Ecstatic Emigre: An Ethics of Practice

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Acknowledgments “Revising the Parade: Against the Poetry of Witness” first appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Winter 1997. Reading and Writing Spiritual Utility first appeared in Fence 4, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2001. “Without Sovereignty” was first published in My Business Is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery, edited by Stephen Berg Copyright © 2001 by Paul Dry Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The American Poetry Review was the first serial publisher of “Preliminaries,” “A Concrete Memoir, ” “It Might Have Begun Differently,” “A Hinge-History,” “A Garden Is a Frame Structure, ” ”Nearing Cradle,” “Native Stranger,” Lessons of the Whirlwind,” “The Citizen-Stranger, ” and “The Instant,” all of which appeared in a column entitled “Ecstatic Émigré.” “Erasing Names, Multiplying Alliances” was first published in The Grand Permission: New Writing on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman. Copyright © 2003 by Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher

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Prologue Reading and Writing Spiritual Utility

via “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything because he has no identity—he is continually in for[ming] and filling some other body.”1 One way through that has been mine. Expelled from the stability of water, first home, the negative seeker becomes aware of annihilation as a physical fact nature promises, making room for the next physical fact. Now the relation of human nature is this. Human nature does not know this. Human nature cannot know thisВ .В .В . Human nature does not know that if everyone did not die There would be no room for those who live now2 In relation, I shall say I and mean you, who shall walk with me here, intent in approaching momentary grace in each precipitous ending. In the space between “I” and “You” we shall find ecstasy. “When I am in the room with people if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the little time annihilated.”3 An etymology charts a line and the lineage sought is ecstasy, from Old French extasie, via Latin via GreekВ ekstasis, “standing outside oneself.” An etymology is a physics and the evolution seen is one of annihilation, from the Latin annihilo to “reduce Page 2 →to nothing,” a dialectic, in particle physics, between elementary particles and antiparticles that release an other energy. In annihilation is ethos, a nature. “Intelligences are atoms of perceptionsВ .В .В . in short they are God.В .В .В . Three grand materialsВ .В .В . the intelligence—the human heart and the world of elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and HeartВ .В .В . for the purposes of forming the soul or intelligence destined to possess the sense of identity.”4 The identity, which, in the making, is forever shedding. “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother, sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled your affairs, and areВ .В .В . freeВ .В .В . then you are ready to walk.”5 To better love them, to perceive, to apprehend, for the first time, without the names with which you thought to contain them. The stars the suns of all visible Other and Nothing I embody looking up. “I” is an ignorant and blessed composite of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, Eve, and Cordelia.6 The twins have set for the night, but the spoon and the hunter, the lantern’s fire, son, daughter, and husband’s love, waxing? Which element constitutes the familiar dread, tight band around my chest, which its release, in morning light now, my hand pressed to my mouth? Moon waxing, sky a time-water, cars outside one brief whine after another. Light on the table now—raised the shade. My anguished friends John and Simone, their books’ spines up—a pale, dying, boy, starving factory angel at the flywheel. Thoreau’s fearless residence, sister dead, brother dead, his

own lungs drowning as he crowed. Ecstatic Gertrude staring at the American flag in France, reinventing English one word at a time. A first bird’s quick flit. I know the end is not available through synthesis though each moment tends there without arriving, all event if you look and listen long enough, sentinel dog barks announcingВ .В .В . Night for hours long and you did not apprehend it, not for one second, as your body lived, tended toward light, morning. What did you think to find before your family drifted in for tea? “It is possible for us to be mediators between God and the part of creation which is confided us.”7 Page 3 →way I want to say a word for via negativa, the negative way, a way seen variously, leading our pilgrim to ecstasy, and to an essential outside where self is, if not transcended, at least perhaps a bit closer to the promise of soul’s speech. The traditional theological practice of via negativa entailed a radical denial of all definitions in order that the person pursuing this way could be united with the ultimate Real, the word God itself a false promontory on this path dedicated to approach. A concept that crosses all boundaries, the term was described by Dionysus the Aeropagite, by Meister Eckhart, and lives in the figure of the bodhisattva central to Mahayana Buddhism. The bodhisattva—Guanyin in China who changed sex to become the female protector of women and children, to name only one historical figure (did you send me Lucie?)—were enlightened beings that refused to “enter” Nirvana in order to remain in the world for the sake of others. The bodhisattva is capable of transferring his/her supreme state of being to others, and this action can be undertaken in any context, monastic or secular. To be a bodhisattva is to engage a dialectic of energy, then, which is forever in exchange so long as there are those willing to pursue the way. Where entry means arrival, the negative way is lost. Bodhisattva cannot know she is bodhisattva. The negative seeker wishes to describe a balance in order between peoples, their societies, the physical space each inhabits, and the actual Real, which is both in and outside that space when one is openly seeking. I have approached that space in reading, in the letters of John Keats, in the word rooms that constitute Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre, in Thoreau’s “Walking,” in Simone Weil’s essays we know now as Gravity and Grace, in countless texts, some of which I walk through in these pages. The writing I love most demonstrates a commitment to social and spiritual indeterminacy and produces an activist energy that is transferred across to any reader willing to hear. Martin Luther King Jr.’s devotion to the “beloved community” demanded an active passive resistance to laws that were derived from a world status quo instead of the Demos promised by Droits des Hommes. And as his literary confreres lived lives and created texts whose compositionsPage 4 → relied on approach, King’s emphasis was on a process of becoming that would convince by its engendering energy alone: The phrase “passive resistance” often gives the false impression that this is a sort of “donothing method” in which the resister quietly and passively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth.В .В .В . It is not passive nonresistance to evil, it is active, nonviolent resistance to evil.8 Selma Montgomery Ferguson Baltimore Everywhere

By the wayside On the way Samaritan’s way Poor Wayfaring stranger Have you lost your way This is not a game “Very fewВ .В .В . have ever arrived at complete disinterestedness of mind; very few have been influenced by a pure desire of the benefit of othersВ .В .В . yet this feeling ought to be carried to its highest pitch, as there is no fear of its ever injuring society.”9 Approach the word the world where She has never been equal The page the door to the diner the bus where neither He nor She was allowed to sit Lift the pen the cup Raise a sound Raised us all When the coffee streamed down Our face “I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”10 Inhabit your words as you inhabit your body. Put it in (on) the line. Stop being Somebody. Etymology of exist is the same as ecstasy—We are Outside.11 We exist, we rid ourselves of I. We exist, we rid ourselves of You. The sun in son, the deep hole in mine. Living there. Page 5 →

Notes 1. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gitting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 157. Keats’s letter to Richard Woodhouse on the poet’s identity imagines a poet, somehow freely, somehow by virtue of her will to powerlessness, relinquishing notions of identity to further free the vehicle of her perception. American poetry is still descending from British Romanticism, among other lineages. On one side, proponents of self promenade under William Wordsworth’s idea in Preface to Lyrical Ballads that the poet is one “who speaks in the language of real men.” On another, Keats’s legacy of negative capability endures in the ever new forms that the state of being Nobody promised. 2. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1936), 1. In The Geographical History of America Stein is interrogating her lifelong devotion to the opening of possibilities inherent in constructed notions of Americanism, space, human life, and language. Here she is meditating between what human “mind” and “nature” can truly understand. While the human mind knows that individual life, name-bound, indebted, loved, and/or compromised, will end, human nature or sense of Being cannot know this. What the young Keats desires is about to become a physical reality for the elderly Stein. 3. Keats, Letters, 157. Yet, Keats’s urge to annihilation here is not a metaphysical or metaphorical urge.

Rather, it prefigures concepts of annihilation evolved later by particle physics. 4. Ibid., 200. In this letter to his brother and sister, Keats constructs a dialectic that also places formerly metaphysical ideas of heart and soul squarely in a physical relationship to a “world of elemental space.” 5. Henry David Thoreau, Walking (Concord, MA: Applewood Books, 1862), 6–7. Thoreau recasts Jesus’s exhortation to the rich young man who asks him the path to redemption. Thoreau puts this idea of dispossession into play throughout the essay, in service of a wilderness agenda. 6. J’est un autre (I is another). Endlessly, Rimbaud. 7. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1952), 34. Weil’s position throughout the writings we now know as Gravity and Grace places the believer, who possesses no power in terms of the ways in which the world defines the word, as infinitely powerful as a vehicle through which God’s grace is seen. Page 6 →8. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Nonviolence and the Montgomery Boycott.” In Black Protest: History, Documents and Analysis 1619 to the Present, edited by Joanne Grant. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. 9. Keats, Letters, 22. 10. Jesus says this near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. 11. Dear Jack Spicer.

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1.1 Ecstatic Г‰migrГ©

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1. Preliminaries 1. To experience time passing and to know the sensation is the truth and province of poetry. 2. To feel the onus of this knowledge as a physical law. 3. A physical law and a dynamic that winds the experiencing subject into a circuitry: me-in-you, us-in-them, then-in-now, citizen-in-state, nation-in-world, heaven-in-hell. 4. To become a traveler, a willing émigré, in service of that circuitry, to write the poem that is each time and oftener the newest expression of that dynamic, which is universal love. 5. To falter moment to moment in the ever-emerging history of the present, which is not engaged in the language of ecstasy but of set territories, as on a map. 6. To gain equilibrium again in sincere relation to contiguity and to the contingent, which house the actual human condition. 7. To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. 8. To ecstasy, to the émigré, in that order. a. ecstasy, 1382, definition 2 from existani, to “displace,” also “drive out of one’s mind” (existani phrenon). b. émigré, the noun form, definition 2, “An emigrant, one who departs their native land to become an immigrant in another.” c. to émigré, the verb form lost in English, from the French past participle of emigreer, “to have left.” 9. To the displacement of mind for the next, to be driven from my mind. 10. To and in English, my language, and the emigration possible there.

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2. Apology A dying animal, I lean to sounds that hum the work of the world. As Allen Ginsberg writes at the end of “Memory Gardens”: Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work— and what’s the Work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.1 And since I want to be alive until I’m dead, I listen for sounds that, in Spinoza’s terms, are identical with that part of my nature that orients me toward the world. Louis Zukofsky expresses it sweetly in response to L. S. Dembo’s question in an interview conducted in 1969: Q. Where does the idea of love fit inВ .В .В . A. Well, it’s like my horses. If you’re good enough to run, or you feel like running, you run. If you want to live, you love: if you don’t want to live, you hate, that’s all. It’s as simple as that.2 Zukofsky’s work is filled with horses, Homer’s epic horses, Ovid’s Lenti, Lenti Noctis Equi,3 Richard III’s “A horse! A horse! my Kingdom for a horse,”4 sawhorses in Brooklyn during the Depression, horses, after all, made of words, and, most overtly, poems in the sound of a man and horse running madly, “for dear life.” For dear life, I hold much reverence; dear life, so full of things that constitute the reality of the temporal: that I am someone, some one, and you another one, and trees and the sky, and billboards and the news of the international financial Page 11 →crisis daily on the radio! In dear life, where we are all in time together, Baruch Spinoza’s natura naturans,5 all things, more or less, more and less, whole—by how fully what we are is moved by an orientation toward (and not away from) the world, that uber thing! This belief in material, this thinking through things, contra thinking beyond the thing: objectivism (the things, and not the movement, the things and a stance toward them) contra symbolism (the things and a movement and a stance away or “beyond” this world). John Cage: Q. Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? A. There are many ways of saying why. One: in order that each sound may become the Buddha. If that’s too Oriental an expression, take the Christian Gnostic statement: “split the stick and there is Jesus.”6 Cage is speaking here of contemporary music, though he was also a poet and essayist; all of his work sui generis, aiming toward divinity.7 Dear life, the paradise in dear life. Thus, also, poetry, and poetry that calls for, in the most literal sense, a radical calling into question of art qua art, thus poetry that is the fact, not artifact, of attention in time and so is poetry turned toward the temporal. Cage believed that the infinite was available in art, and that the infinite was a mobile, fluid thing, available in moments:

In “Meridian,” a speech written in acceptance of the George Buchner Prize in 1958, Paul Celan defined this same attention to temporality as one paid by “the poet of the creature.” In the same speech, he poses questions about poetic reception, no doubt anticipating poems to come, and poems that would trace his contemporaneity through each moment’s origin: May we, as happens in many places nowadays, proceed from art as from something given and implicitly assured should we, to put it blankly—let’s say—be thinking Mallarme through to the end? Page 12 →Already under way with a radical dismantling of German in service of what he called the “ever yet” of poetry, found only by “someone who does not forget that he speaks fromВ .В .В . his very being, his creatureliness,” Celan would continue until his death in 1970 to emigrate far away from the lyricism of the celebrated poem “Todesfugue” that had established his reputation: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink it we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair MargaretaВ .В .В .8 There are many who believe that poetry’s purpose is to console, to make understandable our failings, our suffering and transient condition on Earth. The same many, however, don’t usually accept that language too is transient, and must change to fit the condition of its use. Celan knew this. Having lost his mother and father, his origin, to the death camps, he knew that there would be no consolation and that the acceptance of his beautiful “Todesfugue” was literary culture’s desire to make comprehensible the murder of millions of people. Inconsolably, Celan’s poetic practice evolved from a deep need to find, in language, an objective place to stand: Art creates I-distantness. Art in a certain direction demands a certain distance, a certain path.В .В .В . But I think—and now this thought can hardly surprise you—I think a hope of poems has always been to speak in just this way in the cause of the strange—no, I can’t use this word anymore—in just this way to speak in the cause of an Other—who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other.9 “Strange—no, I can’t use this word anymore” (emphasis mine). No, indeed. In order to write the poems he hoped to write, Celan had to embrace his stranger, to discover that his stranger was in fact a “wholly other” who would demand a further language. In Page 13 →order to write the poems that would “alwaysВ .В .В . speak inВ .В .В . the cause of an Other,” he and his language must—as he wrote in a late poem—“undebecome.” The radical nature of his poetic enterprise would involve a via negativa that would travel by way of neologism, by way of anagram, by compounding, and by way of poems whose sense is available in the sound they make in time: Spasms, I love you, psalms,

the feeling-walls deep in the you-ravine rejoice, seedpainted one, Eternal, de-eternalized are you, eternalized, you hey, into you, into you I sing the bone-rod-scratch, Redred, far behind the pubic hair harped, in the caves, outside, all around the unending none-whatsoever-canon, you throw me the nine times twined, dropping eye-tooth-wreath10 A poem can be a settlement that lures the settlers into a false sense of security, even while the original inhabitants prepare war. Deeply unsettling, this late poem from Threadsuns sounds the late twentieth-century spiritual anguish of the survivor committed to Diaspora.11 The Psalms turned “Spasms,” the estranged I reaches a you that is both in and outside of him, reaches an eternity, which is also “un-” and “de-eternalized,” unlike the “unending none-whatsoever” canon of established letters. Deeply unaccommodated, our Г©migrГ© is nonetheless turned toward the world in his approach, waiting for what “you” will throw, waiting for the word that comes next. Page 14 →

Notes 1. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 542. 2. Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions + The Collected Critical Essays (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 2000), 243. 3. Slowly, slowly horses of the night. 4. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), V. iv.l.5, p.789. 5. Nature naturing. 6. John Cage, Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University and University Press of New England, 1973), 43. 7. Many genred. 8. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 31. 9. Ibid., 408. 10. Paul Celan, Threadsuns (Copenhagen: Green Integer 112, 2005), 57. 11. A dispersion of people, language, or culture that was formerly concentrated in one place. There is no Poetry. There are only poems, habitually moving toward the next poem.

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A Concrete Memoir 1. Thousands of colossal houses stand shoulder to shoulder, many empty and only an arm’s length from each other. For Sale signs punctuate the front yards. Hummers and SUVs abound; the soccer mom, immortalized by Sarah Palin’s lipstick joke, drives, a scarab perched on her ear.1 In May 2011 in Las Vegas, one in every 57 homes was in foreclosure, topped only by Detroit.2 A hallucinatory American playground visited by millions each month, Las Vegas holds the record for the most cement structures in the world. In February of last year, in New York for a reading at Fordham University, at Lincoln Center, I shared a cab with a woman who researches environmental impacts for the government. She remarked that every building decision made in Las Vegas and environs has been categorically wrong for a desert region. From the construction of Hoover Dam, which made it possible for large populations to move here, to the 3,500 square foot homes proliferating on 1/8 of an acre, 20 to a parcel, to the mega resorts powered by the Colorado River and water bought from farmers in Arizona, Las Vegas is a spectacle of a living, physical crisis, accompanied by the social crisis such unplanned growth assures. In the bastion of the “gated community,” the city’s former elite is now experiencing the same reduced social circumstances as their ungated neighbors. The realities of upsidedown mortgages bring an equanimity to financial collapse. As reported in the local newspaper, tow trucks have taken to crashing through the gates of these communities in order to repossess cars for which people can no longer pay. Thus in crisis, economics and social Page 16 →order go hand in hand: the foreclosed homes of the rich are now rented by several generations of illegal immigrants who pay cash. In this crisis is a sweet reckoning. If we are not yet forced to see the essential truth of our unaccommodated state, it’s because we’re driven by memory, which provides an a priori, a preapproved image or comparison (or loan), a transfer (metaphor) of value from previous epochs to our present state, which blinds us to the moment’s prescience. Much has been written about the function of memory in poetry, with nods to the ethics of remembering as a socially redemptive force. This seems to me an essentially reductive sentiment, rooted as it is in the tired and historically unproved notion that if we don’t know history, we are doomed to repeat it. Often, cultural memory causes history to repeat itself. If I look to Las Vegas as a receptor of this impulse, I’m forced to see that there is really not one structure, most especially not Hoover Dam, which is touted for its engineering (and the bodies of the dead who fell building it), which is of any actual value to the place it is. Las Vegas is the ultimate “bawd of the imagination” of whom William Carlos Williams wrote in “To Elsie” in Spring and All and proof of the falsity of Wallace Stevens’s line “money is a kind of poetry.”3 Las Vegas is our pyramids, built on the backs of the poor who flocked here in droves to share in Pharaoh’s legacy, without ever a hope of sharing it at all. I’m on record as an apologist, even as a fan of the place, and with Walt Whitman, I’m glad to contradict myself. Still, if this place is worth anything, it is as a presentation—not a reflection—of the American self, the desire for an unaccountable self: There are things We live among and to see them Is to know ourselves.4 George Oppen the objectivist, the critic of New York and California conversely, was our uniquely pastoral poet, though unlike Virgil he could only write once he had returned home.5 Las Vegas is also our humanism, our shortsighted humanism, the demos without regard for the earth. I look to the desert for instruction, the instruction provided by thanatos. Historical testingPage 17 → ground for America’s nuclear proliferation, Nevada was declared a natural disaster area by the U.S. Department of Agriculture because of losses caused by drought over the past year. We live on the fossils of fish. I’ve seen them engraved in the rocks. I should like, with

Whitman, to sleep with the animals, and believe, with the late theologian Alan Watts, that “it is high time to go back, or on to animism, and to cultivate good manners towards all sentient beings, including vegetables, and even lakes and mountains”(emphasis added). And deserts. Provoked by the lineage of poetry that looks to the truth in things, I’ve seen, from time to time, the metaphysics of the physical. Oppen: And we saw the seed, The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab Of the tree. And imagined the seed In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green Needles of a redwood until the tree Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth’s Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical.6 What comes after a desert? More desert. I live there.

2. The Mojave Desert will still be here long after Las Vegas is gone. A stretch of land that exists on less than four inches of rain a year, the Mojave supports 2,100 species of plants that survive by storing water. The desert’s aridity, high temperatures, and low air pressure draw in moisture from the Gulf of Mexico in the summer months when the North American monsoon creates thunderstorms as far away as California’s Central Valley. Wind is constant and fierce. This extreme place, named after long vanished meadows, has taught me something about the truth Page 18 →of dispossession, and the books I’ve written chart an exilic path, one committed to soul’s sense above all. Accompanied by texts secular and spiritual, I’ve worked a process of duration and erasure akin to the physical life of the desert I see around me. It’s remarkable and darkly hilarious how miniscule the Las Vegas strip looks from 14 miles out of the city, on Junction 160 and the Rosary Pass. The neon and hotel lasers protest too much, their florescence unable to penetrate the night sky at 1,400 feet, though if you stood on the Las Vegas strip on any night of the year, you’d be tempted to think there was no sky at all. Since I’ve lived in the desert, I’ve written to objectify the first person in the poem, looking for a linguistic origin that was lost in conventional grammar use: Repetition is the essence of music, and of time, and in time, repetitions alter. Working also a notion of generation learned from William Blake, albeit in the fin de siГЁcle of the twentieth century and the first decades of the 21st, I have attempted to write poetry of phenomena—parts of speech interchangeable, durations replacing measure.8 In such a marriage as “Nuptial,” possession is not possible, nor desired, but in the transit I, no longer an “altar,” reaches her others, engaging a body electric. The poem proliferates subjects—I, while not an

altar, is a “bride,” which grows, and with the seeds of the tree, is the Keatsian “unravished bride” of pure art, never completed but alive through perpetual remaking of origins. Having achieved such creation, once or thrice, in book after book, however, is not the point. Page 19 →Just as nature is not interested in perfection of a style, so the poetry of phenomena begins in the latest present. Oppen writes somewhere in his Daybooks that Robert Creeley was ultimately a mannerist, which isn’t true, though I understand that, to a mind as absolute as Oppen’s, any poem whose first surface calls attention to its construction is ultimately trivial given the reality of the derogated earth and its inhabitants.9 Creeley’s poems are intimate; he speaks often of the “company,” and he spent his life making that company in poetry. Near the end of Creeley’s life I was lucky for a time to join it, to be in his company. I believe his work is absolutely “objective” but not in the sense that Oppen takes the word, as Creeley’s work is always aware of the syllable, the line, the living through the language. In that sense, Creeley’s poetics are materialistic, a value system that offended Oppen. Still, in Oppen, who I never knew, whose poetic scale always engaged the politics of being-in-relation, not in-thecompany-of, I find a refusal of company that instructs me: I can be stopped Again anytime By, shame. The man sitting on his stoop, in a world of stoops, defeated; What can anything I have written mean to him? He does not know how he can live his life. I can tell him nothing Unless perhaps he can think of his grandchildren As if they were in some way himself, And I know of no reason he should do so.10 This is a good poem because it survives its limitations. Unlike his seminal “Of Being Numerous” and all of his best poems, which chart a related but ultimately indeterminate nexus of relations—human-human, humannature, individual-state, etc.—, this poem charts a very solipsistic relatedness that nonetheless reaches a position of clarity regarding one dynamic. It Page 20 →is questionable, even vain, to assume that because the “I” feels ashamed, that the man on the stoop is “defeated,” or that he doesn’t know how “he can live his life.” This is a problem with the lyric IВ .В .В . it so often consoles itself by spreading its gloom on its subject. The poem redeems itself, however, by stopping its process of assumption. It stops short of falsehood by recognizing that desire for self-fulfillment in future generations is an act of appropriation, and the poet has “no reason” to perpetuate a bad model.

