Hypothetical Statement of Purpose for Cornell's MFA/PhD Program (Grant Writing)

[Note: formatting has been removed.]

First of all, I would like to thank you for finally bridging the gap—or, for your efforts toward bridging the gap—between the “creative” and the “critical” through your Joint MFA/PhD program in English Language and Literature.

Like my letter of inquiry, which inquired into the silly-serious continuum (or binary opposition), and sought to deconstruct and reconfigure it as a means to the end of defining my style, concerns, and aesthetic; this statement of purpose will demonstrate a similar function, which is (a) to dissolve the creative-critical opposition as exhibited by the majority of graduate programs, be they MFA or PhD; and (b) to illustrate the actual congeniality that exists when the creative and the critical are employed conjunctively. The latter of which should demonstrate the compatibility between a program like this, and a person like me.

First order of business: to eradicate the myth that creative enterprise should be extrinsic to critical inquiry in an antiquated, capital-R Romantic kind of way; along with the myth that critical inquiry is an uncreative, near-scientific and methodical approach to literature. Whether these myths are observed at the graduate level deserves probing; however, at the undergraduate level I've noticed this casual yet subtle divide, beginning with the existence of two distinct degrees in English—i.e. writing and literature—and the resultant variations in their respective requirements; along with certain sentiments I've encountered among my fellow students; my so-called peers. For example, I heard more than once (and, well, more than twice [and, yeah, more than thrice]) a Writing major say, “I don’t like/want to read, I like/want to write,” or, most simply, “I don’t read, I write.” (I've also heard concerns over reading’s disruptive potential when it comes to creativity and originality, however farcical) Somewhat dissimilarly, yet in a neighboring key, I've heard Lit majors (and even Lit professors) bemoan this blanketed/generalized notion re Writing majors which, obviously, even I am guilty of; but I’m convinced that these assertions are rooted, perhaps, in some inferiority-complexed need for domination, or superiority.

My point in all of this: we should all step back and realize we’re playing on the same team. That is, this competitive divide between the creative and the critical is overly and strangely reminiscent of the gradual, post-Enlightenment demarcation between the humanities and the sciences. To reiterate: we’re on the same team; and so, we should start acting like it.

How is the creative critical, and vice versa? Like any art form that chooses to be mimetic and transfiguring, poetry has the capacity to participate in the pervasive reflexivity of contemporary life in an exceedingly postmodern (or post-postmodern) world; and as the former dependent clause implies, art doesn't occur in a vacuum, that is, interaction and interpretation are actively involved, or passively so if one refuses to admit and, thereby, fails to embrace the role of influence. In other words, by actively interacting with other/older literary texts, one’s perception, conception, and interpretation of the world is invariably molded by said texts, which will undoubtedly be diffused into and through one’s work and, therefore, contribute to the ongoing discussion from time immemorial.

All of this is, perhaps, convoluting a hackneyed conception of the art-artist-art dynamic; however, it isn't hackneyed because it’s commonplace or overused in academia: somehow it skipped that step in becoming trite and went straight to being overlooked unless articulated, and even then it would be relegated to banality. Instead, it’s been reduced to pithy, structuralist maxims like, for example, “Write what you know.” What I propose is that instead of passively engaging what Harold Bloom referred to as the anxiety of influence, one must actively and explicitly revel in what Jonathan Lethem recently posited to be the ecstasy of influence. That is, an artist must be willingly capable of articulating their art—or, artisticating (forgive the neologism)—in terms of influence, and have the capacity to critique and explicate their own work by placing it alongside, or outside of, the grand discussion that has seemingly been forgotten; because, let’s face it, there’s a daunting and undeniable chance that others will never even consider critiquing and explicating your work.

Much of the same could be said of the critical, to some extent. However, influence in critical writings tend to be somewhat inherently obvious in the form of bibliographies, references, etc. Despite its explicitness, criticism is hardly objective and scientific; it too is a creative enterprise with aesthetic and ideological concerns, which is to say, it has personality. A critic will always exhibit personality as long as s/he is capable of making choices. Debates in metaphysics aside, these choices are rarely derived from pure, pinpointable premises that have been consciously asserted as truths; and, much less, from logically sound arguments of which the aforementioned premises have been tested and verified. In other words, because of the human element, criticism will always be biased toward aesthetic and ideological concerns and, thus, will rationalize and justify arguments through rhetorical and creative means, which means by making convincing connections.

Convincing connection-making requires a similar skill in discernment to that of writing poetry—choosing one word over another, for example—such that the desired effect is accomplished, be it the pathos of a poem or the effective elucidation of criticism which, again, makes it convincing. This concept of criticism could be likened to the act of looking up at the stars and discovering new constellations in a game of connect the dots. Like creative endeavors—particularly the critical approach to creative writing mentioned above—it necessitates an awareness and understanding of the constellations one already knows or should know; thereby allowing the intricacies that would otherwise be absent from these constructions. However, this practice is not in the business, so to speak, of creating new stars; nor is it interested in determining universals. Instead, its primary concern is unveiling the near-infinite and potentially endless amount of possibilities, be they linguistic, (multi-) cultural, historical (New Historicism), sociological, psychological (Freudian/Lacanian), economic (Marxism), or sexual (Feminism/”Queer” Theory)—to name a few—and thence applying them to the vast network that is literary history.

And so, my intended and, perhaps, overstated purpose is to write both creatively and critically while accepting their interchangeability/malleability as inherent and necessary to their respective processes: to write creatively is to write self-consciously (not insecurely, however) and critically aware of one’s place in an ongoing dialogue between history and the present; and to write critically is to make previously unexplored connections that are plausible and, therefore, convincing—which, itself, is a creative endeavor contingent on the critic’s personality, his or her preexisting knowledge (of the stars [so to speak]), his or her aesthetic and ideological descriptions/prescriptions, and a general self-awareness of all the aforementioned.

