sometimes it is the simpler form of pun, as in his "rasp of medusa", from the title of Gericault’s painting, "The Raft of the Medusa" (a painting, to be sure, with more than its share of bare male back muscle and frontal nudity, doubly meaningful in its masses condemned to shipwreck during our age of AIDS). This device, one that Shurin soon enough abandons with a healthy nonchalance, nonetheless underscores an earlier mode of gay literariness that engineers so much writing, a "closet" trope, as it were, where one text (the original) is partially concealed/partially revealed beneath the screen of another (the allusion), just as the reality of a gay identity must often be suspected, suggested, and glimpsed through layers. Likewise, it is in this Selected Poems’ earliest examples that Shurin resorts to a "symbolic" apparatus of phallicisms, snakes, and so on: "Taking the snake between your teeth and / biting through / into the fleshmeat of desire", "A snake bites his tail, the venom circuits" (note the static-y interference of other, more troubling sexualites which this repression of symbolism hatches: the sadistic twinge of biting), "a rocket rammed with a personal hand", "every usher is a heirophant with a big wand" (sic, with the tellingly Freudian slip-of-the-typewriter-key misspelling).