3. In the Voices and Visions film on William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg says the following about Williams’s famous adage “no ideas but in things”: No ideas but in things means that there is no God, basically. . . . It’s a non–theistic view. Things are themselves. Things are symbols of themselves.11

I understand what he means, but I don’t agree. I understand, too, the historical imperative modernist poets were under to rectify centuries of the pathetic fallacy. “Rose is a rose is a rose,” Gertrude Stein wrote, going on later to add: “Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying вЂis aВ .В .В . is aВ .В .В . is aВ .В .В .’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”12 Looking out my window, everything is itself—the quail, trees, sage, creosote, globe mallow, roadrunner, brick wall around our land, broken toys, etc.—and evidence of an ongoing creation and decreation. The Mojave is where I find paradise or nowhere. Whatever energy things give off dying are also themselves. Things then are also other than themselves. The soul has been reported to weighs 21 grams.13 If, as Emmanuel Levinas proposed, ethics is the antidote to that part of the Western tradition that seeks the subordination of objects and other people to its own power, and if a self truly only comes into being by first recognizing its responsibility to Page 21 →the other, the simulacra of Las Vegas is telling because its mission is to erase recognition of the other.14 Here on Las Vegas Blvd., the aesthetics of illusion triumph—New York is not, Paris is not, and behind each glittering facade the American Dream works the slots in factory production-line order, the means of production and product, lose or win, one and the same. Thomas Jefferson, putting down his pen, is ready to die, having copied the last lines of the Jefferson Bible: There they laid Jesus, And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher and departed.15

Notes 1. “What’s the difference between a pit bull and a soccer mom?” “Lipstick.” 2. Watts, Alan. In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915–1965. (Novato: New World Library, 2001), 22.This week, September 1, 2016, over half of homes in Nevada are still in foreclosure with many abandoned, and mosquitos now are in residence due to all the stagnant swimming pools. 3. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 505. 4. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 163. 5. I think intense cultural loneliness leads poets to write defenses. Think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claims. This passage from Oppen’s Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an amazing statement, both in its ethic of noninclusion and in the strangeness of pride he obviously feels writing it: “It so happens that I well, happen to occupy a position at the precise apex of the pyramid: there is no one that outranks me. First, because I am a poet, which gives me a position somewhere in the upper layers of the cultural pyramid, and finally because I am an unknown poet, which places me at the highest position of our society. I outrank the President of the United States. It is understood that if the President has the temerity to invite me to dinner, I would contemptuously refuse. If I did not refuse, I would no longer be an unknown poet, of course, and would no longer outrank the President” (71). In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva calls this the condition of the Page 22 →foreigner. Oppen literally made himself a foreigner for years in Mexico because of harassment from the FBI for his involvement in the Communist Party. Kristeva’s larger point is, however, about an individual deep sense of being, which recognizes the essential strangeness of the self. Recognition of the condition, she suggests, creates better societies. There are no natural citizens. (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiex [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991].) Oppen works this ethic. In terms of poetics, Oppen isn’t interested in the structure of the pastoral, as, for example, Zukofsky was interested in the canzone, but rather in the way in which the pastoral convention translates across time. 6. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 47. The poem “Return” begins with a quote from Shakespeare’s King Richard II, by John Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who is dying;

This Earth, the king said Looking at the ground; This England. (2.1.47) While Oppen mistakes a Duke for a King, his positioning of the quote is central to the poem’s distinction between earth and state. The Duke is a patriot and a fool. Oppen is neither, having returned to his country where “nothing is ours” (48). 7. Claudia Keelan, Utopic (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2000), 47. 8. I am also deeply indebted to Robert Creeley’s poetry and poetics here. A musician by training, I’ve long been puzzled by the fascination with description over all other sense in much of contemporary poetry. As Creeley puts it in an essay called “To Define”: “A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act. I mean any act, which leaves the attention outside the poem. Our anger cannot exist usefully without its objects, but a description of them is also a perpetuation.” He goes on to define a prosody in the essay “Form” where he allies his poetics with the poetics of jazz where “the beat is used to delay, detail, prompt, defineВ .В .В . the content of the statement.В .В .В . it’s trying to do this while moving in time to a set periodicity—durational units, call them.” Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 473. I go with this. 9. George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 116.The writing in the journal are series of phrases, sometimes sentences, some with words and lines crossed out, so to read sequentially is difficult: “error to see the вЂsuccessful’ as Page 23 →real.’ / then abandon the real world and failure as the pre–real as childish / Creeley finally largely mannerist one remembers the manner not the poem / and the failure of people one sees the land lying beneath the sun the more clearly” (116). Are these three lines connected to each other? Does the thought of “success” lead Oppen to an opinion on Creeley’s poetry, and to an extrapolation to the general “failure” of people which in turn leads “one” to see the natural world more clearly? 10. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 326. 11. William Carlos Williams. Voices and Visions series, videocassette (Washington, DC, Annenberg Media, 2002). 12. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston: Four Seas Co., 1922), 178–88. 13. In 1907, an American physician, Duncan McDougal, attempted to prove the soul’s existence by placing six terminally ill patients on a specially designed bed built on a scale and weighing them as they lived through their last hours. After subtracting the amount of fluids that normally are lost in death, he proposed that there was 21 grams less in each cadaver for which he could not account. HmmВ .В .В . 14. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 15. Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVisionPublications, 2006), 95.

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from Without Sovereignty The Colorado River wends its way through many western states, influenced by underground valleys and canyons, its direction at any given point dictated by the physical reality of the course it must take. Whatever it has become by the time it meets the ocean is a result of that course—acid rain, motor oil, garbage, fish, and grass arriving in a confluence of water that occurs only for an instant before it is dispersed into the larger body of the Pacific. Influence, as the river reveals, has a physical cause and is labile. It crosses categories and moves forward and backward in time. When I first read John Keats’s letters, I was brought back to the direction to pray outlined in the Sermon on the Mount: But when thou prayest enter into thy closet and when thou hast shut thy doorВ .В .В . When ye pray, use not vain repetitionsВ .В .В .1 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advocated versions of what I’ll call negative virtue, a wholly unnatural acceptance of solitude and otherness as the place to begin. Inside the closet, without the misguiding authority of priest or congregation, the seeker is instructed to begin alone and anew. Likewise, Keats’s notion of negative capability participated with a negation of selfhood that would bring him closer to the whole. In the last century, this via negativa emerged in the civil disobedience movements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin King and in their efforts to destabilize the status quo. The passive resistance they espoused involved a concept of self in service to a society of which their opponents would ideally be part. King: Page 25 →What is the nonviolent resister’s justification for this ordeal to which he invites men, for this mass application of the ancient doctrine of turning the other cheek? Things of fundamental importance to peopleВ .В .В . have to be purchased with their suffering.В .В .В . This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.2 Formally, a poetics dedicated to finding the words anew each time might insist that the body of the poem, the shape it comes to be, arrives not from an already-negotiated self, nor from a priori forms. In such a poem, mastery is a paradox, since the poem annihilates all former paradigms of sovereignty in favor of the uncharted Now. In such a poem, poet, subject, and reader are labile, and the measure of success is how all three are changed and enlarged by their interchange. I look for versions of this dynamic in all that I read, as well as in our various human architectures. I’m instructed by its evidence, and also by its absence. When Walt Whitman writes at the end of “Song of Myself”: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot soles,” he affirms his life in relation to his death as a natural and equally life-giving process.3 Beginning with the minuscule atoms that we are here to share, this joyous poem enacts a chaotic reciprocity that refuses point of view, proving that “I” is indeed another, and another, andВ .В .В . I began this essay with a paragraph describing the passage of the Colorado River, and while the description might seem to depict a metaphorical relation between the river’s course and the particular relation between influence and mastery I’ve posited here, it was intended to show that influence in the physical by-product of things that make passage together. Whitman’s power as a poet relies on negative affirmations, inviting an inclusiveness that foregoes nothing in pursuit of his radical democracy.4 In section 6, the poet’s inability to answer the child’s query “what is the grass?” leads him to a tender meditation that is all the more beautiful for its tentativeness.5 Each of his attempts to answer the question proliferates the frame in which he sees the possibilities of grass, until he ventures that grass must be a “uniform hieroglyphicВ .В .В . [g]rowing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman.” Page 26 →The demos Whitman advances becomes physics by the end of the section, when he sees that the equality he invites is also physically true:

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death6 He sees the end of death in the continuity of grass. As I hear “virtue” and “verity” in the green (vert) of the grass, so I believe Whitman’s generosity begets his genius. As translator, he reads a world that has already been authored, and as translator, he is free to see the unbroken chain of existence in which all beings participate, and by that participation, are released. Whitman’s mastery exists in a reverence for generation over and against self-knowledge.

Notes 1. Matthew 6:6–7. Bye-bye, canons! 2. Martin Luther King, “Nonviolence and the Montgomery Boycott,” in Black Protest: History, Documents and Analysis 1619 to the Present, ed. Joanne Grant (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 232. 3. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America College Edition, 1996), 247. 3. Ibid., 351. 4. At least not in this poem. See “It Might Have Begun Differently” for another take on Father Whitman. 5. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 192. 6. Ibid.,193.

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“It Might Have Begun Differently” History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discoveryВ .В .В . the blood means nothing; the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood. It is we who ran to the shore nakedВ .В .В . who cried “Heavenly Man!”1 —William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain While William Carlos Williams is speaking here of Ponce de LeГіn and his bloody adventures in search of the fountain of youth, he points to a peculiarly American feeling of connection to “the ghost of the landВ .В .В . in the blood,” even now as the Bureau of Land Management rounds up the wild horses for slaughter, horses that were left in Nevada by the conquistadors during their search for silver never found. Charles Olson puts it baldly in the opening of Call Me Ishmael: “Americans still fancy themselves such democrats but their triumphs are of the machine.”2 Williams ends his paragraph on Leon: “it might have begun differently.”3 Indeed. The cab driver who drove me home last told me stories in a manner that Williams would have approved, losing all sense of narrative, losing his way between perceptions, and yet I might say I know him. In a life mostly lived losing, he had ridden his horse Caesar in Red Rock Canyon before there were roads to it, had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy for refusing to work on the missiles he’d been trained to build, and he expressed something central when he wondered aloud what this country might have been if the people who settled it had included the beliefs of its aboriginal peoples. Though our literature and nation have produced great pantheists—in the generative outpourings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Henry David Page 28 →Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and in our visionary, aboriginal Native American literature—when Ronald Reagan said if you’ve seen one redwood tree you’ve seen them all, he was only expressing another form of American naturalism that, borrowing from the early churches, produced a citizenry and a literature enmeshed in the throes of predetermination, which our commitment to the physical and spiritual laws of Manifest Destiny made sovereign.4 Though my sense of my self as a poet was informed by Romanticism, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the ways in which nineteenth-century pantheism participates in this spiritual materialism, especially in definitions of the poet and poetry, promoting the development of the poetic mind as an instrument of sorts, linked to a spiritual manifest destiny. Children of the fire, the poet for Emerson, makes “a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”5 Emerson’s argument in “The Poet” is that nature isn’t a symbol; though he constructs a simile, a one-to-one correspondence, to prove it, the nature in this sentence comes second to the poem and to the advent of the new poet Emerson is seeking for America. The arrival of that poet who will “hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own” will “reconcile me to life and renovate nature.”6 Thus, in Emerson’s pantheism there is a desperate humanism, a need for reconciliation of his spiritual condition so that the essence he seeks from nature can again be manifest. He found that poet in Walt Whitman, and though Whitman’s conception of the poet is filtered through an engaged reciprocity with all that lives, he too is seeking an idea of order from nature that will confirm his essential humanism—humanism prescribed by a nationalism that is as lofty as it is virulent. Nowhere more ominously does this occur than in “Song of the Redwood Tree”: A California song, A prophecy and indirection, a thought Impalpable to breathe as air A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or

Hamadryads departing, A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the Page 29 →Earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree In the redwood forest dense7 An onanistic elegy for clear-cutting, the “prophecy” Whitman charts here dictates the emergence of a modernism that will celebrate the destruction of natural lands as a sacrificial rite necessary for the continuous presentation of the New. In a characteristically erotic description of loggers—“with crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms”8—Whitman gives voice to the trees in their dying. Whitman’s redwoods are happy to die, and the dryads and hamadryads are willing to leave the tree, as they are all somehow magically convinced of the natural supremacy of the human. For a poet who claimed equal access to all phases of religious and spiritual traditions, Whitman somehow forgot that pre-Christians believed that the hamadryads were the actual tree, which was fused with the dryad, or spirit, of the tree. If the tree died, the hamadryad associated with it died as well. For that reason, dryads and the gods punished any mortals who harmed trees. (I suppose it is California, and not Whitman, that bears the punishment of the pagan deities, as forest after forest burns, the Pacific warms, and the water in its national parks disappears.) The redwoods, functioning as a Greek chorus, are cognizant of their and all nature’s divinity—“I too have consciousness, identity / And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth”9 Also stoic patriots, the trees pledge a good death in service of human futurity: Nor yield we mournfully majestic brother, We who have grandly filled our timeВ .В .В . But come from Nature’s long and harmless throesВ .В .В . These virgin landsВ .В .В . to the new culminating man, To you, the empire newВ .В .В . we pledge, we dedicate.10 In the collision of pantheism and naturalism, materialism is born, pledged to the new, in human form, above all. “It might have begun differently.”11 And it had, of course, with Henry David Thoreau, the dying Thoreau who, beginning differently, wrote the perfect book in his 1862 essay “Walking.” Page 30 →A persistent Г©migrГ© in his native Concord, Thoreau wrote notes toward the piece in his journals of 1851. He died in May 1862 and in July “Walking” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. “Song of the Redwood Tree” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1873, a year after Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke and his mother died. Before I go on, I need to say without hesitation that Walt Whitman’s vision of humanity has been my constant guide, companioning me in the best and worst moments of my life, and that the animate soul that Ralph Waldo Emerson spent his life delineating, in counter distinction to Plato’s charioteer, shares a vision of the human divine with which my own work participates. In one whole life, one needs as many fathers and mothers as one has selves, and where Whitman and Emerson comforted and led my early self and thought, it is the uncompromising Thoreau who has calmly directed that I must ultimately parent myself. The parallels between the three are innumerable and recorded, but it is worth mentioning here that what Whitman called the modern, in literature and in his conception of the country America should be, Thoreau called the wild, and the differences between the two are more substantial than the similarities. “Song of the Redwood Tree” in section 2 becomes a hymn to Western expansion, after the tree gods have yielded to the “deities of the modern.” At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,

A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere, Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific, Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers, the railroad, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.12 The ecstasy with which Whitman accepts the destruction of the forest for the advent of the modern and the demos it would Page 31 →embody is the same ecstasy he experiences writing of the death of Abraham Lincoln and the American literature such blood sacrifice would summon. Lincoln’s death, the fact of that man’s assassination, “stamps this Republic with a stamp more marked and enduring than any yet given by any one manВ .В .В . the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nationВ .В .В . the imaginative and artistic senses—the literary and dramatic ones.”13 For Whitman, no other great death —not Caesar in the Roman senate houseВ .В .В . or Napoleon passing away in the wild night storm at St. HelenaВ .В .В .—no other country, no other literature—what if the old Greeks had this man, what trilogies—what epics—could have been made out of him!—14 could have commanded the new artistic expression that Lincoln’s martyrdom for the Union had. With “the historic muse at one entrance and the tragic muse at the other,” Lincoln’s death serves to illuminate “the terminus of the secession war, in one man’s life.”15 For Whitman, Lincoln’s death is a birth, a “parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic.”16 The redwoods, the giants of their genus, are also such worthy sacrifice for the books America will produce, and their and Lincoln’s death are our indigenous inheritance. Whitman’s reverence for Lincoln and his truly extraordinary accomplishments continue throughout his life and work to fulfill the promised demos of his body electric. Still, his inability to include the Mexican people in his universal equation, and the falling off of the pantheistic worship celebrated throughout “Song of Myself” in “Song of the Redwood Tree,” for an unquestioned, unilaterally American, thus predetermined, human progress, speak volumes of an American tendency in public policy and in our literature. It is this traditional elevation of the human that Thoreau’s hymn to the wild refutes. An American flaneur happily devoid of the sidewalk Baron Von Haussmann invented for the perpetuation of the modern, Thoreau renames his walker a “saunterer,” or a “Saint Terre—A Holy Lander,” who alone, and wed to dispossession,Page 32 → challenges dominant notions of man’s sovereignty, speaking “a word for nature, for absolute freedom, and wildness” in an essay that will redistribute the balance of power to “regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of nature,” and not its superior.17 Re-membering America, Thoreau will return the gods to the land, re-visioning the Christian trinity via its earthly counterparts: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”18 He will align his wilderness agenda, as does Whitman, with a new literature, and a poet “who derived his words as often as he used them; transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots.”19 The question of the new literature, and the poet who will hear it, comes not from a preoccupation with use, but how closely the poet is to language’s living origin. The new poet then will take the origin of his words, not from parent canons, but from a parent substance, for which favoritism is nonexistent. She will not be “Author,” having released her authority into a process of natural selection. Anticipating our present by a commitment to his own—“above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present”—Thoreau also allies the destruction of the forest with the destruction of civilization:20 A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots belowВ .В .В . in such a soil grew Homer and ConfuciusВ .В .В . and out of such a wilderness comes

the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.В .В .В . Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.21

Refuting the materialism to which Whitman exhorted the new world and literature to pay homage, the Reformer St. Thoreau is already exhausted by the frenzied humanism of his moment, a humanism that could both justify a war against slavery and execute John Brown for his assault on Harper’s Ferry in order to Page 33 →stop such a war. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau suggests that abolitionists—to whom Brown in some respects could be compared— were rangers in a lower and less important field.В .В .В . They could bravely face their country’s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong.22 While Brown had not gone “to Harvard,” as Thoreau had, Brown’s natural education is the one that Thoreau is looking for in the new Humanities. [Attending the] great university of the WestВ .В .В . he sedulously pursued the study of LibertyВ .В .В . and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanities in Kansas. Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar.23 Thoreau argues that Brown’s actions, called “insane,” were the sanest in an insane period where the “law and the slaveholder prevail.”24 Thoreau shares Brown’s ardor for an absolute, his advocacy for the wild in individuals and in literature. This is a literature dedicated to “the West,” which is but “another name for the Wild” because “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”25 While Whitman and others hurry west, chasing Columbia the goddess of Manifest Destiny, who carries a book and strings telegraph wires as she flies above the locomotives in an allegory for “progress”—even as the buffalo and Native Americans flee—Thoreau is becoming the poet for whom he calls.26 Inventing a new mythology in a country that, Gertrude Stein will say just 50 years later, is the oldest on earth, Thoreau critiques 19th-century America by “wilding” each thing he mentions. Even a cow—“who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?”—finds her origin in Thoreau’s mythology, in her momentary wildness swimming the river in Spring becomes again “the buffalo crossing the Mississippi.”27 One wonders what form the beef industry would have taken, not to mention how much methane might have been left out of our Page 34 →air, if such a worldview had dominated. Where Whitman sees the new literature arising from the egalitarian Lincoln’s assassination, Thoreau’s view is emphatically geographical and thus more connected to the naturalists he cites in Walking such as “the younger Michaux” who noticed that “the common inquiry in the newly settled West was вЂfrom what part of the world have you come’ as if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”28 Charles Fourier had provided the utopian model for community in his phalanx, which was the model for Brook Farm where some of Thoreau’s friends, following Fourier’s idea of a society based upon shared or “elective” affinities, tried unsuccessfully to live communally. Thoreau’s Walking provides a topos dedicated to the sustainability of the gigantic wilderness on the earth.29 Abandoning society for wildness, “the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge” for “the Society for Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we call Beautiful Knowledge,” “Walking” follows the grammatica parda of the unaccommodated man, offering a vision of Lear on the Heath, finally content to find himself so deposed. Seeing the sun set and understanding that this “was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and everВ .В .В . and reassure the latest child that walked there.”30 Thoreau subverts dominant paradigms of sovereignty, and paves the way for the modernity of phenomena in American poetry from Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Black Mountain, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, to contemporary poets as different as Alice Notley, Brenda Hillman, Lyn Hejinian, and Eleni Sikelianos.

Notes 1. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing, 2009), 39. 2. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 17. 3. Williams, In the American Grain, 39. 4. I’m not an expert on public policy, but the extent to which public policy regarding land use has often held hands with American naturalismPage 35 → and Christian ideas of predestination seems pretty evident. James Watt, the first secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, testified before Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ, saying: “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 264. 6. Emerson, Selected Essays, 265. 7. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America College Edition, 1996), 351. 8. Ibid., 351. 9. Ibid., 352. 10. Ibid. 11. Williams, In the American Grain, 39. 12. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 354. 13. Ibid, 1069. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 1070. 17. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 225. I’m a fan of sewers, don’t get me wrong, and Von Haussmann also brought those to Paris in the 1850s. Still, the boulevard, championed as an equalizer of the classes, wasn’t quite that. It is perhaps better understood as the place where classes collided, as Charles Baudelaire, the ur-flaneur, described so well in “Beat Up the Poor” and elsewhere. The gardens of the Luxembourg Palace were cut down to allow the formation of new streets, and the Boulevard de Sebastopol was driven through a populous district. A country whose commitment to the secular is impressive, France’s open spaces are also used as toilets. 18. Thoreau, Collected Essays, 239. 19. Ibid., 244. Borrowing from some Native American tribes that did not name their offspring until an action defines them, Thoreau is disillusioned with civilized Man in “Walking,” and it shows: “Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.В .В .В . It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.” Good-bye, baptism. 20. Thoreau, Collected Essays, 254. 21. Ibid., 242–43. Thoreau’s knowledge of forestation and civilization’s need for it was prescient. Page 36 →22. Ibid., 396. 23. Ibid., 398; emphasis in original. John Brown was particularly affected by the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, where a sheriff-led posse destroyed newspaper offices, private houses, and a hotel. He was also aware of the brutal beating of antislavery Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks. Sumner had given a speech to the U.S. Senate, which included insulting remarks about a member of Brooks’s family, and in retaliation Brooks caned him nearly to death. Violence against abolitionists was accompanied by celebrations in the proslavery press, with the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that proslavery forces “are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists.” Brown was outraged both by the violence of proslavery forces and by what he saw as a weak response by the antislavery partisans and the Free State settlers, whom he described as cowards, or worse.