It has been, and is, my goal/purpose to also assert that these two assumptive tautologies, with their independent variables being the creative/poet and the critical/critic, can undergo tautological substitution while maintaining their soundness/validity. I will spare you the logical notation, but the resultant is as follows:

To write [critically] is to write self-consciously (not insecurely, however) and [creatively] aware of one’s place in an ongoing dialogue between history and the present; and to write [creatively] is to make previously unexplored connections that are plausible and, therefore, convincing—which, itself, is a [critical] endeavor contingent on the [poet’s] personality, his or her preexisting knowledge (of the stars [so to speak]), his or her aesthetic and ideological descriptions/prescriptions, and a general self-awareness of all the aforementioned.

Is this statement—or the statement that precedes it—vulgar and untrue? If so, I've no business being a part of your program.

The Dream Songs by John Berryman

Devine and Kirsch are in relative agreement that to consider Berryman a poet of the Confessional school is at once misguided, and derivative of a merely topical analysis of his life's work; particularly his magnum opus, The Dream Songs.

While the chapter on Berryman in Kirsch's The Wounded Surgeon is somewhat organized biographically or, perhaps, just chronologically; it is less focally the former than what I'd imagine other critics' analyses of the author.

Even though The Wounded Surgeon also asserts that, along with Berryman, neither Lowell or Plath are truly Confessional poets, I would place Berryman even farther from the leftist pole in the Confessional-Denial (?) continuum than, say, Sylvia Plath; whom I haven't read quite as much of as Berryman and Lowell, whose works are (as little/much as I know) far more impersonal, labyrinthine, and opaque/vague in its connection to the authors. I mean, "At twenty I tried to die"? C'mon. But enough about ole Sylvia.

As a side note, a class on the conception/evolution of the "I" in poetry would be interesting, spanning from the Romantics to the Confessionals, say, or all the way to now. I may have mentioned this before, but it's obvious, this flip-flopping, Oedipal killing of the father and near-adoption of the grandfather, so to speak.

Also, Personism: there's an obvious difference between the Cs and Ps, in content and style, but both have that Return of the "I" (Jedi, heh) going on. Were they separated geographically and/or academically, because they seem to overlap if not completely coincide? Anyway.

Devine and Kirsch heavily consider Berryman as a protagonist and an antagonist of the Modernist aesthetic, perhaps respectively. The former reads (I think) The Dream Songs as a kind of allegory for The Fall (from Eden) in which "the poetic project at hand is nothing less than an attempt to replace that tree from which the poet originally fell." In reality, this fall was/is a vestigial symptom of modernity which would inevitably emerge from remission via The Dream Songs, making it clear that the "problems of subjectivity and 'impersonality'" never really went away; that is, they're perpetual concerns for the artistic and spiritual self in the modern and postmodern world.

Despite these problems, "Berryman's authorial consciousness is wider than the consciousness of Henry" ("the author has a wider perspective and greater wisdom than his creation"), which is made evident by the voice of reason that is Mr. Bones: an authorial stand-in whose commentaries are composed of voices that are and aren't the timbre of Berryman's own voice. Instead, "the madness that Berryman accesses through his poems is the violence and repression of the American people," making The Dream Songs less personal/Confessional, and more social in scope.

(O these damn "critical" non sequiturs! Having a hard time taking a step back and taking it all in and getting/keeping it all down.)

Somehow I think these Songs were all meant to funnier; that their heaviness is regarded as such only due to and/or in light of Berryman's own life. I see Henry as a kind of Brian a la Monty Python's Life of Brian. He was forsaken in that he was screwed out the position of being forsaken; he's the Nobody to Everyman. And, Mr. Bones, as I've said, is the authorial stand-in/stand-up comedian to Henry's self-destruction—a Job, but in a godless world.

However, Mr. Bones's facetious attitude toward a self-pitying Henry is righteous in that while white-male Henry was elected to a position in the tree from which he was able to fall, the presumably black Mr. Bones wasn't even allowed entry, much less a tree-climb, unless he was being chased by "flashlights, & barks, and [...] guns" (DS 57).

It is also worth noting that Berryman didn't like Henry—he even hated his name—and so, why would he create a character in his image, so to spark. Anyway, maybe Mr. Bones is more major a character than we think, maybe? Or, to suggest the most overused idea—multiple personality disorder—maybe they're the same person! Just kidding.

While Berryman's allusions to The Fall, as iterated by Devine, is legitimate, the fact that Berryman was somewhat antagonistic to the concept of God—i.e. until the end of his life—one must question the nature of his allusion to The Fall: was it meant to be austerely regarded or facetiously so?

And how interesting (and oddly poetic) it is that it was a fall that killed Berryman, however instantly, and The Fall that killed Henry, though over time. I think Berryman's Henry is a/the bridge (heh, how punny) between modernism and postmodernism: in his struggle to assert a poetic and spiritual self, and the reconciliation "to the limits of his art and the loss in his world," a world without God yet filled with secular consequence nonetheless. To fall from the sycamore and hit every branch on the way down is to be human, of which Henry takes full advantage by aiming for each and every branch.

(Meant to use your paper and Kirsch more but didn't want to just regurgitate them at you; plus, didn't know where to begin.)

Another idea: Henry + Mr. Bones = double-consciousness.

"To the Break of Dawn" with Michael Robbins: A Portrait of the Poet as a Disc Jockey

In Alien vs. Predator, a poetry collection by Michael Robbins, the concluding poem, “To the Break of Dawn” (poem attached), celebrates the ecstasy—as opposed to the anxiety—of influence as it pertains to the aesthetics and poetics of an individual artist, poet, or DJ; the latter of which serves as the allegorical perspective in this particular poem. Despite the aforementioned ecstasy of influence, a certain amount of anxiety does persist, however external to “art for art’s sake,” yet inextricable to the development of an artist that is truly mimetic of their time and place. Such externalities include apocalyptic politics and failed diplomacy; the pandemic of materialistic preoccupation; pop-cultural infatuation as distraction by detachment, yet masked as inclusion; and coping with the impossible: to adapt and evolve at the same exponential rate as technological advancement.