24. Ibid., 391. 25. Ibid., 239. 26. See this allegorical painting, American Progress, by John Gast, which unironically shows the cost of Manifest Destiny: http://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3b50000/3b52000/3b52100/3b52137r.jpg 27. Ibid., 247. 28. Ibid., 237. 29. French utopian socialist and philosopher Charles Fourier is credited by scholars with having originated the word feminism in 1837. Fourier believed that concern and cooperation were the secrets of social success. Fourier saw such cooperation occurring in communities he called “phalanxes,” based around structures called Phalansteries or “grand hotels.” Wealth was determined by one’s job; jobs were assigned based on the interests and desires of the individual. There were incentives: jobs people might not enjoy doing would receive higher pay. He believed that there were 12 common passions that resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1,620 people. He is also known for certain utopian pronouncements, such as that the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade, and in a prophetic view of climate change that the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean in a future phase of Perfect Harmony. Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne were two of the disillusioned “Brook Farmers” who left the commune after its buildings burned down. A man named John Plummer purchased the land that was Brook Farm in 1849 before selling it six years later to James Freeman Clarke, who intended Page 37 →to establish another community there. Instead, Clarke offered it to President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, and the Second Massachusetts Regiment used it for training as “Camp Andrew.” Utopia/dystopia and the grammar wheel turningВ .В .В . 30. Thoreau, Collected Essays, 250. The grammatica parda, or “tawny grammar” of wildernessВ .В .В .

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Revising the Parade Against the Poetry of Witness I used to believe that anger was failure and that to affirm it was to say the other was not me, was to forgive myself in advance. Now I find that I owe myself, the other(s), my country, and my poetics the articulation of this anger. The city of my birth, Los Angeles, continually falling angel, rebuilt after its people took to their own streets in fury, wanting perhaps this time truly to destroy the image made in their name.1 The poetry of witness, the birth city of my poetic, stares out from the bookshelf but I can’t bring myself to reach for it, not any more. The failure of the secular is real; the other is me but her neighborhood is on fire. My suffering with her once convinced me that we were the same, but we are not. This community I built of our assumed common grief is to appropriate a body I do not inhabit and, by extension, is to write a false poetry. The poetry of witness, born from an honorable premise—to suffer with and for the United States—deteriorates in relevance, in secular reality, to the useless witness of the leisure class to which I belong. As a mode in language, it fails to convince. As Robert Creeley says, “A description is a perpetuation.”2 Witness is as rooted in America’s notion of the individual as it is in the dream of democracy and as such speaks to both the poignancy and the falsity of those ideas. To bear witness is to believe in a unified self, in the primacy of the authorial I, that self who is receptive and discerning enough to withdraw to render account. At the same time, the act of witness implies a connection to the subject: I see, therefore I render, and I judge. The act of description takes the place of the community; the I infers by the act of seeing. In other words, the writer assumes knowledge Page 39 →of the subject’s condition, and if the description is accurate, that is, if the audience is convinced, both the I and the audience achieve catharsis. Job done. Yet, tragedy has been dead for years, the individual defunct in the reality of polls and statistics, the machinations of government and media the only versions of praxis left, isolated as we are in our different neighborhoods until the end. To a nation of tourists, travel and television are essentially the same medium. Even poets visit other countries (make a “visitation” as the pope did one summer when I lived in Denver, handing out redemption for a tithe while the hospitals accommodated the very literal bodies of 14,000 dehydrated “pilgrims” unused to pilgrimaging at 5,280 feet) in order then to utter the definitive, pained, but beautiful word. People suffer, often by the hands and words of others. If I am not simply doomed to catalog the travesties year after year, as poet, as legislator, I must work toward the language not yet made. The failure of integration, the failure of poetry to make a difference. I could tell you a story about an American family, a father’s belief and naivetГ©, the march of which they were part, in 1964, in Oklahoma, specks of white in a black water, crew-cut men with baseball bats, the father saying “truth wins” while spray from a fire truck knocked his family down. I could but it is the oldest story, the saddest story, about the conqueror’s inevitable self-slaughter when he fails to see the other in himself. William Carlos Williams met a version of Elsie every day of his life as a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey; it was through the image of her perhaps—“a girl so desolate / so hemmed round / with disease or murderВ .В .В . / some Elsie—/ voluptuous water / expressing with broken / brain the truth about us”—that he was able to realize, in Paterson, that his depiction, his appropriation, his witness of her condition, like the state’s rescue, was neither honorable nor valid.3 It’s in Paterson also where he stops the usury once and for all, burning the library down, reducing the word/image tabernacle to ashes: Fire burns that is the first lawВ .В .В . The writing is nothingВ .В .В . The writing should be a relief,

Page 40 →relief from the conditions which as we advance become—a fire, a destroying fire. For the writing is also an attackВ .В .В . What’s burning, now, Fire? The library? Whirling flames leaping from house to house, building to building carried by the wind the Library is in their path Beautiful thing!4 A relief is a figure or form that depicts configuration; in grammar it is the arc or passage the sentence makes; it is also a place of shelter, and a condition of emotional release. Williams is looking for all three in Paterson, but the only relief he finds is the ultimately unconsoling configuration of the poem’s body. Through it he will face down his misogyny, refuse to forgive both history and himself, and ultimately destroy the “beautiful thing” by which much of his work is informed. I could let you hear as I did, as L.A. burned, my father crying over the phone wire, unbelieving that after thirty years, it was happening again. But this is your history too, your anger, our configuration. I’m not adhering to T. S. Eliot’s notion of the impersonal, nor am I retroactively affirming William Wordsworth’s desire for a poetry “written in the language of real men.” There are no real men or women, the adjective real in itself suggesting that which lives outside it, in another neighborhood, country, and another language. Further, the focus on the intensity of artistic process by which Eliot ordained poetry’s relevance, like Wordsworth’s belief in a “real” language, relied on consensus. Laura Riding: The price of poetic freedom of word was poetry having a mode of expression outside the norms of expression that language, as the common human possession, seemed to ordain to be natural, “ordinary” practice. (Emphasis mine)5 Page 41 →For Riding, the mode of expression was first a renunciation of poetry and then silence, poetry being “essentially an argument of hope” that failed “my kind of seriousness in my looking to poetry for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself.”6 Though the statement of her intention seems to argue the opposite, her renunciation can be read as acquiescence to consensus, a relinquishment of the words “natural” and “ordinary” to the status quo. Riding misreads her subject by overemphasizing the poet’s power and assuming that rescue is possible, or even, from the subject’s point of view, desirable. Poetic meaning, like the meaning(s) people forge in the differing realities of their historical circumstance, is forged by a self who is processing the materiality of circumstance. And selves differ, obviously, as do versions of materiality. A few things are clear: rescue is not possible, and “ordinary” language is a desperate lie based on a myth of homogeneity. I came to this difficult understanding one summer teaching a seminar I called “Creativity and Permission: Freeing the Anger” to Denver educators and social workers, thirty-one years after my family and I marched in a civil rights parade in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From my perspective then, a five year old holding her father’s hand, our stark whiteness had seemed the problem (a kind of unwritten page), our faith a transgression that had caused

the firemen to mow us down. I think I thought they were wrong, but I also knew that they, in their uniforms and shining truck, in the screaming consensus of the standing crowd, were stronger than we. In my mind, our failure was what caused us to move to California, where everybody was different from each other but where the constant sunlight seemed to take the edge off that difference. That summer in Denver, a year after the riots in L.A., there were two to three murders—drive-by shootings, envy killings, mostly children killing children—each week. In one year, Denver had ballooned in population. An influx of people from Southern California had headed “for the mountains,” transforming a relatively tranquil place into a violent one. Each day the travesties were catalogued in the Rocky Mountain News: August 6, 1993: “3 YEAR OLD BRODERICK BELL CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE OF TWO GANGS”; August 7, “A total stranger Page 42 →stops at stoplight; вЂfor nothing,’ sobs sister of victim, вЂthey killed my brother for nothing’”; August 27: “ Gang turf kills Denver boy, 16: вЂhe’s just another black man pushing up daisies,’ says sister of teen”; August 30: “TEEN GETS LIFE NO PAROLE”; September 7: “вЂWhat’s wrong with this world?’ the victim’s brother William asked, as tears streaked his face.”7 My students, the caretakers of these children, took my class hoping for relief from their fear and anger. We read Williams, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Jean Toomer’s Cane, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Audre Lord, Theodore Roethke, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, the early poems of Adrienne Rich, James Wright’s poems to George Doty, Frank Bidart’s Golden State, Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History, among many others. We worked to leave no definition of victimhood unexamined; they wrote poems in the voice of a pornographer, pedophiles, and murderers, all of those others so impossible to love. They created curricula around the readings, generating multitudes of writing assignments, including collaging from the summer’s newspapers. They had come thinking they wanted to be creative with their anger, but they had come wanting to be consoled. I had come wanting to teach consolation. They left happy, I left happy. They wrote lovely letters of thanks. I read them. I thought I wanted this to be an essay on the poetry of healing, of redemption, but a poem of Robert Creeley’s made me face my real motivations: The Hill It is some time since I have been to what it was had once turned me backwards and made my head into a cruel instrument. It is simple to confess. Then done, to walk away, walk away, to come again. But that form, I must answer, is dead in me, completely, Page 43 →and I will not allow it to reappear— Saith perversity, the willful, the magnanimous cruelty,

which is in me like a hill.8 In searching for an “ordinary” language to inscribe the travesties of our age, the poetry of witness fails because it succeeds in consoling. Anger, like the hill in Creeley’s poem, is in me, interminably, inconsolably. In the temporal reality of the human condition, social problems are not solvable via anger or community; neither is the true poetry a vehicle for consolation. We succeed insofar as we face “that form” in ourselves. I will always be an incomplete version of the child in a civil rights parade. It is the configuration of her next word for which I’m listening now. Essentially unforgiven.

Notes 1. In May 1992, riots spread across Los Angeles after the acquittal of four LAPD officers who were caught on video savagely beating an African-American man named Rodney King who had led them on a highspeed chase through Los Angeles County. The video shows the police striking King with batons at least fifty times. King went on national television and pled for calm, saying: “People, I just want to say, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?” Rodney King was found drowned in a swimming pool in 2012, a few years before the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. 2. Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 473. 3. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1922), 132. 4. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), 113,119. 5.Jackson, Laura Riding. The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007) 34. Emphasis mine. Page 44 →6.Ibid. 7. The Rocky Mountain News is no longer. 8. Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 202.

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Reclaiming Paradise Style, in a great writer, is always a style of life too, not anything personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing. —Gilles Deleuze, es(sa)ys critical and clinical Finally, as any real exile will confirm, once you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life, and become just another citizen of a new place. —Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual Responding to Friedrich Nietzsche, who first called artists and philosophers “physicians of culture,” the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze furthered the definition to question issues of composition and the manner in which a literary work implies a way of living, a form of life: “the aim of writing is to carry life to the state of non-personal power.” Equally, the late Edward Said in his Representations of the Intellectual sounded a clarion call, demanding a recommitment to Western intelligentsia’s real and/or metaphorical exile: At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or the smooth, ever-so accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do.1 From the beginning, poet Alice Notley’s writing has negotiated the boundaries of style and shared an affinity with powerlessness, while her life and stance as an artist has participated in Page 46 →Said’s call for diaspora. Born in Needles, California, educated at Barnard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was for a number of years a designated member of the New York school. Years after the death of her first husband, Ted Berrigan, she remarried the English poet Douglas Oliver, was widowed for a second time, and lives permanently now in France. From her earliest work (How Spring Comes, Margaret and Dusty, At Night the States, to name only three of her many books), Notley’s poetry has been distinguished by its porousness, by its availability to competing definitions of self and time, and to the larger contexts provided than to a given self in time. The 1995 books Close to me & CloserВ .В .В . (The Language of Heaven) and DГ©samГЁre share the thematic and prosodic regions that inform the feminist epic of consciousness The Descent of Alette. Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Notley is not invested in system making, but in a rigorous ontological quest that will not be bound by definitions that come previous to the journey: It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience againstВ .В .В . everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form, in principle, open to the possibility of liking.В .В .В . I try to maintain no continuous restrictions in my poetics except with regard to particular works, since writing at all means making some sort of choices. But NO DOCTRINESВ .В .В . I don’t believe that the best poems are just words, I think they’re the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn’t words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we’re in all the time.2 Her disobedience includes, among other things, a continual reworking of genre. While it is true that Notley’s work is resistant to doctrine, it is equally true that she is intent upon retrieval of the body electric, both its first, or lost, language, and its forms: father, mother, and the “forgotten possibility” of the mineral and animal lives inside human life. The retrieval leads to a style that diagnoses the uses and misuses of gender in the communication of conventional culture.

Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-moleculePage 47 → to the point of becoming imperceptibleВ .В .В . not to attain a form (identification, imitation, mimesis) but to find the zone of proximityВ .В .В . where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule.3 It would be disingenuous to continue without pointing out that Alice Notley in no way sees herself, or her work, in a theoretical context; in fact, as she states in “The Poetics of Disobedience,” she dislikes having her work placed in relation to any idea. In a conversation I had with Alice for two years via e-mail she makes this clear: CK: The more I read of your work, the more aware I become of your interest in what you call the “forgotten possibility,” which seems to be a figure more animal, more mineral than human. Humans are always evolving into animals and plants in your imagery.В .В .В . Do you think we should get closer to becoming animal? Is it an idea you got out of reading? AN: I’ll try to answer your question about the animal, but the answer seems so obvious that I don’t know where to begin.В .В .В . I “know” that animals and plants and rocks are as important and knowledgeable as we are. I don’t think they are anything like the descriptions of them biologists make. But most of the biologists I know love animals and use science as a way to hang out with animals. Theory of evolution drives me crazy—because of its pointing towards “man”—and being dreamed up by a man.В .В .В . I feel so stupid because I’m 57 years old and I know very little about animals and except for roaches and rats and mice—and coyotes—they’re disappearingВ .В .В . CK: I guess what I was thinking about in the question was how writing, how when you are really writing, you’re becoming [here I quote the Deleuze passage above]. Your writing seems dedicated to something like thisВ .В .В . the whirling, metamorphic style of Alette, and her dismemberment, etc.В .В .В . AN: What Deleuze says makes me nervous. I dislike it when men talk about becoming women in writing: I have heard other French men say such things. It means they don’t want to give up power to women. They would rather say they are them.В .В .В . I am not Alette or DГ©samГЁre: they are the ones who becomeВ .В .В . [emphasis mine].4 Page 48 →“They are the ones who becomeВ .В .В .” Unlike many of her contemporaries who place emphasis above all on the materiality of the text, or the concept of “the self,” Notley’s poetics seem dedicated to letting the poem itself attain “a zone of proximity” where notions of materiality, or identity, disappear. At least since Dr. William’s Heiresses, she has been interested also in sound in poetry, and particularly, like William Carlos Williams before her, with the differences between American and English speech: EF: You say in the book “Variable foot is maybe about dominance of tone of voice over other considerations.” AN: Because you have to be able to change according to how you’re speaking. American speech is different from English speech in the ways that it speeds up and slows down, and it has to incorporate more or less syllables at different moments in speaking. It can’t have a rigid foot. I think that with the variable foot we are all involved actually in trying to find an American way of going on at lengthВ .В .В . that’s what happened in The Maximus Poems and what happened in The Cantos.5 Her experimentation with measure eventually enables her to go “on at length,” leading her to the epic The Descent of Alette and the poetic sequences Close to me & CloserВ .В .В . (The Language of Heaven) and DГ©samГЁre. In the preface to the sequences, she writes that “the overall form of each work is unique and is a consequence largely of the requirements of a voice: in each there is a dead man’s voice whose urgency and liberative qualities exact a line and a structure.”6 In Close to me & Closer the dead man speaking is her own

father, an “ordinary Southwestern American,” a figure who preoccupies many of her books: “my father died kind of young, and when someone dies young, you remake them.”7 The sequence takes the form of a dialog between the poet and the dead father, the “daughter’s partВ .В .В . characterized by mid-line capitals, which signal, quickly (other punctuation is too slowing) the beginning of a new foot or sub-line.”8 I sit mute Nothing mutely —Flowerlike— I sit being nothing of petals be nothing And then of petals Page 49 →Is a flower A mute flower flowing color Are you Come closer & watch me cry for Watch me cry for new air ____________________________________________ What story are you showing me, Daddy The story you must write of being me9 Being “I,” that is, poet, and “mute” inside her signifier, writing she is syntactically becoming woman, while, in Deleuzian terms, she becomes vegetable: “Flowerlike.” Her disassociation is also heard in the midline, the initial assertion “I sit mute” quickly countered midline by some other part of her voice, “Nothing mutely,” as if to give actual voice to the impossibility of total silence available in the imagesound possibilities of being “Flowerlike.” It reads as an imperative, a command—“Flowerlike”—alone on a line between dashes, and the command propels the music of the next four lines: “I sit being nothing of petals,” a participle construction that blooms into “And then of petals / This new is new shape / Any new thing.” The repetition of “nothing” in each line engenders each time, in the music and in the image, a “new thing.” Too, through the process of dictation, the poetdaughter becomes the instrument through which the father can “make his metaphysical distinctionsВ .В .В . in the thought that metaphysics and religion would never be rightly discussed unless in an ordinary way by an ordinary mind” (preface). From heaven, Father’s “story” affirms her “becoming imperceptible.”10 .В .В . I, almost, transfer a shapeВ .В .В . Because it has to cover rock plants animalsВ .В .В . As well as peopleВ .В .В .11 It’s intriguing that Notley has so often spoken of “story” in her work, particularly in this book, and in The Descent of Alette, when in fact her works’ preoccupation with measure and the dialog form in the books shape what Julia Kristeva calls (speaking of Song of Songs) “song dialog.”12 It’s possible to hear Notley’s Page 50 →measure as a contemporary tempo rubato, which is defined as a “dominance of melody and personal variation in the flexible tempo of the song.” In the Song of Songs, as in Notley’s poetics sequences, the reader is “moved,” literally, in reading, not only by elements of narration or

character, but by incantation and invocation. Notley’s work participates with that ancient text in other ways as well. As the lovers in the Song seek and ultimately do not find the Other, their dialectic serves to multiply the conditions of finding. Loving, and ultimately unable to find her love Solomon, the Rose sees him everywhere. Oblivious to mimesis, writing devoted to becoming finds “the zone of proximity”13 (a space devoted to love) where distinctions disappear. There are enemies to this zone, this writing space, who wield notions of authority over the possibilities of being. In DГ©samГЁre our pilgrim/poet is on a vision quest in the desert with the dead French poet Robert Desnos. Written a year after Close to me, after Notley had moved from New York to Paris and was “looking at the United States out of it,” the book examines notions of authority that survive by constructing paradigms of power.14 A book “cast against a background of environmental disaster and as such almost hopeless,” the three speaking voices in the poem are the dead poet-prophet Robert Desnos, whose voice is “oracular by reason of his known aptitude for dreaming”; the poet, Notley, who speaks through the character at first named AmГЁre—“she is myself, a fact that’s not interesting except insofar as anyone realizes that one is a product of one’s own times”; and the “guidance-counselor/psychologist figure who urges [her] to return to the field of ordinary human complacency.”15 Here, Notley is intent upon conflating time, person, and nationality, so the poem may prove the “phantom realities” of empire: Desnos says вЂI dream I don’t die Have somehow become a soldier, after My death—I know I’ve died before— While the French cling in Indochina’ The year is 1954В .В .В . In my Nam I lift in two hands Water to drink, but it’s bloodyВ .В .В . France’s bloody reign in Vietnam Page 51 →Its one hundred years there become A red tide of algae in the future Multiplying on excess carbon dioxide What’s the connection? It’s the absurd Ductility of human response To phantom realities, colonial empires, Communist and technological ones16 Dead and dreaming, Desnos transgresses his written history where he died in a concentration camp. It is 1954 and he is in Vietnam, able to see both backwards and forwards in time, “through the patterns / blood makes in water.”17 France’s 100-year dominion over Vietnam will cause environmental disaster, that is, “a red tide of algae in the future.” Inside the paradigms of Empire, Deleuze’s zone of proximity exists as a zone of dominance, Desnos’s “escape” from the German genocide of World War II “evolving” into first French, then American, empire and earth’s death. From his dream, Desnos offers a vision of the possible

world: Someone walks towards A flower which bears A mane like the sun’s rays And searing dark center, a mouth To be eaten byВ .В .В . In which there is no Frenchness, Americanness Human or beetle or rock (88)18 Notley’s metamorphic image making shares what Deleuze, speaking of D. H. Lawrence’s concept of symbol, calls “rotative thought”: It is a dynamic process that enlarges, deepens and expands sensible consciousness; it is an ever increasing becoming-consciousness, as opposed to the closing of the moral consciousness upon a fixed allegorical idea.19 “One finds a future” in the mouth Desnos offers, and whose mouth might it be and what future does it promise?20 Deleuze suggests: “The symbol is a process of action and decision; in this Page 52 →sense it is linked with the oracle that furnished it with these whirling images.”21 Certainly the answer to Notley’s new riddle of the sphinx is as “rotative” as the old, if one considers the phases of becoming described in the original, and not the answer: man. While empire proffers proper nouns to engender “controllable” zones of proximity, Notley engages us only with the maelstrom of Being, which refuses the “phantom realities, colonial empire, communist and technological ones” for the “empire of the spiritual,” which refuses singular distinctions. Inside the future the flowers offer us a language, which speaks from “l’ame de l’universe.”22 AmГЁre’s path is thus clear; for love of the universe, she must become a saint and “walk into” the mouth of the flower. Instructed by Desnos to “change the definition of saintly,” she conflates his name with hers, thus becoming DГ©samГЁre.23 It’s no coincidence that her conflation creates “of America” as the definition of life she is constructing here exists in the transit of a radical democracy. To follow Desnos’s instruction, she must first forego Reason, the pinnacle of Western enlightenment, in order to forge a position of constant metamorphosis. In book 2, DГ©samГЁre, looking for the “cure” for civilization’s atrocities, strives to lose her first person, believing that, by shedding identity, she will attain a clear vision of the universe. As Satan tempts Christ in the desert by asking him to remember those who are waiting for him, so does the figure of the “guidancecounselor” appear intermittently to tempt her back to “the field of normal human complacency.”24 Appearing first as an animal, he is startled into this human form by DГ©samГЁre’s detection of his true shape. This man, with a “voice of concern” and the “smile of a psychologist,” operates in the text as a line of reasoning, humanist in its trajectory, which opposes DГ©samГЁre’s quest to let things of the universe stand without hierarchy, as parts in relations.25 Determined by Descartian duality, the counselor is antagonistic to her willed powerlessness. Having succeeded in losing her name, our protagonist continues to discard the names of things, hoping by doing so to fuse the human with the divine. The counselor wants to “Give her back the names,” and while she is tempted, his failed seduction of her gives her back determination.26 In Eros, DГ©samГЁre is convinced first of her singularity, and then of her connection to the universe. Page 53 →Strangely, she must experience exactly what she had been trying to discard—her first person—in order to then give it away. The counselor’s attempt to create a hierarchy based on human reason fails; trying to convince her that her attempts at connection are futile, he says:

His voice returns, faint. You haven’t solved breach. Between world and divine. Chose divine, you leave world. no, I say. World is divine. Human divine. I now define human as divine.27 Joining William Blake, Notley offers a vision of universe in generation, of equality in separateness. If a book establishes a community at the same time it proposes a style of life, it is fundamental to an understanding of Notley’s oeuvre that her books expel audience and that her style is labile. In the biographical note to The Descent of Alette, indeed in all of her books, is the following statement: “She has never tried to be anything but a poet and all her ancillary activities have been directed to that end.”28 This statement recognizes the position of poet as fundamental to, if not the health of the world, then at least to the health of the writer, and so again, without her permission, Notley’s stance aligns with that of Deleuze. Too, her poetics, her style, in fact, the very cadence and line from book to book, is derived, self-described, from a life dedicated to the Poem above all. Her interest in materialism is not driven by a poetics that calls attention to materiality as an end sufficient in itself, as are many of her contemporaries. In the last lines of DГ©samГЁre, the purpose for her disembodiment becomes clear: “I looked out for soul (never wanted more)В .В .В . / something that loves is coming near.”29 Her interest then in the disenfranchisement of the body is to open the “soul” to the larger Soul available in the world. The book thus fulfills the terms of its composition and an attentive reader experiences closure. Yet, the reader will have had to go into exile with AmГЁre to do so, and will have had to discard conventional notions of text and community for Edward Said’s call for diaspora. In diaspora is the freedom of the text, and in diaspora, by implication, the world is returned to the wilderness it desires. Page 54 →The Descent of Alette is an epic, one Notley believes is “traditional.” The poems divide into four books as Alette makes her descent, determined to vanquish the “tyrant,” a more evolved and powerful representative of Western patriarchy than the counselor in DГ©samГЁre. The book also shares much with other modern epic sequences—”Song of Myself,” The Cantos, 77 Dream Songs, Paterson,and Cane, among others—in that Alette is an increasingly disembodied protagonist, acting primarily as a form of consciousness intent on retrieval of the characters and stories of those left out of the tale of the tribe. Where Williams, for example, employs long quotations regarding the national debt, the history of the city of Paterson, and other “outside” sources to deepen the context of his protagonist’s claim, Notley’s participation with the genre begins by calling attention to epic’s ancient mandate as oral act, a text that is to be recited and heard. Each line is enclosed within quotation marks, by which Notley intends to “make the reader slow down and silently articulate, not slur over mentally, the phrasesВ .В .В . they [also] remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice.”30 As a poetic device, the quotations both question and reinforce the authenticity of the story told. They signal the poet’s speech, and she is intent that readers realize that they are listening to a story told, spoken, or sung. Reading, you are not lulled by the conventional anonymity between author and reader. Conversely, the quotations also serve to increase a reader’s culpability. Reading under these circumstances, you are “in receipt” of a text. What you “owe” it says as much about you as it does about it. The poem follows Alette in her journey to find and vanquish the tyrant, who functions in the book as a rotative symbol of patriarchal power. In book 1 Alette begins her quest in medias res, on “a subway, endlessly” without knowledge of “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was exactly.”31 There are countless others on the train who, like her, cannot leave because the tyrant is in charge of the subway and“would make you pay’’ with a currency that is, in effect, “all of you and more.”32 Like his counterpart in DГ©samГЁre, the tyrant is a “mild” man, whose forms evince shifting representations of power and enlightenment. His ability to shift shape is his power; he represents, in fact, the power of mimesis.Page 55 → Alternately, “in his bishops’ robe and gownВ .В .В .В ,” “On exhibit,” “in his mansion,” “in his Vatican,” “in his Parthenon,” “in his administrative officesВ .В .В .В ,” the tyrant “owns form” itself.33 Thus, Alette must “descend” and leave the subway of book 1 to a “deeper, ” “unlimited place” where all is “uncharted.”34 Traveling through a series of caves in book 2, she, like the tyrant, finds the ability to change shapes, but there are significant differences in the shapes she finds.

Unlike the tyrant, whose endless mimesis serves forms of domination, Alette seeks and finds the endless pluralities of an ungendered world, male and female, plant, fish, and human existing in transit. It’s interesting that Notley, while clearly attached to the “eternal daddy-mommy” of Oedipal structure (Deleuze), does not chart a fundamentally infantile conception of literature; that is, at the end of the voyage, or at the heart of the dream of her books, waits neither reconciliation with the father nor reclamation of the mother. As Susan McCabe has pointed out, at least as far back as Plato’s Timaeus “the feminine becomes linked with all that cannot be named, what cannot have form.”35 One of the predominant motifs in Notley’s Descent is women who have their children taken from them; a mother and child in book 1 are “on fire, continuously” until another woman “in a uniform” “took the baby” “away from the mother.” Left without the child, the burning woman makes “an imaginary” “formВ .В .В .” in her arms and where “the baby’’ “had beenВ .В .В .” “she cradled air.В .В .В .”36 Notably, it is another woman, a woman in a uniform, or the businesswoman, the “power” woman, occupying a category owned by the tyrant, who is a nemesis to the reality that Alette seeks. In his reading of Revelation, D. H. Lawrence questions the version of the great cosmic Mother, enveloped in the sun, with the moon under her feet. Planted there, severed from connection, her child is taken away from her “caught up unto God.” She is sent out into the desert that she will never leave, and she may only return in the inverted form of the whore of Babylon. Lawrence is dismayed at what he calls the “modern police woman” who, dominated by brutal forces, finds questionable freedom in imitation of the dominator.37 The freedom Notley senses is possible exists in “the forgotten possibility” of the human reality embodied in both sexes: Page 56 →“I walked to” “the water’s edge” “& looked down into” “the water” “I saw there” “a strange mermaid a” “girl child” “with tangled black hair” “who had a man’s” “hairy chest’’ “& a fish’s” “lower body” .В .В . вЂвЂWho are you?” “I asked” .В .В .В . “She answered quite clearly” .В .В . вЂвЂA forgotten” “possibility” .В .В . “Your people” “have divided” “themselves in two:” “have made” “domination” “your principle”38 Alette avoids the division of which the hermaphrodite speaks. She becomes, in fact, plural; she travels with “the other bodiless” “people” from the “black train,” who in the process of the journey, “temporarily” become her.39 In book 3, Alette discovers “our decapitated” “first mother” who further explains the division described by the hermaphrodite. Retelling the tale told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, she recounts: “In the beginning” “of the world” “there was a whole” .В .В . “Then something happened” “to the male—” “perhaps because he” “didn’t give birth” “He lost his” “connection” “to the beginning” “of the world” .В .В . “Became a fetishist” вЂвЂA thinker” .В .В . “Made me dance naked alone”

“before all men” “made lewdness” “lost its” “mutuality” .В .В .40 It’s Alette’s charge to restore the head to the first woman’s body, an action through which she will be endowed with Lucy’s ancient knowledge, which will assist her in overthrowing the tyrant. In order to do so, however, she will have to “use” the tyrant’s “heart somehow,” which proves to be easy, as he hands it to her, saying “I must be part of” “what happens.” Left with “his heart” in her hands, she is ordered by Lucy to “smear blood from” “the heart” on the line of “separation” between head and body (take that Descartes!).41 “Mother” is thus restored by the tyrant’s blood and Alette is in turn endowed with the knowledge of both genders. Via song-speech, remnant narratives, and lyric, the book’s rotative style dismantles reductive claims regarding narrative and repressive social order, while it reworks lyric to avoid an abstract Page 57 →indeterminacy. The tyrant dead at last, Alette and the others are free to leave the subway. Yet before the Body Electric is restored, they continue to “live in” “this corpse of him,” which is the structure of the city and its routines. The travelers, now free, see a new city, thanks to Alette, where “all the lost creatures” “began to” “emerge” .В .В . “whatever” “whoever” “could be” “was possible” “or had been forgotten” “now joined us once more” “Came to light” “that morning.”42

Notes 1. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 23. 2. Alice Notley, “The Poetics of Disobedience,” http://epc.buffalo.edu 3. Gilles Deleuze, es(sa)ys critical and clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 4 .“A Conservation: Claudia Keelan and Alice Notley,” Interim (Las Vegas)23, nos. 1/2 (2005): 124–26. 5. Edward Foster, The Talisman Interviews (Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, 1994), 96. 6. Alice Notley, Close to me & CloserВ .В .В . (The Language of Heaven) and DГ©samГЁre (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1995.), preface. 7. Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9. Ibid., 8. 10.. Ibid., preface. 11 Ibid., 11. 12. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 95. 13. Deleuze, es(sa)ys, 1. 14. Notley, Close, 87. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Deleuze, es(sa)ys, 48. Page 58 →20. Notley, Close, 88. 21. Deleuze, es(sa)ys, 48. Emphasis in original. 22. Notley, Close, 89. 23. Ibid. 24. Notley, Close, ix. 25. Ibid., 95

26. Ibid., 118. 27. Ibid. 28. Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 150. 29. Ibid., 139. 30. Ibid., v. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 40. 34. Ibid., 41. 35. Susan McCabe, “Alice Notley’s Experimental Epic: вЂAn Ecstasy of Finding Another Way of Being,’” in We Who Love to Be Astonished, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 41–53. 36. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. Mara Kalnias (New York: Viking, 1954), 119. 37. Notley, Descent of Alette, 119. 38. Ibid., 64. 39. Ibid., 45. 40. Ibid., 64. 41. Ibid., 145. 42. Ibid., 148.

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A Hinge-History Robinson Jeffers and Brenda Hillman Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the world falls on decay in the flesh increasing. —from “Meditation on Saviors” by Robinson Jeffers Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rainВ .В .В . Be wet with a decent happiness. —from “The Rain” by Robert Creeley It’s getting harder to love anyone, much less humanity, the genre. Instead of turning with Walt Whitman to live with the animals, it’s tempting to find solace in rage. Robinson Jeffers was good at rage. A poet who, like many of his more studied contemporaries, lived through both world wars, he rode it all out behind the walls of Tor House, his bizarre castle retreat in what was then called Carmel-by-the-Sea. An American naturalist writer aligned with a non-Christian form of predestination, Jeffers engaged the elemental in nature, and his work is much more allied to the legacy of the pre-Socratics, who found origin in earth, air, fire, and water. Yet, in Jeffers, there is no Heraclitan obedience, no solace from the change that the river promises. If pantheism, in the hands of Whitman 50 or so years earlier, had suffered from an overreaching humanism, then the elemental observations of Jeffers, and his construction of a mythopoeic, impersonal universe, erred equally in its urgent drive toward inhumanism: Page 60 →Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet granite sea-fang it is easy to praise Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the herds of people that one should love them? If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder’s delight in the herd of the future. Not yours. Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy1 Unlike Whitman’s redwoods in “Song of the Redwood Tree” which yield themselves, as the poet would have it, willingly to the saw, Jeffers’s nature exists separately (and yet he is privy to its secrets, hidden in his seaside retreat), and somehow purely apart from the herd of “cattle” he sees as “the people.” Caught “in the stone of his own person,” the poet contemplates a Whitmanesque stance: But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once, of man and woman, of civilized And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of living and dead, of human and not Human, and dimly all the human future: what should persuade him to speak? And what could his words change?2 The “if” here seems crucial. The imagination has encountered a plurality, but the mind has decided, via the traditional sentence-driven syntax of Jeffers’s prosody, that the object of his sentence will not be supplied, until the efficacy of such negative capability be brought into question, that is, “what could his words change? ” Jeffers’s nature, as Whitman’s before him, gives him the answer he seeks:

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But the man’s words would be fixed also, Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same present compulsion in the iron consistency.3 In a poem that conflates the separate sacrifices of Oedipus and Jesus, Jeffers here meditates on forms of natural power as an analogPage 61 → to human power. As the mountain is “fixed,” so the “man’s words” are fixed.4 Great men like Christ demonstrate the analog to the priests—“The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love” and yet the priests fail to see the inhuman “blinding fire behind the tragic eyes.”5 The natural world outside of Jeffers’s window, the volcanic Pacific Ocean, and here specifically Point Lobos and Point Sur, were “also wounded with that fire” and “endured.”6 Both Oedipus and Jesus, in Jeffers’s view, misuse love, one “defiling his own household,” while the other “forc[es] the imaginations of men” in order to possess them.7 What is needed, Jeffers suggests, in the “new savior” is “wisdom without loveВ .В .В . / power without hatred,” and, in what will be the foundation of his poetics, a “deep indifference.”8 Jeffers’s deep mistrust of humanity, and Whitman’s deep dedication to the same, dominate each page of their collected works and demonstrate equal sides of despair in the failures of the American experiment. So much later, where do we stand now? It’s getting harder to love anybody, much less humanity, that genre; but love’s the same problem, even while everything, as it changes, remains the same. The more I know, the farther I fall from gnosis. The topos sketched by Henry David Thoreau in Walking is the old topos of Heraclitus, one that Christ outlines in the Sermon on the Mount, and one that will encourage Buddha to homelessness. The trace and extension of their thought continue. From the end of the nineteenth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the new emphasis will be on artistic movements that foreground process over personality. Claude Monet, mostly homeless until Giverny, painting his subjects—haystacks, train smoke, flowers in fields, the lily pond—on four or more canvasses each time, will chase light, as it changes, all of his life and with his contemporaries redirect the focus of painting. Modernist European and American writers, from StГ©phane Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire to Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Paul Celan, Edmond JabГЁs, Wallace Stevens, etc., will make changes and corrections to genre that will draw attention away from, or multiply the possibilities of, the speaking subject and the page. In Connecticut, Charles Ives will compose sonatas that conflate the patriotic tunes of Page 62 →John Phillip Sousa with “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” (making way for John Cage’s compositions years later) and include the sound of boys throwing stones into the river outside the church window. With the cubists and abstract expressionists after them, the focus will expand from following light to calling attention to materiality. Black Mountain, via Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and laterally John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, will insist on “field composition,” explicitly drawing a line back to Keats, and lamenting the exclusion in the 1950s of Walt Whitman from the American canon. The Beat Generation will become shamanistic in its pursuit of the illumination of the human condition, and Jack Kerouac’s work will be called “typing” by Truman Capote. The San Francisco Renaissance with Robert Duncan’s mythic pursuits and Jack Spicer’s practice of the Outside also puts poem before poet. The New York school will continue into a second, already a third generation of poets. The Objectivists, introduced by Louis Zukofsky in his essay in 1931 for the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, will, with the exception of George Oppen, remain largely unknown until the intense canon-formation endeavors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E patriarch Charles Bernstein make them the subject of choice for PhD dissertations at Buffalo, UC San Diego, and elsewhere from the late ’90s until the present. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement itself will intersect and extend beyond the Objectivist platform, and there will be dozens of others, many of them women, whose revisions and additions to poetic practice will shed new light on the polarities embodied in the oeuvres of Whitman and Jeffers, but more importantly in the polarities of the explicitly American psyches the two present. With Thoreau, there will be several who go beyond these polarities, producing work that is as multifarious and miscellaneous as the natural world. With the exception of the confessional and deep image poets of the 1950s and вЂ60s, whose work was canonized in their lifetimes, lyric poetry has been in diaspora, largely because its means and methods are so varied, and the very poets and critics who might have been able to read it have turned their attention to poems and movements

whose attention is away from the claims of a first person. It may be lyric poetry is in diaspora because diaspora is the social equivalent of wilderness. Page 63 →In her citation for Brenda Hillman’s Pieces of Air in the Epic, Marjorie Welish remarks: “She writes as if the lyric poem had a political calling.” When, I ask, has it not? Since Sappho’s fragments, the lyric has insisted upon the reality of the speaking subject, indeed a political claim in a Greece where women were not allowed to speak in public. The English Romantics were engaging the demos of their period. William Blake overtly attacked political institutions, William Wordsworth insisted on writing in the language of real men, Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed the poet as legislator of the universe, and John Keats’s notion of negative capability summoned forms of humanism and inhumanism in endless postponement of self for the possibilities of the world and poem that might arise from such postponement. So late (so early), the poetry most thrilling to me is poetry that negotiates the poles of humanism and inhumanism, and then gives itself away to the wilderness inherent in revealing radical essence. Interestingly, it has been mostly California poets who have advanced this wilderness agenda, with the notable exception of Susan Howe, whose redactor’s position has done much work to bring the book forward to wilderness. This engagement with the wild surrounds Brenda Hillman’s Practical Water. It is a California book, a book in drought, a book that addresses the failure of “the West”—that is, the western state of California, and the western expansion continually demonstrated by our government. The latest volume in her meditation on the elements (a pre-Socratic in Berkeley!), Practical Water is described as a “meditation and an ecopoetics” on water. Asking the central question “what does it mean to live a moral life,” the poems in this collection negotiate the endangered position facilitated by our relationship to water, and call attention to the logic of Empire in such proceedings: What does it mean to live a moral life It is nearly impossible to think about this We went down to the creek The sides were filled with tiny watery activities Page 64 →The mind was split & mended Each perception divided into more & there were in the hearts of the water molecules little branches perpendicular to thought9 Knowing with absolute perception that “everything feels everything,” a repeated mantra throughout Practical Water, Hillman’s point of view works laterally in the poems. The poetic mind that, separate from creation in Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” makes “the slovenly wilderness” surround it, is here “split & mended,” and “divided into more.”10 The poet sees this division in the water molecule’s physical structure, the “little branches perpendicular to thought.” In Hillman’s oeuvre, the thinking subject is part of the landscape, as is the creek, and is moving, as is the creek, and so is in counterdistinction to the Whitmanesque humanism that places foundational authority in the poet’s first person point of view: “what I assume you shall assume, / for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In this sense Hillman shares most with the high Romantic position, which refused nature as a detached object in favor of nature as a creative power. Our shared atoms give Whitman confidence in his ability to speak for the whole; there is no such assumption in Hillman’s humanism, and the refusal of such a poetic model is this

work’s operative poetics: Lower frequencies are the mind What happened to the creek is what happened to the sentence in the twentieth century It got social underground You should make yourself uncomfortable If not you who11 “You should make yourself uncomfortable / if not you who” (emphasis mine). “You” should poet, “you” should reader, and “you” should America? Yes and yes and yes. Our “you” has proliferated. Because the human body is anywhere from 55 percent to 75 percentPage 65 → water depending upon size, because without it the body perishes, because every modern decision made regarding water use and building codes diminishes the water supply, because I live in the desert that some millions of years ago was an ocean, because together you and I must be the cause, and if you and I are part of the cause, then you and I can be part of the solution. As Hillman’s humanism demands a revision of Whitmanesque poetics, so is Hillman’s inhumanism tutelary. Unlike Jeffers’s inhumanism, which, with Robinson, stands apart, Hillman’s distance from the people arises from close observation of Being—which is made of infinite parts and is thus always situated locally, that is, a part of: Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead Had written to the Committee on Understanding Had written to the middle middle of the middle class but it was drinking12 A book mediated by the activism that led Hillman to civil disobedience and participation in the political protests of Code Pink, Practical Water is a call to action to the “middle of the middle” place where our citizens live, unable to believe their actions matter; as well as to our poetries, which so often shy away from active belief in favor of self-expression, or worse, canon formation. The poems in part 2 of the book, subtitled “(of Communal Authority),” were composed via “trance” while Hillman “attended hearings & participat[ed] in actions to make the record collective and personal” and are described by Hillman as “reportorial poetry, ” which she defines as follows: Reportorial poetics can be used to record detail with immediacy while one is doing an action and thinking about something else. Experience crosses over with that which is outside experience; the unknown receives this information as an aquifer receives replenishing rain. Meditative states can be

used to cross material boundaries, to allow you to be in several places at once, such as Congress and ancient Babylon.13 Page 66 →If we must admit that the human body is mostly water, and thus have to question our received, sovereign, and hierarchical position in relation to the water that runs through the land’s body, we must equally consider the possibility that the unknown is formed by both our experience and what lives outside it. Instead of using mind to categorize, Hillman proposes a poetry produced by meditation, or trance, one of the most ancient activities of mind. An often hilarious priestess in her conveyance of the Senate’s pedantic activities, she is again, and often profoundly so, the wisest of all teachers, providing the most deceptively simple advice: whether or not you have the strength to resist official versions that are devastating the earth and its creatures, you could in any sense send back reports. If political parties will not provide solutions, the good can occur when people gather in small groups to work for justice in each community using imagination without force.14 A book with Queen Calafia secretly presiding, and blessed with many visitations from Ishtar and river and other goddesses known and forgotten, Practical Water is also a travel diary wherein Hillman travels widely—in California. In her tour de force “Hydrology of California, An Ecopoetical Alphabet,” Hillman dreams “a dream of a west that would outlast us.” and rewrites the “Apostle’s Creed” (as Thoreau did before her) from the land’s point of view: Following the hydrological typology of the Golden State, Hillman summons “the future of poetry,” where “everything feels everything” an opinion, she avers, “i don’t / just thinkВ .В .В . / I knowВ .В .В .”16 Here, as throughout the book, water, and here the California rivers she follows, are “a grammar” that this contrary “pilgrim with no progress” recalls. “Hydrology” is cacophonous, the syntax threading in diverse directions, and it is a poem for Page 67 →poetry, and to poets living and past. In the trash and detritus on the highway, and the overbuilt California earth, where the natural world survives in spite of us, pilgrim makes her detours: The wild radish thrives in “disturbed places,” a fitting plant for a ravaged earth.18 The moment’s current icon to folly—“the gated community”—which overruns the western United States, is a scar and an affront, as is the notion of a вЂthey’embodied in the proliferation of KB, Pardee, and the countless houses built by developers, who have defaced the once perfect beauty of the American West with their “butt-ugly buildings” it’s impossible to believe anyone could call home. A travel diary, Practical Water is also a startling encyclopedia of plant life, and thus in “Hydrology” we reencounter Whitman’s “leaves of grass,” literally: Dactylic glomereta or “leaves of grasses” are an introduced species, which survive fitfully in the waterpoor state, and reading I’m struck by the question, what are humans if not an “introduced species? Whitman’s recognition of the future and the past running through the present, his incessant and beautiful dedication to the “filtering” of all things in relation, and the pluralities Page 68 →he recognized because of his attention to phenomena is key in Practical Water and to what Hillman is clearly stating is the “future of poetry.” Near Tulare Lake, she encounters both Spicer and Jeffers, reframing Spicer’s famous last words as “Agribusiness did it to our vocabulary.”20 Tulare Lake, drained now, was once the largest lake in the western United States. Reading in the guidebook the “elegy words once formed as in вЂonce formed Tulare Lake,’” our eco-pilgrim becomes as “mad as Jeffers.”21 An eco-liturgy, “Hydrology” calls for a poem, and a world, human to human, human to earth, world to word to the pages that are our earth:

Notes 1. Robinson Jeffers, A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, ed. Robert Hass (New York: Random House, 1987), 99. 2. Ibid., 102. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 4. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Ibid., 33. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 88. 16. Ibid., 89. 17. Ibid., 86. Page 69 →18. Ibid., 88. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 93. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 95.