Perhaps the ultimate anxiety, however, is overcoming and transcending entirely the fear of futility as it relates to art and its role in society, which can no longer be thought of as traditional in the traditional sense. A “back-to-basics” approach to aesthetics à la pastoralism, or longing for the past by lamenting the present for what it lacks in terms of the former: this approach just won't do. However, the answer to this dilemma is not necessarily novel, either. In fact, it's unavoidable for any artist that is interested in standing the proverbial “test of time;” though not in the universalist sense as, perhaps, advocated by many structuralist teachers and writers alike—that is, the sense that a true work of art can and should be defined as timeless. On the contrary, a true work of art is timeful. In other words, it is dated; mimetic and representative of the time in which it was created. As previously stated, this is not some groundbreaking modus operandi: Dante did it when he employed vernacular Italian, as opposed to ad litteram Latin; Whitman did it in his “democratic” poetry; Eliot in his blend of high- and low-culture; O'Hara in his lunch poems à la Personism; and, now, Robbins does it in his poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator: an artistic smoothie comprised of too many fruitful influences to list here, but ranging from Wordsworth to Jay-Z; from Hart Crane to Bob Dylan; from Wallace Stevens to the Wu-Tang Clan. This Eliotian blend of high- and low-culture content is “democratic” in its ability to engage a diverse audience on multiple levels—regardless of academic status and privilege—yet still adhering to certain properties of formalism.

“To the Break of Dawn” is written from the perspective of a DJ with an eclectic, encyclopedic knowledge of music, as is characteristic of a disc jockey. However, this perspective is not revealed until the final stanza:

"I take this cadence from the spinning plates
where the DJ plots the needle’s fall.
I take it, and I give it back again
to the dollar dollar bill and the yes yes y'all."

Here it is important to note the allegorical use of a DJ as it is used throughout the poem. As a metaphor for an artist, and a poet in particular, a DJ spends countless hours “digging in the crates,” i.e. going through milk crates, in which vinyl records are traditionally stored, in the basement of some secondhand shop, looking for new music. A poet undergoes a similar formative process, say, in the basement of a used-book store: reading line after line of verse and prose, taking mental notes, adding to the memory bank the influential ecstasies; and then, walking up stairs with an armful of books to the register, and handing over “the dollar dollar bill” in exchange for the affirming “yes yes y’all” the books contain: encouragement, reinforcement, the sublime, etc. When poets read, they “take it” in, and when they write, they “give it back again.” However, they are in control; “the DJ plots the needle’s fall.” The DJ determines the setlist, and accepts its aptness to change; poets write like those they've read, even if it’s just a phase. While the DJ spins wax (vinyl) on plates, poets also spin plates in a kind of circusy balancing act. They juggle their influences of the past and of the present, despite the cognitive dissonance that may occur due to those cumbersome one-eighties, or near-Oedipal reformations, in terms of style and taste.

However, unlike the centripetal force of a turntable, the development of an aesthetic is centrifugal in the Derridean sense; that is to say, it’s messy. Although the poet’s journey seems to be moving toward some kind of center—some point of overall aesthetic satisfaction—that center is continually shifting as an elusive endpoint. The DJ in the poem has a similar wandering experience:

"I wandered lonely as Jay-Z
after the Fat Boys called it quits,
before the rapper from Mobb Deep
met up with the Alchemist."

The first two lines of the poem is a playful combination of Wordsworth’s lyric poem, “Daffodils,” and Brooklyn-native Jay-Z’s hip-hop hit, “Heart of the City.” The former begins, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and the latter begins, “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up. Somebody got a problem with Hov’.” (Hov’ being short for Jehovah: a nickname proclaimed by Jay-Z, himself, “the messiah of hip hop.”) As a classic example of the Eliotian blend of high- and low-culture, this stanza allusively demonstrates the aforementioned wandering experience that accompanies an artist’s development that is somewhat cyclical. While the DJ “wandered lonely [...] after the Fat Boys called it quits,” this void would soon be filled when “the rapper [Prodigy] from Mobb Deep met up with [the hip-hop producer] the Alchemist.”

From there, the DJ continues his journey of wanderlust, again to some dismay:

"I wandered lonely all along
The Watchtower’s office front
in Dumbo, then across the bridge
that tempts the bedlamite to song."

What begins as a reference to Bob Dylan’s song, “All Along the Watchtower,” becomes a reference to Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose headquarters happens to be located in Dumbo (Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn. They published The Watchtower, a religious text prophesying the apocalypse, i.e. the end of the world which, in some sense, was soon to come. The second stanza also alludes back to first, which contains the Brooklyn-born Jay-Z (Hov’) reference. However, the DJ has outgrown his early influences—i.e. Jay-Z is no longer the “messiah of hip hop” and the Alchemist, like alchemy, has become antiquated—and has decided to continue his journey by wandering “across the bridge that tempts the bedlamite to song.” As an allusion to Hart Crane’s modernist epic, The Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge—a modern marvel of its time—symbolizes “an act of faith.” In Crane’s words:

"The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exists any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago, there might be something for me to say [...] The Bridge is symphonic in including all the strands: Columbus, conquest of water, land, Pocahontas, subways, offices. The Bridge, in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp as it does finally, seems to really have a career."

The “narrative DJ” is torn between the America Walt Whitman, the romantic/transcendentalist, sees in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” before the bridge was built; and the America Hart Crane, the modernist, sees in The Bridge after it was built. However, the America the DJ finds while standing on the Brooklyn Bridge would be unrecognizable to both the aforementioned poets in the ingenious stanza that follows:

"From here you could've seen what planes
can do with luck and delta-v
as that fire-fangled morning
jingle-jangled helter-skelterly."

When two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, many have said it marked the end of irony; however, where one thing ends, another begins, but what? Is it now a seemingly meaningless world of “luck” and chance à la Big Bang and chaos theory; i.e. a world only explicable by way of science? All because of delta-v (Δv): literally, because of the “change in velocity,” however abrupt, of two planes? Perhaps the DJ, while rummaging through crates in a dingy old basement, came across a book of poetry by Wallace Stevens; particularly the poem, "Of Mere Being," which contains the line, “The bird's [fire-fangled] feathers dangle down.” More interesting, however, is the third stanza of the poem: “You know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy. / The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” In short, meaning, or lack thereof, as a precursor to happiness, or unhappiness, cannot be fully explained in terms of logic, reason, or science; likewise, nor can logic, reason, and science be explained via transcendental meaning so as to enable happiness.

The line that follows, “jingle-jangled helter-skelterly,” attempts to explain by example this misconstrued disparacy. The jingle-jangle fallacies refer to “the erroneous assumptions that two different things are the same because they bear the same name (jingle fallacy) or that two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labeled differently (jangle fallacy).” Take, for example, the meanings and usages/uses of “helter-skelter.” It denotatively refers to “disorderly haste or confusion.” Meanwhile, as the title of a Beatles song, “Helter Skelter” refers to an amusement park ride which, to Paul McCartney, was meant to symbolize a ride from top to bottom, and to contain “the most raucous vocals, the loudest drums, etc.” However, for Charles Manson, Helter Skelter was not only a Beatles song but, in conjunction with the Book of Revelations, “an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites.” Clearly, this is an example of the jingle fallacy which, in effect, is nothing new to those who deal with the denotation-connotation binary on a regular basis.

Stanzas four through six read like an O’Harian lunch poem in which the DJ/poet is, perhaps, driving home from the record, or used-book, store with the windows down and the radio blaring; all in the face of the supposed collapse of American culture this poet refuses to accept and attempts to transcend through art’s release:

"From your gravity fails to whoops
there goes gravity, from Céline
to Celan, from “Turn the Beat Around”
to And the Band Played On,"

The radio is on in scan mode. It goes from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself;” from Vicki Sue Robinson's “Turn the a Beat Around” to college radio station playing the Jaggerz fourth studio album, And the Band Played On, in full. He stops at a redlight and grabs the paperbag on the passenger seat. He pulls out and thumbs through two of the books. One is a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The other is a book of poetry by Paul Celan. The light turns green:

"from the Live Free or Die
of plates from New Hampshire
to Musidora vamping
her way through Les Vampires,"

The car ahead of him has New Hampshire plates: Live Free or Die. They're either lost or they're not paying attention. The poet doesn't honk, or hang out of his window to yell, at them. Instead, he looks in the distance and sees an advertisement for an independent screening of Les Vampires, a 1915–16 French silent crime serial film written and directed by Louis Feuillade. Maybe he'll go. Eventually, the car in front of him does, but not that it matters. There’s traffic up ahead, and it looks like gridlock:

"from It Takes a Nation
of Millions to Hold Us Back
to Daydream Nation,
from Station to Station,"

It’s rush hour, bumper to bumper, and every horn possible honks in the key of futility. The poet rolls his windows up. He opens the glove compartment and pulls out a few cassette tapes. Not only had he forgotten about cassette tapes, but he forgot he still owned some, especially these ones: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, and Station to Station by David Bowie. He pops the first one in and listens to it straight through while his car inches forward. Some cars have run out of gas; others have turned theirs off, put them in neutral, and are pushing them to save gas. Luckily, the poet has a full tank. He pops in the second tape. The sun is setting and an end is in sight. He pops in the third tape, Station to Station by David Bowie. His front tires are just now rolling onto the abutment of the Brooklyn Bridge. As he gains speed, he rolls down the window. The mystical moist night-air rolls in. No one is honking anymore. The concluding song on the album comes on, “Wild Is the Wind.” The poet sings along with the song’s last chorus:

"Like the leaf clings to the tree
Oh my darling cling to me
For we're like creatures in the wind
And wild is the wind
Wild is the wind"

The poet, then, looks out upon the East River, and in a frame spliced by the web of bridge cables, he sees the wind-filled shirt of the bedlamite, sitting upon the bridge parapets, his feet dangling, never to be seen again.

Reconsidering My Reconsideration?

Quick note. Reading about the Sophists for my Rhetoric and Writing Arts class. I don't know if Abramson goes here in his essay (I don't have time to check) but to me the Sophists were the first cultural relativists or the first deconstructionists (protos) which re Robbins ties in to this antago-complicity I've discussed. Perhaps a pop-cultural relativist? Gotta get back to Rhetoric but I think this is worth exploring. A way to tie A's essay to Robbins.

Edit: Word I want to remember for this class/study: "micro-movements."

Frank O'Hara vs. Michael Robbins

Immediate notes/thoughts/remarks on O'Hara (vis-à-vis Robbins?) as possible bases/premises for further arguments:

Personism: objects to "abstraction in poetry" ("the absence of the artist's personal voice or style from his or her work"); avoids "philosophy," or abstract speculation.

The poems I've been focusing on are "A Step Away from Them" (because I can relate to it so damn much), "The Day Lady Died," and “Rhapsody;” because they all overtly say what I want to say about O'Hara, especially re what I've been reading about modernism and, also, the poetry of Michael Robbins.

Connections/reactions to modernism: all three poems are reminiscent of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem and Guillaume Apollinaire’s “poemes conversations” in their experiential/observational methods, along with their incorporations of (pop-) culture, which one can also see in Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land; all of which were inspired, in part, by the French Symbolists: Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, etc (I think); “the cut-up phrases, the lack of syntax, the unclear references, the zipping between an ancient past and modern present.” However, where O’Hara’s poems depart from these/this tradition(s) is by their inclusion of the perspectival “I”. Whereas, in modernism, the first-person perspective was eradicated--or maybe just looked down upon--due to its failure to mimetically represent the socially/politically/culturally fragmented self. O’Hara’s poetry seems to be a response to this by bringing it back to the individual, making it personal, and not necessarily trying to assert some greater meaning; but to just write for and, maybe, entertain that other one person for whom the poem is written.