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A Garden Is a Frame Structure 1. A garden is a frame structure, a story within a story, and the most famous gardens in the world can tell us very much about Western civilization’s need for a green world. Though I have never managed to successfully plant a garden, for some years I’ve been helping my courtyard return to a meadow, replacing grass with thyme, hollyhock for pansy, letting weeds live between verbena and globe mallow. My meadow is a meadow-inprogress, and it is never beautiful, most often a holy mess, though it is briefly—in late April, before the heat sets in—a lovely disaster, with Mexican lavender growing through thyme, thick with blue flowers, and bird of paradise, which takes possession everywhere, blocking sight of the little Buddha who presides during the rest of the year. In July, approaching now as I write, the meadow is prophetic in its death and disarray. The hollyhocks have lost their flowers, the honeysuckle is falling forward from its own weight, and the only thing that is thriving is the crabgrass, invincible bastard interloper, waving in the scorched wind. For much of the fall, it will sit dormant, and only when winter begins here in the Mojave will it again begin to show signs of life. A garden tells the story of civilization, of our fear of the woods, the need for green within boundaries, order, and design. A garden can also be a form of categorization, homage to mimesis, and it is also the place orthodox Christians forever remember in their fallen state, as their innocence. Milton’s Eve understands the lesson of the garden differently; possessor of God’s knowledge, she soothes Adam’s fear and openly leaves the garden for the woods and meadows, the living world that lies ahead. A gardenPage 71 → is a paean to Art, and also a plot designed for use. I fool myself, thinking I am cultivating a meadow.1 It does not belong to me, and all the things I do to it—feed it, don’t feed it, weed it, don’t weed it—are futile, since its pattern is evolving, and unpredictable each season. Am I victim to nostalgia? Nostos “returning home,” because of my algos, my “pain and ache?” If I am, it is for a state I have experienced variously from time to time, as a form of freedom from home, freedom from the possessions my acquisitive self procures for my tribe’s longevity, freedom from the names I’ve given to the people, the poems, and conditions I love.2 If I am nostalgic, it is for experience my humanness has never truly enjoyed, for union with my traveler, my Г©migrГ© imagination, which finds home in the temporary, changing, and radically democratic negotiations with time that will take no prisoners, giving citizenry to any who freely love. A garden is made; a meadow transpires. But a garden can be a meadow transpiring. v. tranВ·spired, tranВ·spirВ·ing, tranВ·spires v.tr. To give off (vapor containing waste products) through the pores of the skin or the stomata of plant tissue. v.intr. 1. To become known; come to light. 2. Usage Problem To come about; happen or occur. 3. To give off vapor containing waste products, as through animal or plant pores. It occurs to me that this is un-American. It just so happens that to know absolutely that possession is a fantasy, and that this knowledge is the truth of poetry, is what civilization is built to supervene. Evolving from its conventional usage since the 18th century meaning to “leak out,” or become “publically known,” the word “transpire” since the 19th century has been commonly used to mean to “occur” or to “happen.” (“It has transpired (def. 1) that Keelan’s view is a transgression.”) Language critics have condemned this usage for more than 100 years as pretentious and nonetymological. (“It occurred to language critics that transpired (def. 2) didn’t need them.”)3

Page 72 →It occurs to me that this is entirely American. It so happens that you can own without possession and that this knowledge is also the truth of poetry. I’ve been cultivating a meadow. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future.”—Frederick Law Olmsted4 The story of the garden in America became the story of the park. Central Park transpired in Olmsted’s imagination long before there was the occupation we now call landscape architect. Coming of age in an America frightened of wilderness, Olmsted generated wilderness in the most densely populated city in the United States. Olmsted minutely planned the park and he saw the wisdom of planting indigenous plants, installing densely growing trees and bushes at the park’s entryways to conceal the inevitable human traffic, thereby creating the effect of an entirely natural wood in what is in fact 843 acres of revolutionary landscaping. A man with very little formal education, whose “Greensward plan” won the city’s competition for the best plan for a park in New York City, Olmsted believed it was “of great importance as the first real Park made in this century—a democratic development of the highest significance.”5 Conceived and constructed between the years 1860 and 1873, the park’s physical space was, and continues to be, a great social equalizer.6 The New York City Olmsted lived in was squalid and overpopulated, plagued by a lack of sanitation and gang warfare, and yet he saw a space for commonality, by looking away from the squalor that surrounded him, to a distant future only he could see. He had traveled elsewhere, of course, and had seen the great English gardens, but Central Park is something quite other than those. He had seen the truth of the modern. “It had come to light that the green wood he saw in his mind needed his mind to occur.” He understood that from now on, wilderness must be a made thing. So late, this seems an essential prerequisite for the practice of any art. Formed by histories of civilization and art that come before me, I arrive in the position of the borrower. I stand before the tableaux, the map that is the living record of people’s choices. With the many before me, I am a pilgrim. Where to go? Why? What I choose to include from the choices made beforePage 73 → me will help chart my path for others to follow. It occurs to me I am myself a result of people’s choices. I find that I am a made thing. But there is also a green one in me, the green man through time, whose appearance is occasional, and always a gift. The story of the artist in America is the story of the opening of the common space, the expansion and contraction of the score, the canvas, of the page, the (be)wildering of the material creation, and the destabilization—through deconstruction—of an idea of use. Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855, five years before construction began on Central Park in 1860, signaling a new, forward direction for the purposes of poetry. In a lovely concurrence, Walt Whitman’s constant provisioning of the poem during his lifetime is an analog to the continual replanting of Central Park in the generations following Olmsted’s death. In the opening strains of Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, and the ballets of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, a spreading out of the possibilities. In John Cage’s “4’33,” a contraction. In the opening lines of Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael: “I take space to be the central factВ .В .В . I spell it large because it comes large here,” an expansion.7 Joseph Cornell’s tiny boxes laugh quietly, leaning against the wall, just as Emily Dickinson’s spare stanzas, shoulder to shoulder with Whitman from the start, too contained multitudes. Expansion and contraction, can you believe it! The artist is alive! The story of the artist in America marries the knight-errant to the green man, resurrecting the ancient inside the contemporary.

2. A consummate American poet, Lorine Niedecker lived most of her life in the marshes of Black Hawk Island, near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. She has become fairly well known in recent years due to her lifetime correspondence with Objectivist founder Louis Zukofsky and the critical apparatus surrounding the Objectivist platform, but primarily through the impressive editing by Jenny Penberthy of her collected works, which place Niedecker where she had always rightfully been—as one of America’s finest 20th-century poets. Niedecker’s entire oeuvre, Page 74 →as Penberthy’s meticulous editing shows, is evidence of the continual expansion and contraction of a maestria. While identified with the Objectivist school, initially defined by Louis Zukofsky in an issue of Poetry in 1931, Niedecker’s work from the very earliest reflects her contact with surrealism, imagism, and knowledge of the major modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound,

T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and D. H. Lawrence. Though she never finished school, dropping out of Beloit College in her sophomore year to return to Black Hawk to assist her mother, who was going deaf, her work and letters to Zukofsky, Cid Corman, and others chart the influence of her extensive reading. She is thus in an interesting position as a poet, at once intently connected to the internationalism, compositional methods, and preoccupations of high modernism, while intimately connected to the language, social realities, and conditions of the folk she lives among on Black Hawk Island. The poems that comprise the book she titles New Goose are situated simultaneously within a present local idiom, which includes the language of the folk and nursery rhyme, a past history of the region in which she lives, the global and international realities of World War II, and modernist writing practice. Most powerfully, aligned with the subversive and proletarian intent of the anonymous poems of the original Mother Goose nursery rhymes, the poems of this period manage to pay homage to the folk, while subtly critiquing the values that make the folk themselves: For sun and moon and radio farmers pay dearly; their natural resource: turn the world off early.8 She had tumult of the brain and I had rats in the rain and she and I and the furlined man were out for gain9 A lawnmower’s one of the babies I’d have if they’d give me a job and I didn’t get bombed in the high grass by the private woods. Getting so when I look off my space I see waste Page 75 →I’d like to mow10 We know him—Law and Order League— fishing from our dock, testified against the pickets at the plant—owns stock. There he sits and fishes stiff as if a stork brought him, never sprang from work— a sport.11 Taken as a group, these four poems from New Goose demonstrate Niedecker’s complicated relationship to

her neighbors and to ownership. The historical tension between Labor and the Board Room (now more aptly Wall Street), which dominates our nation’s politics and policy, here is seen in the modernization of the town, and the movement from an agrarian to consumer culture. The farmers in the first example “pay dearly” in what has clearly become an antiquated position. The only ones truly left connected to the land by their labor, they live between the two phases of culture, the sun and moon that formerly controlled their total activity, now in competition with the radio for vying definitions of the “world.” Niedecker’s own father “farmed” carp, until he lost his business late in life, and she herself lived in increasingly reduced circumstances. The “she” and “I” of the second example share a disorder unspecified, until the third, the “furlined” man, that is, someone of financial means, “completes the equations showing how all three вЂwere out for gain.’” The distancing from the land achieved by agribusiness has been for rural Americans the literal distancing from their means of production, and the last two poems here reveal the psychology that follows such distancing. Far from Whitman’s pantheistic Leaves of Grass, the lawn became popular in this country at the end of the 19th century, and “came of age” with the phenomenon of the suburb (the triumph of private property) and the mass marketing of the lawn mower. Niedecker’s mower is as yet in the poem, merely an aspiring mower, and one who wants to birth a machine. Out of work, our grass-cutter can only dream of the grass cutting possible by the “private woods,” which are Page 76 →unavailable to the public and to the mower.12 Land, in fact, if not owned, becomes by the end of the poem “waste / I’d like to mow.”13 The fourth poem in this group draws the portrait of the fully assimilated, stock-holding corporate man, the “team player,” namely the “Law and Order League” who “testified against the pickets / at the plantВ .В .В .” who is himself trespassing, both by his betrayal of his employees and his fishing for leisure at “our dock.”14 Interwoven between the idiomatic portraits of the people, Niedecker mediates the natural history of the region, which serves to expose the differences in land relation between the European pioneers past and present who settled the area and the Native Americans who lived there before them. The island of Black Hawk, where Niedecker lived most of her life, is named after the Indian war chief Black Hawk who waged war on the U.S. government because of what he felt was the theft of his tribe’s land. With most indigenous people, “Black Hawk held: In reason / land cannot be sold” against a government that was paying its debts by selling the land inhabited by aboriginal people.15 We all know who won the battle. The beneficiaries of the Black Hawk War of 1832—Niedecker’s neighbors, as well as herself—more than a century later sit among their questionable plunder: On Columbus Day he set out for the north to inspect his forty acres, brought back a plaster of Paris deer-head and food from the grocers and bakers, a wall thermometer to tell if he’s cold a new kind of paring knife, and painted in red, a bluebottle gentian for the queen, his wife.16 Inscribed by the spirit of Columbus, the venture capitalist who claimed this country for his queen, the intrepid “explorer” in this poem has been successfully ousted from a “natural” relationship to all of his consumption, down to the painting of a flower that he brings to his wife. Here, as per the Objectivist platform, all of the details speak for themselves, that is, the day he sets out, and the objects of worth he brings back as bounty, withoutPage 77 → lyrical interference from the poet. The war in Europe and Russia weave in and out of New Goose as well, creating a tableaux of involvement in which the folk, despite their apparent lack of understanding, participate. Apparently playing with Pound’s edict dichten = condensare, “to compose poetry is to

condense,” in what appears to be a nod to Williams’s triadic foot, Niedecker formulates her own liberation song. Doing so, she establishes her debt to modernists before her, locating herself both of and away from the folk roots that permeate her oeuvre, as she redefines work through the autonomous activity of writing:

A woman whose financial realities were increasingly precarious as she continually changed jobs throughout the Depression, she nonetheless affirms the “lasting” work of poetry, albeit in the idiom her neighbors on Black Hawk Island would recognize. Continuing her political stance in “Poet’s Work,” she continues to critique American acquisitiveness, recasting value in ontological terms: Property is poverty— I’ve foreclosed I own again these walls thin as the back of my writing tablet. And more: all who live here— card table to eat on, Page 78 →broken bed— sacrifice for less than art18 Lorine Niedecker’s marriage to Al Millen in 1963 allowed her to retire from her custodial job at a hospital and dedicate her time to writing. “Poet’s Work,” written during this period, places the “ownerless” position of the poet at once side by side with those who “own” their residence, however meager. Reversing the American equation for success, the poet claims that “property is poverty,” and ponders the human condition that will “sacrifice for less / than art.”19 Just as Olmsted necessarily looked beyond the immediate environment of 19th-century New York to see the green possible there, Niedecker looks beyond the people to imagine a habitable position. The posthumous poem “Thomas Jefferson,” collected in Harpsichord and Salt Fish, borrows text from the biographies, writings, and letters of Jefferson, locating her concern for the folk directly within the language of one who also thought long among, and ultimately, away from those he legislated. Living in a country that is the triumph of a Hamiltonian vision—“Hamilton and the bankers / would make my country Carthage”—Niedecker pays homage to Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of America depended upon an educated electorate:20 IV Latin and Greek my tools to understand

humanity I rode horse away from a monarch to an enchanting philosophy VI To daughter Patsy: Read read Livy Page 79 →No person full of work was ever hysterical Know music, history dancing21 Jefferson’s vision of the cultivated farmers who would form the citizenry is a story not fulfilled, though the story of the artist in America shares the same urge toward knowledge, innovation, toward the ever-expanding platform of the real. It was a country imagined as a country-in-progress, expanding and contracting through the minds and actions of the people—a country that, Jefferson knew, would not transpire without the people’s continual rebellion against any form of authority that would delimit their collective growth. He looked away to see them. He made himself a meadow.

Notes 1. Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” is an amazing blend of vying poetic stances that William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens made explicit in their war over the function of the imagination. The meadow is itself and it is made again through the poet’s imagination. 2. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1922), 6. William pays tribute to Carl Sandburg’s recognition of this condition in the prologue to “Kora in Hell.” “Carl Sandburg sings a Negro cotton picker’s song of the boll weevil. Verse after verse tells what they would do to the insect. They propose to place it in the sand, in hot ashes, in the river, and other unlikely places but the boll weevil’s refrain always вЂthat’ll be ma HOME! That’ll be ma HOOME!” 3. Ernest Fenollosa. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman. (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 17. I am returning “transpired” here back to its original life, that is, to its point of origin. As Pound showed us via Ernest Fenollosa’s “From The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ” our decision to separate noun and verb functions is arbitrary, and based on a desire to simplify reality: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points; or rather the meeting points, of actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in Page 80 →nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: thing in motion, motion in thing, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them” (17). Transpired transpired to give us back our native freedom. 4. Witold Rybcznski, A Clearing in the Distance (New York: Scribner, 1999), 14. 5. Ibid., 204. 6. The ramble, the 38 acres that hugs the lake on the north end of the park, was originally meant to be a secluded walk away from the traffic, a stroll, a wander, a ramble away from the center of the park. It is the unofficial meeting place for gay lovers, as well as the sleeping place for the homeless. It occurs to me that

the ramble is the natural alternative to the street, so central to modernism, and those who walk there are the green form of Baudelaire’s flaneur. 7. Charles Olson, Collected Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6. 8. Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 94. 9. Ibid., 94. 10. Ibid., 96. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Ibid., 94. 13. Ibid., 96. 14. Ibid., 99. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 98. 17. Ibid., 194. 18. Ibid., 195. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 279. 21. Ibid., 277.

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from Erasing Names, Multiplying Alliances (Salt Lake City via Memphis via Las Vegas) We must take the feeling of being at home into exile; we must be rooted in the absence of place —Simone Weil, from “Decreation,” in Gravity and Grace In the moments after my son Benjamin was born; after he’d crawled the short distance from some other where to my face, my husband took him to the nursery for his first bath. I followed, a nurse pushing me in a wheelchair, and at the first sight of a baby boy in a tub of water, I said, “he’s so beautiful.” The nurse said, “That’s not your son, he’s right there, with your husband.” I said, “He’s beautiful too.” I’d heard that a new mother can’t recognize the face of her own child among a group of babies, but only later did my lack of recognition sting me with its necessity. Benjamin’s growth and continual evolution proves that no thing is really about any other thing but is and of itself, a world becoming. “I also am other than what I imagine myself to be,” intones Weil from the grave. Born into a world where the script is overdetermined by documented, revisionist, and projective claims, Benjamin will need a special mirror. In it, I hope he sees me, his first teacher: Nobody with her hand in his. The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary. Even if in fact we kill or torture our enemy, it is, in a sense, imaginary.—Simone Weil1 Two pressures doing what they do make a new pressure. The poet is one pressure, the subject is another, and the poem is the thing they make when they are together. Page 82 →Wind is another example. It is two currents, two pressures in relation to each other that create erasure. Weil’s preoccupation with physical laws after her religious conversion prompted her to see the word in its terms: “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.” Her understanding of gravity and the spiritual utility that she forged from this understanding enacted models for correct action that were based on function, not ideology—for example, the world won’t change because it should; the world will change because it must. Wind is another example of the physical law of which I speak. The erasure it causes over time is often unnoticed. It is only years later when the caravan reaches a great absence and names it valley that valley signifies in the conventional sense. This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How gain deliverance from a force, which is like gravity?—Simone Weil2 The infant life of my child necessitated a drawing in of self. In the drowse of his first two years, I listened often to the sound of my heart in my ears, listened to it and counted our breaths, in light and dark, waiting for the numbers when sleep would arrive and I might sneak away. Urged by the pressure of his immediate and future needs, we moved to Memphis where I was writer-in-residence at Rhodes College. A city known for its two tragic Kings, Martin and Elvis, Memphis is nicknamed Bluff City because it sits on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. We lived in an apartment with bars on the window, and as I taught only two hours a week and winter made it hard to be outside, we spent most of our time behind those bars. What happened outside was something I could piece together only from the inside out. As I am internal by nature, my experience of the world has always been mediated by language, words of necessity coming prior to understanding. Then, with my sense of self subsumed inside the nonverbal life of my son and my physical existence prescribed by what I could only glimpse between the bars of my apartment, my writing process was

made literal. Martin Luther King had been the figure outside my family that I had loved first. His assassination at the Lorraine Motel had done something indelible to the eight-year-old girl I had been. In homage of him, I began a poem called “Bluff City” that year, negotiating the physical and ontological Page 83 →boundaries of inside and out. Within the demands of my child, I heard the demands of the child that I had been asking me to account for her brokenness. Nobody and her son inside a city where the heart—the King who asked all to consider all—was dead watched the ravaged bodies of his dream steal car after car in their neighborhood that year. First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resistВ .В .В . for while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive towards his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong.—Martin Luther King Jr.3 Just as saintliness is unnatural in the willing mortification of the flesh, and passive resistance is unnatural in its acceptance of pain and death for the betterment of the whole, so I’ve found there is, in the violation of language’s conventions, a wholly unnatural inclusiveness to be accomplished. Weil’s life and work are instructive here. At first an ardent communist, she ended her life dismantling language and thus the empirical self political movements depend upon. “The effort of expressionВ .В .В .” she writes in a letter to Gustav Thibon, “has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being.”4 The essays in what we now know as Gravity and Grace emerge via fragments, the fitting “expression” for one intent on delineating a reality invested in self’s erasure for the sake of the Whole. King’s dedication to passive resistance required a nation’s replacing the text called Self with the one called Other, still being written. To that end, I tried in the long poem “Bluff City” to write toward a constantly emerging center, the poem’s insistence on simultaneity of action from differing points of view, and my experiment in passive resistance beginning with the pronoun. During the year that Benjamin and I lived in Memphis, many of the people who lived in my neighborhood had their houses robbed, their cars stolen. As Christmas approached, the thefts became more daring, occurring during the day as well as at night until one day a woman coming home from work early surprised one of the thieves who broke her nose with a pistol and fled with her purse and car. She was white; he was black. It is often a strange and oppressive solidarity that makes a group out Page 84 →of people, and the neighborhood watch group that formed in response to this woman’s victimization was no exception. The indeterminate, shifting point of view in “Bluff City” came from Nobody’s recognition that the car owners and the car thieves were the two sides of King’s failed dream of social freedom: In Tennessee, it is legal to carry a gun. One night, in their fear, the neighborhood watch group held a young black man at gunpoint; he was stuttering as he tried to explain that he was on leave from the army and only trying to visit his friend in the apartment adjoining mine. In the dialogue I overheard that evening, King’s idea of the “beloved community” was again failing to become. The passive resistance method vital to the spirit of the civil rights movement, a method “physically passive, but strongly active spiritually,” meant refusing to see the community as either the center or the goal, focusing instead on resistance to those ideas as the vehicle for a new inclusiveness. The neighborhood’s watch group failed simply because it gave autonomy to the word neighborhood, thereby limiting its possibilities. Method in “Bluff City” is predicated on a commitment to a passive body (i.e., the text that refuses a center, i.e., my self, refusing to be named) in order to keep a promise to the child I’d been and to the child Page 85 →I held in my arms on the floor in an apartment in Memphis. A poetry of social wholeness, in the terms of “Bluff City,” In grammar, parentheses contain that part of the subject that is conditioned additional, supplementary, and indeed not truly necessary to the sentence. In algebra, parentheses standing side by side multiply reciprocally all the factors inside them. In trying to find a way to write the interior, which in some crucial way still belonged to the

child I’d been, I’d been forced to retrieve her from that part of my mind that had been relegated to the margin. Conversely, in trying to find a way to reach the utopian outside King had proposed, I discovered the charity of proliferation that allowed me to merge pronouns and to place clusters of words side by side. In the process of writing “Bluff City” I pored through civil rights documents and found an account of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, black children who had sought to enter that city’s all-white Central High School in 1957. Her action paved the way to implementation in Little Rock of the Supreme Court’s ruling that made segregation in schools illegal. “She Walked Alone” describes Elizabeth’s walk through a screaming white crowd, which included the National Guard, and the two white citizens whose assistance saved her from being hanged. In “Bluff City” Elizabeth works as an extension of the unnamed child who takes various forms in the poem. In depicting her experience, I attempted to grammatically multiply both the military action of the guards and the charitable action of the two good citizens so that the reader is compelled, simply by reading the poem, to witness both forms of action:

Page 86 → Are these impossible claims to stake for language? Perhaps. I believe not. Yet, if they are, the place I want Benjamin to live lives there. The endeavor acted on the surface of “Bluff City” is ultimately a spiritual endeavor, an activity that the reader reading shares: The world, all that exists exterior to individual perception, is for a poet such as I, the place I try daily to find. Benjamin’s presence demands my renewed commitment to that process. I knew the world was far less than perfect; but before he was born, I tried my best to ignore “mere” outside reality, thinking, I suppose, that this was the best way to gain access to Nobody and the sainthood she promised. Most of the versions of community I see in my life—cities, suburbs, universities, conferences, shopping malls, political protests, public gardens, museums—fail the deepest meaning of that word because they are predicated on a status quo that is anathema to the living spirit of the world. The versions of truth and beauty they embody are contained by racial and gender identification, income brackets, libraries, professions, seasonal changes in style, a fear of the wild, commitment to “Culture.” I am probably, like Groucho Marx, too self-loathing to be in a club that would want me as a member. I knew I felt this way, and yet I brought Benjamin here. I keep believing that if I continue to experiment with language, I will eventually find the architecture of community I find lacking here. Page 87 →The structure of the Vietnam Memorial has pointed me toward this version of community, confounding as it does the boundaries of memorial in its architecture and emphasis on the memorial seeker—you there, with your walking shoes and tracing paper, searching out a shape along a black wall. The Civil Rights Museum is also true to the world in its shape. Constructed in the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the museum begins on the balcony where he was shot, begins at the end of Martin’s life, the effect of which immediately calls into question traditional narrative function. In time, we are always in the middle of the story, and in being in the middle of the story, we participate with the present and the past simultaneously. The experience of walking in the Civil Rights Museum conflates that sense of time. Its circuitous passageway and walls are completely filled with documents regarding civil disobedience and the crimes perpetuated against those who sought equal justice, creating a sense of infinite culpability in the museum patron visiting there thirty years after the fact. . Here, in the model of a bus, the patron must sit in Rosa Park’s seat and hear what the bus driver said to her. There, she must sit next to a mannequin of a young black on the set of a diner while watching footage of the living man having coffee poured over his head in 1961. All the while, recorded voices are reading the debates of civil rights

through American history, the cacophony through which I found, on my last day in Memphis, the beloved “outside” at last: Page 88 → Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace.В .В .В . Moral gravity makes us fall towards the heights.—Simone Weil10 Music rises from a musical bear as he slowly shrinks in size. It’s picnic time for the teddy bears, and all the teddy bears are having a wonderful time today. The barnyard animals are all losing their voices, goodbye moo, goodbye neigh, goodbye cock-a-doodle-doo, goodbye, goodbye. In the pig’s pink fur, the single socks, the one, two, three, four, five, six, etc. year-old clothes, broken bikes, punching bags, video games, computers, friends come and gone, grandpa gone, grandma mumbling to her mother in the memory care home, all of it, what we are to each other, Benjamin, exists in every changing increase and breakdown. I arranged the pieces together in your room each night. I willed you to see the piecing as whole.

Notes 1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1952), 6. 2. Ibid., 58. 3. Martin Luther King Jr., “Nonviolence and the Montgomery Boycott,” in Black Protest: History, Documents and Analysis 1619 to the Present, ed. Joanne Grant. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 288. 4. Weil, Gravity and Grace, xi. 5. Claudia Keelan, Utopic (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2000), 25. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Ibid., 28. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 3–4.

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Snow in America (Boston) I suppose I had to begin somewhere, seeing how the myths of our culture fought their tormented struggles under the late night street lamp. Some 19th-century soul was always yelling at me from between the clapboard houses where I lived, mouthing its weary vowels in the 4 a.m. screams of Nick, my neighbor next door. He wanted, it seems, for someone to take a ride with him, through the avenues of dark, closed shops and residences of Porter Square and into the nineteenth century forest from which Young Goodman Brown could not return. Faithless. There was nothing to do but ride over the cemented, long-lost witches’ burial grounds and Native American skeletons that the used-up New England landscape concealed, into the history of the present. If I was his audience and I chose to go with him, I believed I would ride, finally, into my personal myth, a postmodern Anna Karenina who found love in the process of sitting in the lamplight, defying the train’s wheels in successive vision and revision as I claimed what was my own. This is about identity. A writer, teacher, woman, and surveyor of my sad America, I wanted to ask: Who do we think we are? One day in summer, Nick put a note on his car that said: “This is a ship and no one cares.” The neighborhood watched through the humid days of August as Nick disassembled to reassemble his 1963 Dodge. I saw him often asleep by the car, some tool necessary for his work firmly gripped in his hand. In tragedy, the hero, determined by fates, goes through peripeteia, the recognition of one’s own character, in the climactic moment of action that reveals one’s essential identity. Oedipus discovers, after searching diligently for the cause of the plague in Thebes, that he is the cause, his pierced eyes the testimony to the consistency of his character. The audience, as witness, is jury Page 90 →for both his action and for their own reaction. Their looking is his validation, and if they stand convinced, they leave the theater reconciled not only to his circumstance but also to their own. I am preoccupied with the others. I want them to listen, but more, I want to lure my readers here. I want them to think they came of their own free will. While the greatest work of the writer is to give a landscape to the abstractions that humans value, the work of the teacher lives in helping students locate that landscape. Though I already knew it was myth that first guided me in writing, I began to understand its power when, almost inevitably, I found its present in the primary notion of a “quest” that arrived abstractly in the hand of the many beginning writers I taught. They’d come, almost apologetically, with their versions of a journey, sometimes through a “dark forest” or “big water” and the possibility of a “clearing” or “dry land.” I tell them to read Nathaniel Hawthorne for allegory made concrete. They all shared one trait—wonder—opening the conversation with “I’m not sure where this came from, butВ .В .В .” Flannery O’Connor called this region the “country with its body of manners that the writer knows well enough to employ.”1 For O’Connor, the principal means of travel was the southern American landscape she compulsively navigated, demanding that retribution be paid, if not by the characters of her beautiful stories, then by her reading audience. In that world, Hazel Motes’s “Church without Christ,” based in his “rat colored car,” becomes the vehicle through which O’Connor examines the intellectual’s journey away from faith. While it is the internal journey—how does one move from judgment to compassion? —that drives O’Connor, it is the undeniable “Southernness” of her world that gives it tangible force. For me, the journey began in departure from a home in California, a baby step taken away from the house stuck on a hill that turned yellow and spread dust across the windows looking down on a Shell Oil refinery, the refinery’s single flame unbearable in is steadfastness, refusing even to flicker in its task there near the Carquinez Straits. A house filled with a fine, tan dust I knew was sifting about his head in the evening light as I left my husband over 3,000 miles of phone line. A departure of spirit, then. A dust I had seen before, in James Joyce’s “Eveline,” the dust that Page 91 →Eveline chooses over the unknown, which settles in the reader’s mind and “over the yellowing photograph of the priest she had never found out the name of, hung beside the colored print of the promises made to Blessed Mary Alacoque.”2 A tangible dust then. A bad spirit whose entry signifies the motion of a soul prematurely withdrawn from this race, this process of becoming

that designates us as caretakers of the other animals. I once heard a Native American say that if a bad spirit sets a fire—“you think you’re crazy when you set that fire? You’re not crazy! Bad spirits are bad! They’re bad!—pour water on that sucker; piss on it if you have to.” Journeys of the human spirit, thus ones repeated to share. My students were surprised in their pride of creation, sometimes angry and disbelieving when I told them I don’t know where I am in their field, their vast water. They were sure that this was their landscape. I think they are right. All I ask for is an anchor. I was held in those years in Massachusetts by the vigil I kept each night in honor of Nick, the madman, my neighbor. More nights than not in the years I lived there, he came into the narrow driveway between my house and his, pleading for someone to “go for a ride.” In the winter moonlight he looked like Job after the whirlwind; his hair grown longer and whiter over the years, he stood beside his car, in spite of himself. The only response he had had to his midnight calls, as far as I could tell, was from the neighbor on the other side of the street. Coming home from work one day, he found Nick playing marbles with his children. He threw him off the porch, yelling “You’re the last thing I hear at night and the first thing I see when I come home.” Everybody saw him and nobody could bear the sight of him. Or was it the thought of him we couldn’t stand? What is put to test when a madman is your neighbor? One week, Nick’s car caught on fire. Firemen came in great yellow coats, armed with sledgehammers, and broke all the windows looking for the cause. Nick cried and pulled his hair. His wife swept pieces of glass. The car sat there for months, now completely subject to any predator. Blackened all over, its glassless windows made me feel remorse. For him? No. I saw him many days, standing by the stop sign at the end of the street, kicking a mound of snow and yelling “Fuck you, fuck you.” I knew what Page 92 →he meant. In this strange New England, the snow didn’t signify anything after a while. Winter itself seemed a notion you were born with. From the day you arrived home from the hospital or arrived here, as an adult from a warmer coast, snow and its possibility was always present. It faded color—nothing was safe in that white erase—and after the plows pushed it into a small mountain, it turned gray and stayed until May. In almost every yard on that block there was a statue of Mary and three kneeling children. I believe it was a shrine to the last recorded Catholic miracle. Mary appeared to three children in Guadalupe, hence Mary and her children thrived there through the winter, covered in plastic. Why do I find this so appalling? I believe the answer lies in the answer to my first question about remorse. I felt remorse for us. I felt remorse for myself and for the man I thought of as Nick, though his name was Bill, and for his wife, and for all of us who shoveled snow and covered the statues while he shouted “Fuck you” at the snow. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t his fault, or hers. I just kept thinking we should have joined him there yelling “fuck you” at the snow, or ripping the plastic off Mary, or maybe yelling, in answer to his “fuck you,” “I love the snow! I love the snow!” Maybe then at least that neighborhood would have found a little balance. Maybe then at least the resolution of this story wouldn’t come in recognition of the horror of a human existence whose choice was to place the emblem of charity in your front yard while the lack of that abstract virtue went around in the form of your husband or neighbor yelling “fuck you” at the snow. I understand how a person can lose her mind. The equation is as easy and as cruel as neglect: in light of his wife’s reverence for Mary, Nick’s only love, his car, went up in flames, nobody asking why or how. Robert Penn Warren understood a lot about people, as his character Jack Burden in All the King’s Men reveals: They say you are not you except in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are alone in the car in the rain at night, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really sit back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you or anything. There is only the Page 93 →flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus which isn’t really there, between the you you have just left in the one place and the one which you will be when you get to the other place.3

Jack Burden is a coward in the novel, and while I knew somewhere inside myself that Nick was a hero, I never figured out until now that he was a victim of self-love. Oedipus put out his eyes in the revelation of his own, true self; I moved away. But when I look back to that narrow street in Somerville, Massachusetts, it is the midnight vigils with Nick that I see. It got harder for him. After his car burned up, he got a bicycle, but he wouldn’t ride it; he just half pushed, half dragged it down the street. His kids started visiting him then, but Nick was no fool. At the end of every Sunday visit I witnessed, he’d wait until his son and entire family were in the car with the windows rolled up, and he’d tap politely. His son, snarling in Portuguese to his mother seated at her station on the front porch, would jerk the window down and wait. Each time, Nick’s comment was the same. If they loved him, they’d come on Monday or Thursday, any day but Sunday. “I hate Sundays,” he’d say. “An easy day, a dumb day.” Maybe we all fool ourselves. Maybe I’ve been too hard on his wife, his family, the neighborhood. What, after all, did his wife (why doesn’t she have a name in my mind? why didn’t I give her one? is she the real subject of this essay?) gain from her love of Mary? A resignation to suffering, thus her silent sweeping of glass? A dead son, an unreal husband? And the others—Nick was crazy, God knows, raging through a day, demanding an audience for a life that was so difficult and, really, cost too much to view. But a voice like a god sweeping through my ears says that, in him, I could make room in myself for us, and by doing so, was whole. Page 94 →

Notes 1. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 9. 2. James Joyce, The Dubliners (Library of Alexandria, Kindle Edition, 2001), 23. 3. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 184.

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Nearing Cradle “Go it,” IВ .В .В . cried aloud “and go it stronger!” —William James, from “The Earthquake” I have had to learn the simplest things last. —Charles Olson, from “Maximus to himself” Here or nowhere is our heaven. We can conceive of nothing more fine that something which we experienced. —Henry Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Last week I stood on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and watched a dazzling light surge across the crest of wave after wave. The line of light rose and moved parallel across the water’s swell until the wave broke and the process began again. In Half Moon Bay, on the beach of my beginning, I stood with my dearest friend Sarah for hours and watched a light so other it gave new life, both of us laughing, amazed and blissfully ignorant of the name of what we were witnessing. I was only sure that whatever it was, it was far more central than the polls we’d watched all day, moaning, and that whatever it meant, its intention was true. Beyond it was what it brought about in me, and in my friend, both of whom in different narratives in our week together would try to account for the baffling middle portions of our personal lives, where the promises of the beginning had disappeared somewhere into the perpetual promises of death, drug addiction, and infidelity, all those human, all too human, tropes. Though I am far too often void of it, I have remained committed, on the ground and on the page, to wonder, and have followed sometimes happily, Page 96 →sometimes not, those who seemed to be filled with admiration, amazement, awe, and marvel. When he woke to what we now call the San Francisco Earthquake in the early morning of Apri1 18, 1906, William James, a visiting professor in ill health at Stanford, took the earthquake personally, in the best sense, writing, “it, cameВ .В .В . directly to me.”1 Ever intent upon “the business of subjective phenomena, ” he quickly set about gathering the “data” of personal response to the quake: All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this feature in their experience. “It expressed intention,” “It was vicious,” “It was bent on destruction,” “It wanted to show its power,” or what not. To me, it wanted simply to manifest the full meaning of its name. But what was this вЂIt’?2 What was this it? Indeed. Over the next day, I learned the name of my “it” was bioluminescence, which occurs in many dinoflagellate species (such as plankton) that in a large mass produce phosphorescent light, turning the foam in the ocean electric blue—though I am still processing the full power of its name. What is truly remarkable is that I saw it with Sarah, my first teacher in wonder, and that it appeared in an otherwise remarkably grave time in our personal and national lives. The line of light rose and moved parallel across the water’s swell until the wave broke and the process began again. In Half Moon Bay, on the beach of my beginning, I stood with my dearest friend Sarah for hours and watched while, “out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” we, women and ever young girls again, heard the sea whisper each to each: me. I know what poetry is because I’ve lived through periods without it. After years of thinking of the poetic encounter as one where I find my newest “her,” I feel now the experience is beyond gender, and my restive urge toward a feminine semblance simply the old problem of self-knowledge: “Do you know her?”

“Uh, no, sorry, can’t say that I do.” “I knew her yesterday, but today’s another bowl of fruit.”3 Page 97 →I see now that she was never missing and that poetry is engendered in the catalyst of the expression of one who is awake and listening to a natural phenomenon perhaps never apprehended before, at least not certainly by the one who is awake and listening now. William James helps me to the point: For “science,” when the tensions in the earth’s crust reach the breaking-point and strata fall into an altered equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective name of all the racks and shaking and disturbances that happen. They are the earthquake. But for me the earthquake was the cause of the disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent was irresistible.4 So much for categories! Poems are not earthquakes perhaps, but each poem is a singular event, one that has no relation to poems that came before except that each poem was also written in time, which is individual, and shared. Though after an earthquake there may be more aftershocks, as in the poet there will willingly be more poems, each one will be the enactment of its own activity. Traditional meters and forms, “free verse,” the syllable, the line, the new sentence—well, painters have paint and brushes and sculptors stone, marble, and metal, but an understanding of the finished painting, of sculpture, of the poem, is not the experience of which I speak. The poetic encounter of which I speak means as music means, that is, via an instrument that is the poet and through the notes she plays, and thus is ultimately ephemeral, and transitory, as is the consciousness from which it originates.5 And as with the reactions James records of the earthquake’s intent—the poem will happen to you.6 All of Walt Whitman’s great poems record this process, and never more thrillingly than in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and placeВ .В .В . I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution I too had received identity by my body Page 98 →That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.7 Whitman recovers the body electric by allowing the metaphysics of the physical world to simultaneously place him in the past, present, and future—the only true place of real time in human consciousness—and affirming the truth of this reality by paying homage to his body, the individual instrument of all truth. The body is the personal vehicle, by which experience is received, and thus is and is not the whole story. Though we collect the data that lead us to rationally know that earthquakes aren’t personal, one’s experience of an earthquake is personal, as the news anchors reporting the myriad individual devastations in Haiti modernize the supernatural warning and retributions of ancient mythologies. Thus poetry is and is not primarily attached to self-expression: “Does it feel good to say so?” “Today it does. Yesterday was another animal, one who got away.”

Notes

1. William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1216. Frederick Olmsted, another devotee of “it,” was hired to build Stanford University, but was fired after he refused to implement some of the grandiose structures Leland Stanford demanded as monuments to his dead son. In the 1906 earthquake, all of Stanford—with the exception of the buildings Olmsted built—was destroyed. 2. Ibid., 1216. 3. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America College Edition, 1996) 394.Compare Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life”: “O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, / Oppress’d with myself that I have dared open my mouth, / Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me / I have not once had the least idea who or what I am.В .В .В . / Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sands beneath.” 4. James, Writings, 1216. Page 99 →5. Readers whose own experience validates the truth of its reality may share the experience the poem conveys. Readers whose own experience leads them to dismiss the truth of its reality may dismiss the experience the poem conveys. The experience the poem conveys may also alternately be sought or eschewed by readers whose relative experiences lead them toward or away from the truth of the poem’s reality. Reading poems involves objective and subjective criteria. 6. As this poem did one morning when my son Ben was a baby. Claudia Keelan, The Devotion Field (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2004), 48. MORNING WITH BOY AND DOG Repetition denies being Something died I No longer live Here Here an unfamiliarity I prepared One morning to the next The sun is out! Not to have prepared “painstakingly” Is not to have denied it You decide what it Life intrudes on the page All those interruptions to curse and curse? That’s where it lives 7. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 310.

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Native Stranger In this nation Which is in some sense Our home. Covenant! The covenant is There shall be peoples —George Oppen, from “Of Being Numerous”

1. It just so happens that the dispossession I have proposed throughout this book will write my own destiny, albeit perhaps sooner than I expected. The process of revolution ousted the Egyptian dictator, Muammar Gadhafi died in a hole, the military returned to power in Egypt, ISIS has forgotten the body of Osiris, our black president has left office, and the bodies of black people unjustly killed by the police have filled our screens more than at any time since the civil rights movement worked its perilous magic. In 2011, it seemed that an opening was beginning in the Middle East; the people were sharing the public body, but now that body has disappeared, retreated into factions written long ago. Across the United States, in what we call now the Great Recession, beginning in 2009, what we call the “public services”—in the guise of firemen, policemen, nurses, teachers, university professors, those who fuel the present and future needs of the service industry called the American people—were facing loss of rights and jobs en masse,1 as the state legislatures, dominated since the midterm elections of Obama’s first term by the Republican Party, worked to reduce deficits by gutting the social sphere. Occupy Wall Street movements sprang up in Page 101 →protest in New York City and many major cities across the country. In Las Vegas, the university had begun preparing to declare financial exigency, that is, bankruptcy, which meant that anyone could be fired, and tenure, which promised to keep us academically free to read, to write, to teach, was so much dust. In Wisconsin, despite the ramrod approval in the House by the Republican majority of a bill that strips unions’ collective bargaining rights, thousands demonstrated at the state capitol while Democratic senators fled the state in order to stall voting on the measure. Scott Walker won in Wisconsin, but thanks to a philosophy professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas outing the university’s plan in the Boston Review, we were on television as the public university to save, and so were, for the moment, saved, though I have never felt at home at home since.2 Feeling as if we were being driven from our chosen names, standing on the precipice of our country’s identity, we were forcefully reminded that we were not native, here in the place of our birth and/or becoming. In the 1937 Everybody’s Autobiography Gertrude Stein comments that, for many reasons, one of them being the end of a European point of view, or perspective, Europe is over. Then, the future was American: in the body of the Г©migrГ© Albert Einstein, in the corpus of Stein’s exilic oeuvre, in the sheer innovation of the machine, the future was American. Watching a Moroccan battalion in the French town of Biligin, she thinks about the word “native”: It is queer the use of that word, native always means people who belong somewhere else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think that they belong anywhere, because they had once belonged somewhere.3 In these ponderous sentences, she shows the desperation of Empire. As the many who left other places to come here in the pursuit of happiness, so we are now being forced to emigrate from origin, we who believed, if not in

power, then in work, social work, and in the truth of our work. We are now our stranger. We are the actor collectively, at the end of Wim Wenders’s Until Page 102 →the End of the World, lying in a fetal position, desperately looking for our image on our phones; we are Casper Hauser whispering, Mother, the world is too much with me. A country dedicated to the expansion of Empire as other empires before us, America is increasingly now cannibal, feeding on the social body, which as an entity owns less together than one billionaire.4 It would seem we would grow accustomed to this winnowing of home, and that our faith in the collective body would teeter and collapse, but there remain those still striving for the body electric, even as we watch its disintegration. It has been so before—this is our moment, those of us living now, to again choose the means of our living and dying. What the result of the current revolutions in the Middle East and in our own country will be will only become apparent after we are gone. That my tenure is not assured and my university may fire me, that the future for my children in this country is unstable, that the police will continue to profile African Americans even as the mayor in New York City has outlawed stop and frisk—this is the reality that the truth of poetry fights, just as the public service announcement “This is not a test” may come too late for those looking for shelter. Wondering how to continue writing a book devoted to the truth of dispossession while cheering my countrymen and women as they refuse to give up the fruit of their labor, and while as the ever new struggle for equality in “Black Lives Matter” punctuates the airwaves, I reread the speech Martin Luther King Jr. made in Memphis the day before he died, the one now called “I See the Promised Land.” He is in Memphis because the sanitation workers are on strike. He begins by telling the audience, in a beautiful overview of a millennium of human history, that if God had given him the choice of when to be born, he would say: If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy. Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.В .В .В . But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are Page 103 →responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South AfricaВ .В .В . Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, TennesseeВ .В .В . the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”5 So the speech begins by affirming his own existence, and the choice he would make again, given the choice, to be alive in the moment he is alive. In other words, he is not wishing for a different world—he is satisfied that the moment in which he lives is the only one for him. He accepts the terms of the troubled temporal around him, and gives courage to the audience who are there in solidarity for the worker, even as tanks roll down Poplar Avenue in Memphis. He ends the speech with reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, who King points out was of “another race,” and who, unlike the two men of the same race who have passed the injured man on the road and offered no help, gives him aid.6 The stranger, the nonnative, helps the man lying in the road because, King explains, “he had the capacity to project the I into вЂthou’ and to be concerned about his brother.”7 What is ambiguous about the words “I can’t breathe?” How can this country have a law like “Stand Your Ground?” The stranger Samaritan helps “his brother,” who shares neither the same blood nor the same country, because the fallen brother’s perilous condition is in need of a savior. King’s speech is prophetic with his impending death, urging the audience toward the “promised land” of equal rights, even as he declares “I may not get there with you.”