Trying hard not to lay on the backspace button: not too confident in my historical sense.

In “A Step Away from Them” (something I myself take every lunch break at work to read and chain-smoke cigarettes in some corner of the garage), “my” and “I” are in the first line--the beginning of an “I-do-this I-do-that” poem that isn’t out to prescribe some universal truth. Why do the laborers wear yellow helmets: “They protect them from falling bricks, I guess.” “What do you mean, ‘you guess!?’” “[I mean,] I guess.” “Okay, word.”

“O'Hara's most persistent interest, however, was the image, in all its suddenness, juxtaposed with an equally unlikely image, following techniques not of Imagism but those perfected by the French Surrealists. This period of experimentation and learning (although the imitations and parodies continued) advanced into an interest in post-Symbolist French poetry, especially that of Guillaume Apollinaire and later Pierre Reverdy, along with the big-voiced, roaring surrealism of Vladimir Mayakovsky” (Poetry Foundation).

Dunno how I did historically (in my connections/reactions section): confused.

Coca-Cola, Times Square, Edwin Denby, JULIET’S CORNER, Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini, Bunny (?), John Latouche, Jackson Pollock, BULLFIGHT, Manhattan Storage Warehouse: just some of the references made in the poem, ranging from the obscure to the obvious; all of which the reader should assume would be understood by the person for whom this poem is written (back to personism).

Ugh, there's so much more I have to read; so much more to know. Might add more later.

Edit: Okay. Here are some snippets from Frank O'Hara's bio section (which have guided my thinking/reasoning), from Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (is O'Hara postmodern?), edited by Paul Hoover and, coincidentally, negatively reviewed by Michael Robbins:

"Characterized  by wit, charm, and everydayness, his work extended William Carlos Williams's emphasis on the American vernacular into urban popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s."

"'[T]he poetry that meant the most to him when he began writing was either French--Rimbaud, Mallarme, and surrealists: poets who speak the language of every day into the reader's dream--or Russian--Pasternak and especially Mayakovsky, from whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the "intimate yell"' (Ashbery).

"Another of O'Hara's important predecessors was the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Gathering random snatches of overheard conversation on his Paris walks, Apollinaire composed what he called 'Poemes conversations.'"

"'I don't think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone's state of social relation, nor am I for any particular development in the American language simply because I find it necessary. What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems'" (O'Hara).

"Immediacy, honesty, and fearlessness are among the attractive qualities of his style: 'You're sort of galloping into the midst of a subject. . . . You're not afraid to think about anything and you're not afraid of being stupid and you're not afraid of being sentimental. You just sort of gallop right in and deal with it'" (O'Hara).

And from volume two of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Ramazani, Ellman, and O'Clair (3rd ed.):

"He objects to 'abstraction in poetry,' which he obliquely defines as the absence of the artist's personal voice or style from his or her work; that is not to be confused with abstractness in painting, because even in the work of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, one can still feel the presence of a personal style. O'Hara wants poetry to avoid 'philosophy,' or abstract speculation, but while he is frank about his sexual identity as a gay man, he doesn't opt for 'personality or intimacy' either."

"Some of his poems express a genial appreciation for the neon lights, posters, and other objects that litter the New York landscape (and that received similar attention from the Pop artists). In addition, the dreamlike, irrational sequences of images in some of his poems may have been inspired by surrealist painting and film, the rapid flurry of images dramatizing the dispersal and distraction of postmodern consciousness."

"O'Hara's poems are crammed with the discontinuous sights, names, and places of metropolitan experience, traversing media from advertising and film to high art and music, representing encounters with diverse social classes, ethnicities, and nationalities[;] [...] showing us what it feels like to live in immediate contact with both the inner and outer worlds. Alert and energetically responsive, the poems stay close to the moment of their inspiration, even narrating the experiences and interruptions that went into their composition."

Okay, where Robbins comes in:

Without having a specific poem in mind (maybe not needing one; i.e. it is, by now, self-evident), Robbins pervasive use of "I" is in the same vein as O'Hara poetics (stylistically), but consider the following quote from an interview with Robbins re confessional poetry (not sure if O'Hara should be considered part of this movement, or whether he was a precursor to it, etc.):

"Doubtless there was a time when the confessionals’ star hogged the firmament, in which equally great poets like Frank O’Hara and George Oppen also shone. But that time is past, and the work especially of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman is vital to any contemporary poetics that hopes to understand the relation of affect to subjectivity and of individuals to the public sphere" (Poetry Foundation).

It seems as though the perspectival use of "I" in Robbins's poetry is less an indicator of the "personal"--in the emotionally evocative sense, which, ugh (see next paragraph then come back to me)--and more a continuation of the direct communication between  poet and assumed person; both of whom are connected/engaged (pop-) culturally--in the past and present. And so, both O'Hara and Robbins have modernist ties when it comes to pop-cultural fascinations, but their use of "I" is what divides them: while O'Hara's is more of a "I"-as-narrator, Robbins's is more of a "I"-as-chameleon (though, not necessarily in the "perspectiveless" modernist sense, but in a "perspective-ful" postmodern sense [what?]). Centripetal modernism? Centrifugal postmodernism? Maybe, dunno. I think the term "postmodernism" is bullshit, and "post-postmodernism" is even more bullshit. I'm beginning to think modernism is still in effect, and that the advent of prefixes is just another attempt at commodification.

(Next paragraph here. While the quotes above may assert/suggest that O'Hara wasn't interested in these things--and perhaps he isn't in the three poems I mentioned; but some of his others definitely have a "[R-?] romantic" feel to them. For example, "Autobiographia Literaria" (holy shit) totally has that whole I-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud vibe to it. Now go back.)

Alright, that's all he wrote. Might add more later. Sorry for all the quotes.

Reconsidering Abramson's Essay, "The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now"

If "we're too jaded" for "the Romantics' watchword, emotion," why is "a denial of our collective emotional reality [...], our national culture considered, a cruelty?"