2. “[I]t is difficult to now speak of poetry—” writes George Oppen wearily, in 1960, recasting William Carlos Williams’s earlier “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there.”8 The social contract weighs too much, and you hear the exhaustion of bearing it in the work of poets whose oeuvres show at least as much distance Page 104 →from the social body as they do connection.9 The people become “a great beast” in Paterson and Oppen’s later poem “Of Being Numerous” is more indebted to “the shipwreck of the singular” than to the promise of its title. Oppen’s resumption of writing after twenty-five years of silence occurred after many years in the Communist

Party, where work for “the people” is objectified through the ever evolving process of revolution, which in Marxist terms means an equal share in the means of production. In “Of Being Numerous,” he demonstrates the dynamic that is created in New York City, “a city of corporations,” where the possibility of “home” has disintegrated into the competition between people and the places they inhabit: Strange that the youngest people I know Live in the oldest buildings Scattered about the city In the dark rooms Of the past—and the immigrants, The black Rectangular buildings Of the immigrants. They are the children of the middle class. вЂThe pure products of America—’ Investing The ancient buildings Jostle each other10 The “youngest people,” one could suppose the “native” Americans, are not connected to “the immigrants,” except by their condition of living among each other, hearkening back to the premise of the poem: “there are things / we live вЂamong and to see them / is to know ourselves’” This connectedness, this onus more aptly, of connection, is apparent only through a process of “investing,” which creates, not in the two groups of people, but in the buildings they inhabit, a competitive “jostling,” Page 105 →and for what? The indeterminacy of the subject reinforces the disconnections—who are the “children of the middle class?” And who, or what, are “the pure products of America?” Far from the figure of Elsie in the Williams poem in which the line first appeared, here the buildings have more value, indeed more affect, than the people, which Oppen may be suggesting is the truth-turned-product of our country. Real Estate is deciding who is worthy. Oppen witnesses the negation of Olmsted’s vision, and proof of Thoreau’s claims 100 years earlier: This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle. I am awakened almost every night by the panting of a locomotive.В .В .В . I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetryВ .В .В . to life itself, than this incessant business.11 King’s martyrdom to the social body is well known, as is the failure of the “beloved community” he imagined as our definitions of civil rights expanded into the twenty-first century. Listening to the public discourse on the news one would believe the worst thing about the Baltimore riots was the fact that the baseball stadium was closed and that tourism would take a hit. Freddie Gray’s broken body didn’t come up. While I live in hope that the Black Lives Matter and all continuing protests and movements will urge our country toward its implicit promises, I believe that the central work of poetry, the work that remains in a state of revolution, is attached via negativa to clarifying the real locale of our ultimate dispossession, while creating a space for futurity

and paradise here: Page 106 → Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s entire life was spent fleeing persecution for his ideas, but inherent in the social contract that his work promotes is a vision of shared responsibility upon which democratic societies are based. While King did not make it to the land of “equal rights” with his contemporaries, the work he did in his brief life is a beacon to any oppressed people. In “Rabbits,” the will toward self-erasure is an ecstatic paean dedicated to the continuing world. I should like to revise W. H. Auden’s famous phrase.13 Poetry makes something happen when nothing else can.

Notes 1. Ah, Whitman: “Endless, unfolding words of ages! / And mine a word of the modern, the word EnMasse” Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America College Edition, 1996) 394. 2. Thank you, Todd Jones! 3. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937. Kindle for Mac, location 303). 4. Michael Moore makes a point about wealth in this speech given in Madison: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael–moore/america–is–not–broke_b_832006.html 5. Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 280. 6. Ibid., 284. Though I’ve read and heard the parable of the Good Samaritan referred to many times in my life, in reading King’s description of the actual Jericho road where the story takes place, it became real to me, rising above a moral tale and into the actual reality of a place where a choice had been made, just as any place at any moment is. Allegory, from the very beginning, has always been rooted in the thing itself. King writes: “You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road.В .В .В . It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You Page 107 →start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous roadВ .В .В . and the first question the priest askedВ .В .В . was, вЂif I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ The Good Samaritan reversed the question: вЂIf I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” (285) I wonder: By not asking what will happen to him, hasn’t something already happened to you (me)? In the fraternal embrace of the American ideology, this is a good time to ask both questions. 7. Ibid., 284. 8. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 180. 9. In a last interview before she died, Adrienne Rich talks about poetry’s “obligations” with clarity in the Paris Review: Q. What are the obligations of poetry? Have they changed in your lifetime? A. I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not to pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference. (Paris Review blog, March 2, 2011, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/03/02/adrienne-rich-on-%E2%80%98tonight-nopoetry-will-serve%E2%80%99/ 10. Oppen, New Collected Poems, 176–77. 11. Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Cape Cod and Miscellanies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 456.

12. Claudia Keelan, Missing Her (Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Press, 2009), 77. 13. “Poetry makes nothing happen” (from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”).

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Lessons of the Whirlwind (Dedicated to Jenny Gropp and in memory of Stephen Gropp-Hess, who saved us) Noun, revolution: (from the Latin revolutio, “a turnaround”) 5. Geology:В period of major geologic change: a period during which the Earth’s crust changes considerably On April 27, 2011, a massive tornado crossed Tuscaloosa where I was teaching my last class at the University of Alabama, which had been spent examining the relationship of humans and nature via Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Brenda Hillman, and finally George Oppen. As the tornado moved in, it was apparent that nature would have the last word. A few of us ran in torrential rain to the theater building, which looked like an old bomb shelter, pausing to yell at a bunch of English majors who were watching a live stream of the tornado in a room with huge windows. The weather announcer was screaming “it’s a tornado of a career,” the gigantic mass approaching us evidently a tornado worth a Pulitzer or the weather world’s equivalent, when it hit a transmission tower in the downtown, and the hallway where we crouched went black. Before the power went out, I saw trees and cars lifted from the ground, the fact and proof of inhuman power, a thing beyond our ability, our will, to power. The tornado was horribly beautiful. The devastation was another thing. In the bomb shelter, it was suddenly quiet, and we left the building with quiet good-byes, thinking to drive home as usual, which proved impossible. After two hours of trying to cross the devastated town, I got out, and Page 109 →my feet are still recovering from the long walk home barefoot through household debris and fallen trees (I was wearing crazy heels for some reason that day). Cars were reduced to mangled pieces of metal, and I saw a few upside down in a church parking lot. I left my car by a tree that had been split down the middle, which was in front of a house that had also been split in half. In the days after, I felt helpless to leave. Practically, there was no power to operate the gas pumps. The National Guard had been sent to keep order and redirect traffic away from the carnage, which meant it took hours to go anywhere. Three elementary schools out of six had been destroyed, and some of those kids, and many other people, were homeless and the Red Cross needed blood. The other reasons for staying had something to do both with the need to see the people I’d met there and to give my condolences to the place itself. In the days following the tornado everyone I met gave his or her version of the experience. Each time, the story trailed off into the unspoken, which nonetheless was a shared space, a devastated, communal space. I visited my students, my shrink, the parents and teachers of the Capitol School where my daughter Lucie went to school, the women in Edelweiss bakery, in order to say a last good-bye, which was saying good-bye to an idea of permanence we’d seen disappear in the tornado’s path. The town’s distinguishing feature was the centuries-old pine trees, many now fallen, mammoth roots ripped whole from the earth. On May 1, 2011, news came of Osama Bin Laden’s death and we watched frat kids on TV dancing in front of the White House. It didn’t mean anything to me. The Black Warrior River was twice its usual size the day we left. On the first day of our travel back to the West, the Mississippi breached I–40 out of Memphis, and we were diverted east for 14 hours through Arkansas in a convoy of trucks and cars. Lucie and I, along with our giant schnauzer, Jasper, who lay sprawled in the back seat, drove at three mph, passing houses and rice fields underwater. We found out later the landscape flooded as a result of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blowing of a levee on the Mississippi River to save Cairo, Illinois, which apparently was a disaster for the towns and small farms in the eastern corridor of Missouri and Arkansas. Two weeks, two disasters, one natural, Page 110 →one madeВ .В .В . or maybe the National Guard was demonstrating natural selection? Was the earth waging a revolution? The desert in its drought had never looked so good. Noun

revolution: (from the Latin revolutio, “a turnaround”) This morning I read a passage in Thoreau’s August 21, 1851, journal entry. He is thinking about Canada and its government, and he is comparing American citizenry and government favorably to it: I saw that I should be a bad citizen—that any man who thought for himself and was only reasonably independent would naturally be a rebel. You could not read or hear of their laws without seeing that it was legislating for the few & not for all. That certainly is the best government where the inhabitants are least often reminded of their government. Where a man cannot be a poet even without danger of his being made poet laureate—where he cannot be healthily neglected—& grow up a man and not an Englishman merely.1 The word revolution in the 13th century was directly from late Latin, “revolutionem,” a revolving, from past participle stem of Latin revolver, or to turn, roll back; by the late fourteenth century was “originally from Old French, revolucion, a course or revelation of celestial bodies.” The shift to a sense of “instance of great change in affairs” is recorded from the mid-15th century.2 Noun revolution: (from the Latin revolutio, “a turnaround”) 1. overthrow of government: the overthrow of a ruler or political system 2. major change: a dramatic change in ideas or practice 3. complete circular turn: one complete circular movement made by something round or cylindrical, for example, a wheel, around a fixed point 4. Page 111 →circle around something: a complete circle made around something, for example, the orbit made by a planet or satellite around another body 5. geology: period of major geologic change:В a period during which the Earth’s crust changes considerably and major features such as mountain ranges may emerge Copernicus named his 1543 treatise on the movements of planets around the sun De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). By the end of the sixteenth century, the primary definition of revolution passed from the physical aspects of the word to its now common meaning indicating a revolt to change the social order. It’s clear that the human demonstrations of the word are continuously colliding with the physical examples we’ve seen in the past ten years. Though it has become a constant point of reference in our national narrative, the actions taken by fourteen suicidal revolutionaries in New York, Washington, DC, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, stand in stark, diminutive contrast to the natural disasters we’ve witnessed in the subsequent years: in the destruction of New Orleans and Biloxi, in the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, in the earthquake in Haiti, in the series of massive tornadoes across the states coupled with rising rivers and floods globally, all associated with climate change. Earth and humans inextricable codependence, the orbit we make together, is in terrifying display as of late. Last night I watched a show about vultures on the Nature channel and a woman scientist said, “If you love the animals, you have to love the vulture. Without them nothing could last.” Even the vultures are on the decline, as the antibiotics that farmers introduce into the feed of their cattle and pig livestock are passed through their carcasses to the vultures, which are dying en masse now. Thoreau’s August 21, 1851, entry moves from a distracted contemplation of people and government to this acute observation of the growth pattern of the blue verbena: I perceive that only one circle of buds about a half dozen blossoms at a time, and there are about 30 circles in a space of 3 inches.В .В .В . I think it was the 16th of July when I first noticed Page 112 →themВ .В .В . yet the blossom have got not nearer to the top of the spikes.В .В .В . Thus this triumphant blossoming circle travels upward driving the remaining buds off into space.3

It’s the indeterminacy of the flower’s enterprise that thrills Thoreau, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson rhapsodizes over the soul’s indeterminacy in the “Circles” essay. What Thoreau first understands as necessary to self-reliance in this journal entry, specifically a revolution of spirit, which refuses the prescribed definition of “poet laureate,” for the ever evolving processes of poetry itself, is demonstrated in the circle the blossoming flowers make, never to be completed, around the stem. Still, even curmudgeonly Henry David wonders at his preference for flowers over humans: I sometimes reproach myself becauseВ .В .В . I skip men so commonly and their affairsВ .В .В . do not elevate them at least in my thought and get some material for poetry out of them directly.В .В .В . I will not avoid then to go by where these men are repairing the Stone BridgeВ .В .В . seeВ .В .В . if that will not yield me a reflectionВ .В .В . it is narrow to be confined to woods & fieldsВ .В .В . why not see men standing in the sun and casting a shadow—even as trees—may not some light be reflected from them as from the stems of light—I will try to enjoy them as animals at least.4 “If you love animals, you have to love the vulture.” I love the vultures in Walt Disney’s version of the Jungle Book, a singing Beatles-like quartet whose keen knowledge of death lead them to assist Mowgli, the “man-cub,” who must outwit the menacing tiger Shir Kahn in order to at last leave his home in the jungle for the village of people where he ultimately, reluctantly, belongs. The vultures constitute a choir, their songs the requiem we sing, tying the burning branch to the tiger’s tail. The vulture’s song is an all-consuming and vast wind coming through a town where you’d begun to live, which leaves death in its wake. Now, as I think of it, the tornado taught me what I’d been trying to teach all semester, what I’ve been trying to learn all my life, and trying to practice since I woke to the poetry of the eternal present. Death made our lives abundantly imminent in those Page 113 →moments, hours, and days after the twister left. My dog rode out the tornado, crouched in a hallway for twenty-four hours, while Lucie hid under the sinks in the men’s restroom at the NASA Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where she was on a field trip, and which was, thankfully, spared. In the days following, before we were rescued and able to leave town, Jasper, Lucie, and I huddled together in our car, listening to the radio and to the people who called in from the surrounding areas who had ever newer stories of someone who had survived, someone who had died, and most who, like us, were waiting for the electricity to come on, for the cell phone to work again, for the daily things of life to come back to us and allow us to spend our days performing the necessary, illusory tasks that human industry created to help us forget that we are not in control. I petted my old dog’s beautiful black fur. I breathed deeply into Lucie’s neck. We sat under pine trees and ate what we could salvage from the rotting refrigerator. We loved each other. We were alive. Jasper Johns, nine years alive, whose animal life taught me much about acceptance of otherness, whose ultimate act of affection was to lay his giant head in my lap, my dog who survived a tornado, could not survive the surgery that we hoped would help him eat again. When I stop now, struck by the memory of his agonized look into my eyes, which begged “please just let it be over now,” I simultaneously see him, one day before his death, tearing through the desert after the unfortunate rabbit whom he triumphantly caught and dropped on the back porch, his interest lost now. And here we are still, all of us, always in that interval between now and then, serenity and pain, life and death, that interval that I have tried to write, which all the poetry I love inhabits, and people I love from moment to moment, accept: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lovest well shall not be reft from theeВ .В .В . The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down they vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down

Page 114 →Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity5

Notes 1. Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journals: 1851 (New York: Penguin Group USA, 1993), 170. 2. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=revolution 3. Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journals, 171. 4. Ibid., 175. 5. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003), 99.

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The Citizen-Stranger An Ethics of Definition

Citizen 1. An inhabitant or a city or town; especially one entitled to the rights and privileges of a free (man)

Inhabit 1. To live in, reside in, occupy or populate some place. Men seek one another in their incondition of strangers. No one is at home. —Emmanuel Levinas I write for myself and strangers. —Gertrude Stein The first definition of the citizen is instructive, withholding reference to which the rights and privileges of the free are owed. A citizen is one who inhabits, and one who is allowed things wed to a condition of being free.1 Citizens freely be.2 If the word had retained its original etymology, without the narrowing down of the possibilities to whom and to what the citizen owes her freedom, the single condition of the citizen remains in the free pursuit of one who wishes to be free. Let the deportations begin! Being free, becoming free, makes the citizen strange, it estranges the citizen from the normal individual living beside her, who has accepted and enforced the second definition of citizen: a member of a state; a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it. The state’s Page 116 →citizen works for conditions inexplicable to the freely pursuing citizen, employed by way of ecstasy where there is no security or surcease from labor (retirement). Forever in the position of becoming, the free citizen is now and always a stranger. She is an Г©migrГ©, illegally living beside her neighbors. Having founded her illegality, writing, she is once again free, finding more allegiance to others illegally employed, standing all day in front of Star Nursery, chopping vegetables in a restaurant kitchen, mopping the bathroom floors in hotels or houses, perhaps caring for the children in and for whom her authorized citizens, the members, the native and naturalized, pursue their pleasurable allegiances, content in the promised protection their membership provides. I have worked beside such Г©migrГ©s, in kitchens in Boston, where I thought I pursued membership into the tiers of my profession, far and away from the part-time professor-poetwaitress I was, teaching English to my illegal friends before the shift began, with and among people who still believed in the chance for a New World. It was the New World in them that gave them rights, not their births in another country, not their names—Isaiah, Nang, Ting, Sergio, Dee, Patrick, Kako-san, Mori-san, Marcel, Carlos—and others absent from this roll call because I can only remember the living quality of their unauthorized work, notwithstanding the letters bestowed upon them at birth by some woman or man dead or alive in some place far from Boston. People if you like to believe it can be made by their names. Call anybody Paul and they get to be a Paul call anybody Alice and they get to be an Alice perhaps yes perhaps no, there is something in that but generally once they are named the name does not go on doing to them so why write in nouns.3 Call somebody citizen; does the name establish the condition? In Gertrude Stein’s lexicon of value in “Poetry and Grammar” it is the activity available in the verb, the “mistakenness” of the adverb, the indefinite nature of pronouns, the “work” of the conjunction, the “inevitability” of the period, that garner respect.4 By contrast, nouns, adjectives, commas, question marks (“it is alrightВ .В .В . when it is used as a brand on cattle”), quotation and Page 117 →exclamation marks are “servile,” while semicolons and

colons “have no life of their ownВ .В .В . they are dependent on use and convenience.”5 Prepositions are king and queen, because they can “live one whole life being nothing but mistaken.”6 The mistakes of nouns and adjectives, semicolons, question marks, and so forth are their dependence upon verbal conventions, which to Stein are “unnecessary names” of things that in and of themselves don’t “work,” don’t “have a life of their own.”7 Normative grammar is besieged. By way of mistakenness, activity, and work, Stein develops a language that destabilizes the nominative case. While Stein’s pursuit is utopian, she attaches it to a pursuit of national identity that is keen on multiplying the means and modalities of the freeman. By doing so, she creates a linguistic habitat that opens and multiplies within the possibilities of residence. In The Making of Americans Stein sets out to tell the story of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the oldВ .В .В . for that is what really is and what I really know.”8 American identity exists “singularlyВ .В .В . in a sense of combinationВ .В .В . within a given space of time.”9 History is a voice that speaks in the present, giving memory a part in the dialogue. First Wave: Sailing, assailing, and as they do not sail over the edge, the world is round and assailable. A crucifix shines in his hand and the beads differ in kind from those he gives to those sent to greet. Indians later disambiguated as Red Indians, American Indians, Amerindians, or Amerinds. Second Wave: The errand. But “singularlyВ .В .В . in a sense of combination within a given space and time?” Cotton Mather, Anne Hutchinson, Salem Witch Trials, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Roger Williams, etc. The Seven Years’ War and soon the American Revolution. The Г©migrГ©s, dead and alive, lead the charge, their voices the horn of a steam ship not yet invented. Third Wave: “It is our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allowed by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”10 Page 118 →Indian Removal Act: Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Ottawa, Potawatomie,11 Sauk, Mishawka. Black Hawk War: “From where the sun stands, I will fight no more forever.”12 Indians later disambiguated as Red Indians, American Indians, Amerindians, or Amerinds. Civil War: Slavery our peculiar institution. “If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”13 Mexican-American War: “I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, neither in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better than herself in these respects.”14 It turns out “I” is mistaken. There is no history of freedom in our country, only a language filled with its lack. The historical record is a space Americans share, alongside a rhetoric of inclusiveness, and a prescribed duty to the individual one is “at bottom.” The record inhabits a page found and is part of the architecture constructed and made newly by American poets since Walt Whitman. With In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams charts the continued erasure of the New as the Old World, in the guise of Christopher Columbus and other venture capitalists, who set forth to steal the New embodied in the native inhabitants and in the land, in order to reconstruct the Old.15 By Paterson, the untouched, public space has become a park, where the people, the “pure products” of Spring and All, have developed into “the great beast” fucking in public.16 In Call Me Ishmael Charles Olson begins: “I take SPACE to be the central factВ .В .В .”17 Allen Ginsberg’s Howl will map the spiritual destruction of “the best minds of my generation”—more Г©migrГ©s! —who, driven mad by America’s unacknowledged fear of otherness, blow their minds for a universal Vision of Love to counter the centuries of war and slaughter that built our country.18 In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein had determined to “make writing as it is madeВ .В .В . that [is] preparedВ .В .В . just

as the world aroundis preparing.”19 She had studied medicine and psychology at Johns Page 119 →Hopkins University, which no doubt influenced her knowledge of Being as something that is repeated, in infinite variation, which led her to a language to suit that repeated variation. In The Making of Americans, she followed that process of repeated variation, negotiating the space between the one and the many in over one thousand pages: I began to be sure that if I could only go on long enough and talk and hear and look and see and feel enough and long enough I could finally describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living.20 Every one then is an individual being. Every one then is like many others always living, there are many ways of thinking of every one, and this is now a description of all of them.21 Is every one everyone? It depends upon which definition of citizen you prefer: All this leads again to kinds in men and women. This then will be soon now a description of difference in men and women morally and intellectually in them between concrete acting, thinking and feeling in them and generalized acting, thinking and feeling in them.22 Stein’s writing practice identifies human interiors that lead her to write in syntaxes formed by participles, gerunds, and impersonal pronouns that move with deliberateness and mirror mental processes. Her method is procreative, insisting grammatically on the reality of the one as she challenges grammatically the autonomy of the one. In Stein’s dialectic, by becoming themselves, the Americans place their social contract in the ever evolving other of national entity: Many have a very certain feeling about something inside them. Many need company for it, this is very common, many need a measure for it, this will need explaining, some need drama to support it, some need lying to help it, some are not letting their right hand know what their left hand is doing with it, some love it, some hate it, some never are very certainPage 120 → they really have it, some only think they love it, some like the feeling of loving it, some like the feeling of loving it they would had have if they could have it.23 The “it” inside, deictic, determined and indeterminate, progressive and digressive, based in singularity and multiplicity, based in the certainty of contradiction, in the capacity for being in uncertainties—the evolving American is in the process toward becoming a whole thing. Fourth Wave: Jim Crow: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double–consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.В .В .В . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”24 “De big bee suck de blossom / De little bee make de honey / De black man makes de cotton and corn / And de white man totes de money.”25 Carlisle Indian Industrial School: European–American haircuts, European American names, John, Mary, Ezra, George, Susan, William, replacing: Adekgawa (spirit of summer), Agwe (water), Huyena (rain), Chakwaina (one who cries), Lovela (soft spirit).26 Indians later disambiguated as Red Indians, American Indians, Amerindians, or Amerinds. The Making of Americans opens with a conundrum: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”27

Paternal embrace is transformed by generation to a charge, a bond, a promise to what will keep arriving, even as father begrudges that progress. Whose orchard is it? Why is the son angry? The indefiniteness of the possessive pronoun “his” in the Page 121 →second instance operating by way of mistakenness, that divine virtue, grants access to both father and son. The evolving American is in perpetual passage from Old to the New. Fifth Wave: nisei: second-generation Japanese–Americans WARTIME WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION Presidio of San Francisco, California April 1, 1942 INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY LIVING IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS: All Japanese persons, alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the following areas at 12 noon on April 12, 1942. No Japanese person will be allowed to leave the designated area after 8 a.m. without special permission from the Provost Marshall at the Civil Control station located at: 1701 Van Ness Avenue San Francisco, California.28 Americans or people, the citizens Homing different origins Indians, later disambiguated as Red Indians, American Indians, Amerindians, or Amerinds. Native American all Americans immigrate African American culture (came capsizing came stolen) HISPANOS & MEXICO SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE ASIA, AFRICA, & LATIN AMERICA. Melting pot pluralistic salad bowl There are no citizens. There are only citizens.29 Page 122 →

Notes 1. Before the Norman Conquest, a freeman was a tenant farmer, a renter, who had the privilege of trading himself and his land to one feudal lord or another, who already owned his land and his labor. In our country, the 14th Amendment made freemen citizens, dependent not on the slave owner, but the government, and the social contract. 2. That’s an order! 3. Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Towards the Open Field, ed. Melissa Kwansy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 289. 4. Ibid., 289–91. 5. Ibid., 292–94. 6. Ibid., 291. 7. Ibid., 290. 8. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 300. 9. Ibid., 238. 10. John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July/August 1845): 5–10. 11. Potawatomie became the name of the town in Kansas where some believe John Brown started the Civil

War when he and his sons assassinated five proslavery advocates. 12. Chief Joseph, “Surrender Speech in the Bear Paw Mountains,” October 5, 1877. 13. General Phillip H. Sheridan, www.projectgutengerg.org/books.2651 14. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 67. 15. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 2009). 16. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), 54. 17. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 8. 18. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959), 9. 19. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 540. 20. Ibid., 246. 21. Ibid., 262. 22. Ibid., 305. Page 123 →23. Ibid., 305–6. 24. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. in The Norton Anthology of American Literature edited by Nina Bayam and Robert S. Levine (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012), 887. 25. Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 111. 26. www.quizopolis.com/native-american-name-generator.php 27. Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, 261. 28. A public service announcement brought to you by Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1942. 29. Please insert infinite placeholders for the Г©migrГ©s to come.