If objects "have been troublingly commodified and packaged pre-consumption," how would the Sophists, who 'sold but two goods: language and persuasion," be a model worth revisiting? That is, aren't language and persuasion two (autonomous) aspects of advertising, which commodify and package objects pre-consumption?

Language, persuasion... attention? Their respective autonomies?  The "object-in-itself" and now the "subject-in-itself"? What? Maybe if I took "a simple course in ethics" I would understand, but as of now I don't.

Back to attention: "So what if a contemporary avant-garde were to emerge, sensitive to the culture of the day, that had precisely that historic capacity? To consume the entirety of our attention in one go?"

Is there a difference between returning art to the praxis of life, and returning life to the praxis of art? Which is more mimetic? And is mimesis even the goal anymore? The ends, the means?

If avant-gardism is, in part, a response to what came before, does the avant-garde at all resemble what came before the before, making aesthetic movements Oedipal and somewhat cyclical? Maybe, maybe not?

How is Abramson's "historical sense?" I don't know.

I (tentatively) propose a not-so-novel idea, and that is a poetics that is historically contemporaneous/simultaneous a la Eternalism; and mimetic of a culture (as a whole) as well as any one moment in time, which requires both the Eliotian "historical sense" and a contemporary sense. Though, not at all/necessarily universalism, but being able/learning to juggle multiple universes and their respective aesthetics, in spite of the cognitive dissonance that may result; which shouldn't be confused with/reduced to mere allusion or postmodern pastiche (intertextuality), but regarded as that which supersedes them, et-blah-cetera.

Abramson is not the first (nor will he be the last) to condemn the technocracy in which we all live, and to lament its effects on the arts/poetry; and to long for a poetics which "might, at once, retrieve the goodwill of a generation lost in the packets of digital information." It simply won't do to be an antagonistic/nostalgic/romantic purist, or to be blindly complicit and overly self-indulgent with no "historical sense." 'Cause, baby, technology ain't goin' nowhere. One can only hope to aspire to a kind of antago-complicit self-awareness which oscillates along the slippery continuum, making art/poetry inquisitively engaging, if one desires the return of art to the praxis of life (and/or mimesis [the same?]).

Edit (vis-a-vis Robbins): [Forthcoming.]

Is the Golden Age of American Poetry Now?

In his essay concerning the question above, Seth Abramson answers in the affirmative. While his essay could be read as an example of chronocentrism--particularly by those who let its title dictate content and tone--I would have to agree, if only to the extent that there are more opportunities for writers today than ever before, whether it be through academia and the communities it fosters, or through social media; even if it's only corroborated by mere numbers and statistics. However, I can't help read this essay as a kind of customary staple for all eras, ages, and generations; i.e., I think every period is confronted by the same dilemma--living in a time unlike any other that came before and thus bearing an inevitable anxiety over the present in relation to the future, and to posterity--and so I can imagine a paper like this being written multiple times throughout history, which essentially catalogues the moments leading up to a so-called pinnacle point in time. But I digress: perhaps I'm focusing too much on the peripheral rather than the foci/loci of what Abramson is really exploring and discussing.

What is important to keep in mind, I think, is that Abramson is not so much/necessarily asserting that the Golden Age of American poetry is qualitatively now (but maybe quantitatively now); instead, he's responding, however tangentially, to allegations that the Dark Age of American poetry is now; which he does more directly in an article written in response to another published earlier that day. Despite the struggle I had acquiescing to Abramson's vague and, perhaps, vestigially litigious style of writing, I can't help but appreciate and admire his (h)op(e)timism when regarding the present and an ever-daunting future in a time so resplendent in its editorial cynicism. For me, these imbued sentiments have been confluently affirmed by reading Michael Robbins's Alien vs. Predator, a contemporary avant-garde, whatever the fuck that means, poetry collection that both defies and praises, thus reifying a non-Du Boisian kind of double consciousness, or cognitive dissonance, which struggles to reconcile the ostensible decadence with the ostensible splendor of the modern world, while balance-beaming between antagonism and complicity, and seeking something that isn't necessarily wholeness, all of which has been occurring for at least a century in response to various external stimuli.

Alright, anyway, let's get back to the essay. Apart from the MFA-praise (okay, I'm convinced: perhaps they're not as bad as David Foster Wallace made them out to be [or maybe there's a difference between fiction and poetry programs, neither of which, as Abramson points out, are standardized and thus must vary from one to another]), I'm intrigued by the section concerning itself with "Conceptual writing" and Goldsmith's "peak language" theory; but by intrigued, I mean I don't understand what the hell he's talking about. Topically, or superficially, it seems to be aligned with Language poetics, but I have the feeling--the fear of misunderstanding--that they're designedly antipodal. Either way, from what I've read and researched about them, I find their (mis)appropriation of language to be somewhat vulgar and/or offensive; not that I'm a purist by any means, but it seems antithetical to what poetry has always, more or less, been about: self-expression, communication, & c. In that sense, they seem to have taken their Oedipal complex--i.e., as a historically traditional movement/reaction between generations--to an extreme for the sake of extremity, however misguided as omnidirectional and nondirectional, both (if that makes sense).

I was also intrigued by the part that alludes to the Sophists--i.e., this idea of language, persuasion, attention, and their respective autonomies (and that concept of subject-in-itself)--as it pertains to something I previously considered in one of my digressions, along with what little I remember from Greek philosophy, and that is the possible correspondence between this antago-complicit dance and the relativistic Sophists--as opposed to the universalities of Socrates (despite his "I know that I know nothing" bullshit)--but other than that, I really don't see where the Sophists fit in. Ugh, there were a lot of moments like this while reading and re-reading this essay; times when I would, at once, agree with what Abramson is saying and then, upon further investigation, see that maybe I was projecting my own ideas in a blend with his. And so, while I tend to agree with certain sentiments--including those from other things he's written--I think some of his connections, diagnoses, and predictions are off; but then again, he's read way more contemporary poetry than me.

To the Break of Dawn with Michael Robbins

The concluding poem in the Michael Robbins's poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator, does just that: it concludes by outlining and redefining Robbins's aesthetic and approach to poetry through the persona of a bedroom DJ. Like a DJ, or a mashup artist, the MC/speaker blends (and celebrates) their tastes in music and, in this case, literature as a means of reflexively tracing their influences, along with their aesthetic development and experience within the medium/media. For many bedroom DJs, and artists/poets, tracing and then retracing this lineage can be a lonely experience, whether it's digging in the crates for that special beat, that diamond in the rough, among those stack upon stacks of broken dreams in a dimly lit basement; or if it's before an invisible crowd in some studio apartment bedroom--also a bathroom, kitchen, and living room--at 4 a.m., after hearing the sickest set that has finally inspired you to play out or at the next battle; but regardless of whether you will or not, you'll still be spinning plates of wax until the break of dawn, or until your neighbors complain to your landlady who tells you to kill that hippity hop music or get out.

Ah-so, the path of a bedroom DJ/basement MC (poet) is a lonely one: the amount of time that is spent digging and reading; between those moments, far and few between, in which you discover those hits and beats that incite and stir the sublime inside you; whether it's a forty-five of the Fat Boys you spun until you met the grooves of the B-side: a hole left vacant until "Mobb Deep met up with the Alchemist." Until that moment, you wander lonely and faithlessly, trying your hand in another faith: Bob Dylan, until he found God like a stranger taken in by reading The Watchtower some Jehovah-Witness neighbor gave 'em. Hart Crane, until he finally gave in and jumped off the bridge/boat. And then losing faith entirely (for the second time ["To write Nazi poetry / after Auschwitz is barbaric. And so inelegant."]) while standing Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, watching the abrupt change in velocity (delta-v) of planes hitting monolithic buildings/monuments/pillars: the apocalyptic/helter-skelter end of life as we (thought we) knew it, and the beginning of a seemingly meaningless universe instantiated/substantiated by luck a la Big Bang--all in the bang of collapsing buildings. Meanwhile, everything is eyed, skeptically/suspiciously, as jingle-jangle fallacies, never knowing what or whom to trust: the appearances of things vs. their realities.

Eventually, you get over it; you find yourself again; accept both the possibilities and the impossibilities as feasible, bound, determined (pre-), likely, eventual, whatever. How everything can be defined: whatever ("The morning slathers its whatever / across the thing.) Whatever, "I could care less. I couldn't care less / means the same thing." Or maybe not. But what the fuck is gravity? Bob Dylan told me it failed, but I've yet feel the difference, even though Eminem reminded me of the fact. I'm still lonely. What am I talking about? But I can feel Celine and Celan; I can listen to "Turn the Beat Around," or watch the movie of the same title, and feel entertained; I can watch And the Band Played On and feel informed; "The truth, too, is fourfold: [...] 4) the movie never ends, it goes on and on".

Have we considered why there are four parts/sections in/to this collection? Four-to-the-floor or the Four Horsemen? Dunno. More allusions/"use your illusion"/references to the formation of the self vis-a-vis the public, your enemies, sound, youth, and David Bowie. Every time I picture myself as someone else, I'm a second behind. Wittgenstein believed “that the most serious and profound problems and questions and issues could be discussed only in the form of jokes.” Making coffee with the same grounds to replace the water I'm pissing out. What? It all sounds Greek and schizophrenic to me.

Ah-so, any-/either way, we keep on keepin' on, dropping needles on wax and hard Stax, adjusting the pitch control to match the snares, bass drums, and hi-hats of tunes with different rhythms, trying to make sense of our world through art, till death do we part, for the dollar dollar bill, monetary compensation, or the yes yes y'all, affirmation/recognition. You ain't a DJ until you can scratch, and it's easier to scratch and count money with lotion on its skin. Lines serving as definition: "I translate the Bible into velociraptor"; "The truth makes me hurl, the truth's a mistake"; "I replace the mirrors with Rorschach blots"; "Life is but the interpretation of a dream"; "Old pond, frog jumps in, so what"; "just junk in a Safeway cart I'm pushing / down to the recycling center"; "I'd re- your very life arranged". Ugh, fin.

Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins is like a mashup artist of poetry; a sophisticated Girl Talk.

Over the course of the past week, I've read this collection a number of times; sometimes from cover to cover and other times a la peek-a-page. Each time I've opened this book, I've gone running around my apartment looking for a pen to jot down what, I think, he is referencing and/or alluding to.

Speaking of which, I think there's a distinction between a "reference" and an "allusion" (i.e., a difference in their stipulative definitions), despite their seeming synonymy (lexical definitions). I hardly ever hear "allusion" outside the classroom, but I hear "reference" quite a bit (e.g., "Family Guy is referencing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in this scene" [no one ever says, "Family Guy is alluding to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in that scene"]). This distinction, however, is important only in an Eliotian and staunchly academic sense, such that "high" and "low" culture are concerned. For the sake of argument, one would say that Robbins is alluding to The Great Gatsby (high culture) when he says, "I spit on any fresh green breast," and that he is referencing Star Wars (low culture [i.e., pop-culture]) when he says, "She's not the droid you're looking for."

Anyway, what he risks by referencing pop-culture is the "datedness" discouraged by many schools of writing, as opposed to the "timelessness" of the classics revered by same. (Sidenote: DFW explores and refutes this notion in one of his essays, which was then picked up and quoted by Jonathan Lethem in one of his.) By thumbing his nose at said convention, Robbins is rewarded with an unusual readership--extending beyond the usual academics and other poets (perhaps an overstatement, but read on)--which includes a large portion of the population that is overindulgent and, shall I say, obsessed with popular culture; and therefore privy to the kinds of references he elects to make: Raptor Jesus/Philosoraptor, Purple Rain, Tiny Dancer, Guns N' Roses, Star Wars, Nirvana, The Big Lebowski, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Welcome Back Kotter, Silence of the Lambs, Fleetwood Mac, Cutting Crew, Joy Division, Indeep, Lil Mama, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, LL Cool J, The Beatles, Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, David Bowie, Wu-Tang Clan, etc.

Although this may not be the first to do so, it is a collection that grants the not-necessarily-academic access to allusive poetry in an example of (almost) reverse-privilege. However, the aforementioned "academics and other poets" are not left entirely in the dark, either. Within this collection of poetry are countless homage-like allusions, quotations, and rearrangements of words, images, and ideas made famous by the greats (or, perhaps, the not-so-greats, according to Robbins): Rilke, Berryman, Keats, Ginsberg, Whitman, Fitzgerald, Larkin, Auden, Frost, Shakespeare, Nagel, Basho, Wittgenstein, Adams, Seidel, Blake, Spicer, Freud, Socrates, Wordsworth, Crane, Stevens, etc.

The result is a collection of poetry that thumbs its nose at tradition while bowing before its altars; a collection that could be, and probably has been, falsely accused of being just another example of postmodern pastiche, parody, and irony; which to some extent it is, but just another example of such in poetry? I don't know, but I think these poems effectively capture what it's like to live amid the din--the infinite noise--of modern America; an emotionally jaded country still struggling to convalesce and cope with disenchantment/disillusionment; a nation clouded by pop-cultural preoccupations, while technology keeps on trying to cure itself, however unsuccessfully. Anyway, these poems successfully fulfill the Aristotelian ideal for art, which is to imitate life--i.e., mimesis.

Meta-edit (quasi-personal statement [as it probably should've been all along]): the only problem I encounter when reading Alien vs. Predator is in the explication process. In some of the poems--like "New Bridge Strategies," "Remain in Light," etc--I've a pretty good idea on what's going on, what's being said, etc. Maybe some of it is either over or under my head, which is funny. I offer the collection such praise but yet, I'm unable to make anything other than broad strokes in unpacking it. Or maybe I'm just being lazy. That is, I'd rather self-deprecate than go out on a limb to grab the ripest fruit. Fruity, indeed. Anyhow, I've something else in mind.

Maybe--while remaining in tune with the themes I mentioned above (and the postmodern fascination with meaninglessness)--many of these poems are indulging in a kind of Derridean play. That is, maybe they come pre-deconstructed, which I can't really explain just yet, but it crossed my mind as if it was a smart thing to say, ha!

Before I forget, I want to include the inscription that was written in the used book I purchased (which I've since torn out, but still use as a bookmark for some strange reason):

"Jesse--
I remember reading the poems of Frederick Seidel with you; these are the poems he would write if he were 15 years old and spent much of his time playing video games in his underwear and listening to Guns N' Roses and Jay-Z.
Merry Christmas!
--[illegible] + Laura
Xmas 2012"

I guess Jesse didn't care too much for this collection, seeing as how I now have it.

Anyhow (back to trying to sound smart): maybe some of these poems, in their esoteric blend of high and low culture, are more like Rorschach inkblots for its readers, allowing each of them to see something different, which then says more about them as readers than it does about the poems themselves. (I'll skip what my reading says about me, except maybe the part where--)

I come from a family that is inordinately aware and knowledgeable of pop-culture: my dad and stepmom (huge Bob Dylan fan) have a near-encyclopedic recall for the music from their generation up until, I'd say, the year, 2000. Needless to say, I was listening to Neil Young and Nirvana by the age of five. Meanwhile, I watched countless movies with my mom, and, looking back, it seems to me the only thing we ever did was cuddle up on the couch and watch movies like Alien(s), Philadelphia, Terminator, Silence of the Lambs, Fried Green Tomatoes, Schindler's List, Sleepless in Seattle, Shawshank Redemption, When Harry Met Sally, Jurassic Park; just oh-so-many movies. Oh, and it was with my dad that we watched the movies my mom was reluctant to rent due to their content: Freddy, Jason, etc. And it was with my dad that I saw movies like Fargo, Exorcist, Pulp Fiction, Deer Hunter Natural Born Killers--movies that, when I watch them now, I can't believe I saw them as a child (all the things that were over my head then that I'm just now getting)--despite their explicit plaints and fears (in jest) that we--my sister, stepbrother, and I--would grow up to be serial killers. And I remember watching Last of the Mohicans and Rambo a lot, which my grandfather taped for me, ha!

And so, from then on, I was hooked--not hyperbolically or metaphorically--on pop-culture: film, music, television, etc. Henceforth, I became a pirate, downloaded/stole everything, delved into the esoteric (sub- and underground cultures) afforded by internet access, had a lot of phases (fascinations, interests, preoccupations, aspirations): a stint, however brief, in sports (baseball, soccer, running); eclectic and radical movements/shifts within music (poli-punk, radiohead, pink floyd, death metal, house/trance, breakbeat/turntablism [had a pair of turntables for a while], underground and old-school hip hop, bossa nova jazz, funk/soul from the seventies); watched hundreds of movies (my friends and I, we play this game called "actor-movie-actor-movie" [see if you can figure it out: Brad Pitt--Legends of the Fall--Anthony Hopkins--Silence of the Lambs--Jodie Foster--Taxi Driver--Robert De Niro--Goodfellas--Samuel L. Jackson--Negotiator--Kevin Spacey--American Beauty--Chris Cooper--Adaptation--Meryl Streep--Deer Hunter--Christopher Walken--King of New York--Laurence Fishburne--Boyz n the Hood--Cuba Gooding, Jr.--Jerry Maguire--Tom Cruise--Vanilla Sky--Penelope Cruz--Vicky Cristina Barcelona--Javier Bardem--No Country for Old Men--Josh Brolin--Goonies--Sean Astin--Rudy--and on and on {to the break of dawn}]).

Okay, this is probably (getting [if not already]) exhausting to read but my point is: I feel at home with Robbins's poetry. Also, it gives me the courage to utilize my self-minimized background in pop-culture, which definitely makes it more fun, and interesting, to me anyway. Okay, bye.