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The Instant The instant, therefore. Is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action—a poem, for example. —”The Present Is Prologue,” Charles Olson The figure of the Г©migrГ© intensifies the evidence of the temporal. The place you call home, country, native habitat, homeland—you will depart, and what you are will also remain, as energy remains. The physics of indwelling, and an admonition: beware of what you use. The location of literature, of the language of literature, which includes poetry, historically calls attention to the fact of temporality qua seconds, minutes, hours, centuries as in “out out brief candle,” though very little changed from one century to the next in the textual generic demonstration of this reality via novels, dramas, and poems.The poem, as it fell away from the song of the troubadour, and into the arms of argument, established an eco-poetics based on conquest “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s dayВ .В .В .” which the mathematical bravado of the sonnet proved was art’s triumph over nature: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and gives life to thee”1 And thus, the “thee” in perpetuity, in the eternity promised by Literature, writ large, defeated the temporal. I wonder about this a lot, culture’s obsession with the Beautiful, and what it does to us. Daniel Tiffany posted this on Facebook in November: Page 125 →In the NY Times list of 50 “Notable” works of “Fiction and Poetry” there are two books of poetry. Two. What is it about poetry’s relation to literature? Rather than being outraged by this ratio—by the near invisibility of poetry in a list of superlative literary works—one must acknowledge that the best poetry is in a fundamental sense NOT literary. The schism between poetry and literature has real historical roots (in the emergence of the super genre of literature in the 18th century), and the rivalry continues—in very productive ways—today. The gatekeepers of literature are blind to poetry for good reasons: certain kinds of poetry—poetry with the deepest historical roots—use language that often prevails over, and sometimes disables, narrative, character, scenography—and good taste. It’s pretty simple: poetry ain’t literature!2 I think that some of this is true, though I think perhaps it goes both ways, in that the best American novel of the nineteenth century, Moby-Dick, wasВ .В .В . a poem! Why it is a whale of a book, in medias res, refusing category, fusing adventure tale with cetology, the tale of the Demos at sea, high Faustian drama dismantling plot, narrative (why should we call him Ishmael and where does he go until he lands on the coffin?). Moby-Dick is a poem! At least since Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, American authors have been testing the delimits of genre to better present the real politic, over and beyond the promise of American identity, over and beyond Literature’s promises of eternity, here in the real locale of time itself, wherein we are all Г©migrГ©s. Son of Irish and Norwegian immigrants, another old man of the sea, Charles Olson likewise maps a sustainable eco-poetics of history, maps what he calls a “heterogeneous present” in contradistinction to “the old homogeneity of the Founders of the West.”3 The history Olson desires is history before the writing of history, a history that projects not time, but shape. The “boring historical and evolutionary one which the West has been

so busy about since Thucydides” had to be put aside for a living past: “There are only two live pasts—your ownВ .В .В . and one which we don’t have the vocabulary for.”4 Yet, we do have the vocabulary, whether or not we understand it when we hear it. It is vocabulary rooted in the speeches of Shakespeare’s fool, King Lear’s Page 126 →unaccommodated man, Keats’s negative capability, religion’s via negativa via Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, Buddhism’s Bodhisattva, and countless other texts, all of which enact ecstatic forms of language that give themselves over to diaspora. This vocabulary rooted in ideas that proliferates the possibilities of self and home that are evident in the history of ideas—these are Г©migré’s location, physical fact, and comfort. Olson “heterogeneous present” is based on a few assumptions. One assumption is rooted in concepts of American identity, and the rhetoric of inclusiveness, however disprovable, inherent in founding documents. Olson had spent the 1940s working for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Common Council for American Unity, as well as working as an employee of the Democratic National Committee in the “Everybody for Roosevelt” election rallies in Madison Square Garden and in Key West. At the same time he was completing Call Me Ishmael, his work on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which shows the varied and incongruous locations, characters, and contexts of the novel as the compromised loci of the losing deal that is promised the American polity: So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick, consider whaling. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, me got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop. Man, led, against the biggest damndest creature nature uncorks. The whale-ship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument. The 1849’s: The New West in the saddle and Melville No. 20 of a rough and bastard crew? Are they the essentials?5 “Are they the essentials?,” he asked, we keep asking, hearing the ghost yes and the polluted, oil slicked no. The horizontal charting of the truth of the middle—in medias res, the truth of time in time, the middle class as it exists appositionally, working so in the midst, and seeing from there, the distortion at the top inversely coded in the play at the bottom. Ahab’s monomania the sole fuel for the crew. Belief become obsession, become currency: “farewell, fish, your bones / we shall walk on,”6 as we do now in the desert. He was finished with politics by the end of the ’40s, Page 127 →and his hope for the motley crew, that heterogeneous ragbag of real citizens who inhabit the American mythos, had become an expectation of a present “my own, and yours” that would project into a future of “a delightful new civilization of man ahead.”7 He had seen this future civilization by looking to the past, where in the study of the Sumerians and Mayans and “the will to cohere in both those people”8 he found a correlative experience to his own “and our,” circa 1952, urge toward autonomous plurality. Olson begins at this time to recast the modernist credo of The Cantos “I cannot make it cohere / it coheres alright”9 and the ideogrammatic method that operates through a series of vertical juxtapositions, which had been crucial to his development. Olson’s urge is toward horizontal time, and the cross-pollination possible there: 1. Lao tse—Noh—Buddha—India—the horizontal—anthro. 1. A. The American Indian (early culture) 2. Hoei Sin (499 AD) AM=Fusang (Buddha worship to America—AD 458) 3. Quetzalcoatl (1st figure of West)10 The cross pollination would be literary—”Reverse the motion of Homer, Dante, Melville: start in Asia withВ .В .В . Lao–tse?”—geographical, anthropological. The idea is “to try to see our time at one glanceВ .В .В . regard its motions and say, swiftly, where it tends”11 He writes in a letter to Robert Creeley, years later, regarding the relation of the line in his own poems: “The lines which hook-over should be read as though they lay out right and flat to the horizon or Eternity.”12 Poetic topos charting a shape in time, that traditional history, by its method of evidence gathering, and attachment to chronological proofs, is unable. Poetic

topos or geography, longitudinal, latitudinal, tracing shapes across a page where horizon and eternity are coeval. A voyager’s view. The shapes traced projecting connections emancipated from received (vertical) histories, shapes devoted to the meaning of civilizations across time. Shapes interested in liberty, and those designating its lack. The cross-pollination did not promise utopia, even if the Page 128 →connections Olson generates this way do leave us in no designated time or place, but one perversely prescribed by lack of self-knowledge, of dasein, in the settlers who set about to build it. With his introduction to Italian painter Corrado Cagli’s drawings from the liberation of Buchenwald, he sees also proof of the horror evident in civilization. The historically horizontal view is established by “La Preface,” the poem commissioned by Cagli for the New York and Chicago showing of the drawings made when he was part of the American army that liberated the death camp: For Olson, Caglia’s drawings of Buchenwald’s dead serve as the horrible horizontal evidence of the new Altamira Cave, the cave paintings discovered in the 19th century that had “proven,” in the polychromatic pictures of animals and human hands, that prehistoric people were capable of Art, an unauthorized history in the day. The dead in transit, yes, in “new life,” both Dante’s book and in the newest level of hell exposed at Buchenwald, the bodies “evidence” of the newest civilization made of the dead’s effort, the perfection of Arian homogeneity, the old, false history of the conquerors, the motley’s sacrifice writ large—ask any cathedral, pyramid, ask Hoover Dam. Caglia’s drawings evoke a lateral justice for Buchenwald’s dead; Olson’s accompanying poem “La Preface” conjoins the unwritten bodies of those who built the pyramids (the nameless slaves who died building an eternal monument where their enslavers would lie in state forever) to the mass bodies of the DPs found in the abandoned concentration camp. Olson’s parallelPage 129 → method makes the space where the Displaced Person across time calls into question the Art of the Conqueror that is written into the pyramids, written into the museum-death-camp open for tour, calling it what it is: the static shroud of a civilization’s adherence to the subjugator’s chronology. Draw it thus: ( ) 1910 ( It is not obscure. We are the newborn, And there are no flowers. Document means there are no flowers And no parenthesisВ .В .В . The closed parenthesis reads: If there are no dates in the closed parenthesis, it means life has not begun, nor is it likewise over. To paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead, “everything that is going to happen is already happening” is an idea that history tends to show.15 Which Allied government didn’t know the Holocaust was occurring, before we gave it a name? “It is not obscure,” the horror, it is “document” and seeing it again we are again “the new born.” If “there are no flowers” there can be no consolation, no posy, no conclusion or “closed parenthesis” to our culpability. “La Preface” pivots on a hinge between birth and death, between the artistic homage Olson and Cagli pay the temporal condition, and to the new modes of expression the two achieved in witness of the unspeakable: It is the radical, the root, he and I, two bodies He and I, two bodies

We put our hands to these dead16 The radical is an expression that uses a root; the root of a number X is a root of another number (of our number). We too swing on a hinge between things, and whatever new life comes Page 130 →to civilization comes between the parallel realities occurring now: We are born not of the buried but of these unburied dead The Babe The Howling Babe17 It is the baby we look to, wrongly, be it not, as if she will not be subject, as if he is not the first result of the error in our timing? It is almost Christmas as I write, and the baby in whose name, for and against, such horror has been continued will be born again, one who will be called King, who did not believe in kings. Herod has now commanded the death of all young male children near Bethlehem. The biblical narrative cannot be proven, there are no graves, it is happening somewhere again now, and the massacred boys of that story are claimed as Christian martyrs. Christ in the spring will not likewise be in the grave, and Shiva, dancing on the head of the baby, intends only to destroy ignorance, while in William Blake’s tiger and lamb, the progress of contraries sheds bright light around the world.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), 1365. 2. Daniel Tiffany’s Facebook post, November 2013. 3. Charles Olson, Collected Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 205. 4. Ibid., 206. 5. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 26. 6. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised, ed. Donald Allen and George F. Butterick (New York: Grove Press), 29. 7. Ralph Maud, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 56. 8. Ibid., 57. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 58. Page 131 →11. Ibid., 59. 12. Ibid. 61. 13. Charles Olson, Archaeologist of Morning (New York: Grossman, 1973). True to his belief in nonchronological time, this book has no page numbers. This poem is called “La Preface.” 14. Ibid. 15. Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 16. Olson, “La Preface,” in Archaeologist of Morning. 17. Ibid.

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1.2 Occasional Prose, Interviews

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Interview for The Range of the Possible, conducted by Tod Marshall (The Secularist and Utopic) Note: While this interview was published in 2004, it began in 1995 and continued into the early 2000s. I’ve revisited some of the earlier statements I make here from my perspective now, 2017. Tod Marshall: Many of the women writers with whom I’ve spoken have articulated a problematic relationship with their early study of poetry; that is, they were immersed in a male canon and had to actively—and sometimes exhaustingly—seek women poets with whom they could form connections. Was this your experience of “coming to poetry? Claudia Keelan: No, I can’t say it was. In fact, part of my delight in the process of “coming to” was finding access to the world and language of my own father, who I loved very much. My problem came later and it had more to do with stances in poetry and with questions of mode, of composition, which are only strictly related to gender in its etymological origin. My original reasons for writing poetry were rooted in a primary need to find my self, to find the expression for the girl I was. I studied music in college and eventually gave it up for poetry, which allowed me access to my first language, which was obviously “personal” and led me to versions of the self I sought. This stance was one derived from the hangover of Wordsworth and that arm of British Romanticism, which privileged the authority of the autonomous “I” rather than the dispersed self of Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode” or the definition of the poet of negative capability defined by Keats in his letters. These attitudes regarding the nature of the self are not in themselves either male or female. Williams writes feminists texts alongside of Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, etc. The late Troubadour poems are Page 136 →feminist poems. The lady cannot be reached. Further, to define Her would be a limitation. I like to read poets, composers, painters, philosophers, saints, mystics, and ordinary people whose methods of composition refuse to limit any part of what we call Being (St. Francis, Blake, Keats, Melville, Whitman, Stein, Williams, Deleuze, Spinoza, Levinas, Martin King, Gandhi, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Creeley, Notley, Susan Howe, Brenda Hillman, an Amish baker in Murray, KY. Others.) TM: What about the poets you see as less open, as exclusionary—who would you classify as such and why? CK: I don’t want to draw lines in the sand. Since, in my poetics, both poet and poem are involved in perpetual becoming, I have no access to the exclusionary. TM: Fair enough. But doesn’t the teaching of poetry and poetry writing usually privilege the lineage you first mention, at the core of which is the autonomous “I.” How did you, in your reading or through instruction you’ve received, get around that lineage—or to borrow your word, “stance?” CK: Does the teaching of poetry revolve around that? Perhaps it does at this current moment in classrooms in America, but I went to Iowa, where I’m teaching this year, and then and now the argument revolved around issues of, well, style. Issues of mode, of syntaxes, considerations of ambiguity, its use and misuse. William Blake was also a Romantic poet whose poems clearly showed that in the one is the many and that societies are responsible to their citizens. Whitman! I wanted to write, to teach, a living poetry. Time gives me the most instruction. It shows how one is many, how desire for autonomy is a purgatory one could avoid if one were simply faithful to the temporal. I’ve found companions for my thought in my reading. TM: And yet, one of the central dynamics of your second collection, The Secularist, is to get beyond

“the teacher.” CK: Yes, but the last lines of that book read: “In the end, I couldn’t love / the others nor the balloons / someone dared among the wreaths / but turned back toward / the God’s dead son / his mute suffering / word of my word, flesh of my—” And in Utopic, in “Tool” there’s the admission: “The one I wanted to teach / proved to be my teacher: / Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount,” / Buddha, with the lamb on his shoulder, / love at heartВ .В .В .” The poem goes on to say hey, don’t follow me, follow ideas, the good ones, the whole ones, the ones that don’t exclude. Page 137 →TM: I see. And yet to get to these conclusions, you had to read through a number of different writers, movements, “stances.” CK: Yes. It might be more accurate to say I had to write through a number of writers, of movements, in order to trade or redefine stances. Susan Howe calls herself a redactor, someone who revises a book simply by reading it. I feel kinship with that idea because it calls on notions of responsibility, and I believe, of history. “Tradition is now,” Creeley said, which I always took to mean that one’s reading and writing must not subordinate the present moment to a monolithic past. TM: I’d like to ask you about a few poets. Whitman and Dickinson are usually held up as the grandpa and grandma of American poetry. What compels you about their poetry? CK: Temperamentally, I’m drawn more to Whitman. His ambition is shameless. He seeks reciprocity shamelessly; he takes us through the whole gamut—me to you, male to female, God and gods, self and nation, culture and the atom—all the while refusing to reduce any single element. He’s generous and overblown—look at his lines! It takes an enormous amount of breath to read them, an enormous heart beating to have written them. “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and the desperately tender “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”—I almost can’t stand to read his poems because of what they ask me to give—and what they give in return. Dickinson is in Luther’s “lonely church of one” and she is doing honorable work there. It’s strange. She writes a poem like the one about keeping the Sabbath in nature and says—I think she says—nature is her tribunal. And then there are her many poems dedicated to transport, as she calls it, which I read as a metaphysical idea—away from here, in other words. For Whitman, paradise is on earth, which is why he asks us to look for him under our footsteps. It’s interesting that the many who dislike Whitman’s poetry often do so for his excessive, vatic prosody. He’s not interested in Art. He’s after something much larger than that. TM: And what about Williams and Stein? How do they fit in? CK: Whitman and Dickinson are still nineteenth century poets, so to the extent that we’re defining lineage here, I suppose you could say that they serve a grandparental role. Williams and Stein have been more directly responsible for my development as a poet. Williams’s definition of the imagination is crucial, opposing as it does the urge towards false unities in artistic Page 138 →practice. I think his adage “no ideas but in things” is badly misunderstood, which I why his masterpiece Spring and All was always excerpted so reductively in anthologies, highlighting the “things” in the poems, e.g., the red wheelbarrow, the note he left to Flossie about the plums, the portrait of Elsie, etc., instead of the relations of those things, in time, in seasons, in language. He’s a great poet of synecdoche, bringing as he says in the prologue to Kora in Hell “many broken things into dance, giving them thus a full being.” His early work opposes metaphor, the easy transfer. Even in Paterson the use of metaphor is generative; in other words, things are by natural law in relations, so if the poet is desiring the truth of nature, the poem that results will be in endless relation, endless transfer. That’s good news. Beauty, in his definition, is convulsive, partial, in need of rediscovery. Stein wants to show the seams, grammatically, of time, of time in a

composition and the “continuous present” where we all live. She dares to say that poetry composed “in situ” is ethically unsound, which is certainly why she loved Picasso and Matisse so much, since their paintings were also dramatically challenging status quo idealities of static, or received, a priori form in painting. In “Composition as Explanation,” she argues that the “classic” is something that has already been seen and understood and so earns the dubious distinction of classicism. Others have made the same argument about Eliot’s work—that the reason his work was so embraced was due to the fact that it was an extension of nineteenth century Symbolism. The critics could read it with old tools. TM: And what about the other modernists? CK: Pound, H. D., Mina Loy, to some extent Laura Riding. Pound is the modernist who actually defines the movement. I came to him later, and somewhat grudgingly because of teachers I had in the beginning who despised him without even knowing the extent of his thought. The ABC of Reading is still a very important book to me. I require it in workshops. I admire the ambition of The Waste Land very much and the humility Eliot arrives at in Four Quartets, but his notion of the objective correlative is a limiting one and, historically, another misdirection for the politics of identity. And Stevens—I was very early seduced by the gorgeous sound of his poetry, the brilliant, evasive maneuvers of his imagination. He’s a moving character because, for all his protest, he knows that the world is real, and that’s exactly what bothers him. The question he asks Page 139 →of Ramon Perez at the end of “Idea of Order at Key West,” and the insistence on “can you tell me why?” He wants to know why the human imagination accepts the lights and fishing boats as real, after the power of poetic imagination he’s arraigned just by looking in the sky. That’s a real dilemma, I know. Ultimately, it’s not a position I share. TM: I’d also like to ask about the range of work you’ve listed as being seminal to your poetic self; other genres, a variety of religiosities, philosophers; how have these multiple genres specifically shaped the formal aspects of your poetics? And what about other sources of inspiration besides the literary? CK: The formal aspect of my poetics continue to evolve, but I can tell you that I’ve always been interested in the shapes that justice makes, which in my experience is often an invisible form or one only gained access to by the body’s reaction. You could say the invisible is the truth withheld, or the very fabric of the truth, which is the version I prefer. Finding form takes patience; it involves waiting. Creeley’s ideas about duration have influenced my idea of the line recently. He sees that experience—or the poetic subject’s experience, if you prefer—has a duration of its own, as does the poet’s perception. Putting those elements in relation to each other creates another duration, which is the time of the poem, as well as the time in the poem. As Olson said so well, physiology has a lot to do with the shape the poem will make. Susan Howe records history convincingly in poetic form. Reading her, I felt viscerally the fact that history itself is a trapped thing (Singularities, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, etc.). She doesn’t ask the reader to accept her activity of release as another version of history—she’s a lyric poet and she is speaking for herself—she simply presents that release and it is the poem. While remaining entirely “personal, ” both Creeley and Howe summon, ask, or coerce the reader into an active position. The meaning inside the poem is one thing; how a reader is compelled to act, to respond, is another. That’s an individual problem, which makes it a question of ethics. Simone Weil works a similar field, as does Charles Ives, though they work with philosophy and music. Reading Gravity and Grace I participate in a model of action—the content and the form of those small fragments are themselves active friezes of detachment. The only way you can read them is to detach, in some sense, to give yourself up for dead. It’s painful if you don’t want to. She’s intent on Page 140 →making a model of behavior that will make the world work justly, and what she does instead is summon the body of the divine. Her work is also entirely personal—she’s the martyr, not you—and yet its

witness takes a form that compels me to action. Charles Ives’s music refuses harmony because it is after reality, and so “Yes Jesus Loves Me” must be—interrupted? or demonstrated?—by boys throwing stones in the river. The generosity of these artistic practices broadens the available reality and so are participant with civil and religious communities that take their definitions from the living action of their participants. TM: I follow you, and what you’ve said makes sense, but there’s a doubting Thomas that hesitates to believe that civil and religious communities and the pluralities they encompass really allow for justice and ethical living in the world. What I’m trying to say is, help me see a concrete, vivid example of an aesthetic object—poem, or painting, or piece of music—that broadened the reality of a living community and helped shape a more just world. CK: How does the Vietnam Memorial strike you? Or the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis? These are forms dedicated to revision, to witness and to participation. The Vietnam Memorial is entirely about culpability, a black wall, or river, the memorial-seeker walks beside. When you look at it, you see the myriad names of the dead and a reflection of your own face. The only way a visitor to the memorial can find individual names—as there are so many and very minutely engraved—is to bring tracing paper and rub the names with a pencil to decipher them. That structure, along with the Civil Rights Museum, revises the very nature of witness. There is no consolation for the Vietnam War, for what we do to each other because of racial difference. And if one is a citizen, truly a citizen, one accepts responsibility for the things her laws, her country, does in her name, or she protests the law she can’t accept. The Vietnam Memorial and the Civil Rights Museum articulate the living shape of witness. TM: I understand what you’re saying, but those are public monuments, shrines, museums; aren’t they different—in essence—from what a poem is? CK: No, a poem is not different from a shrine, a memorial, a museum. It is a place, which is the meaning of the word stanza, where the arguments of the culture take place. In terms of Page 141 →poems, there are so many that advanced the causes of human freedom! Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The poems of Negritude, of the Harlem Renaissance. The list is endless. TM: OK. In your recent book Utopic, you shape a poetry that articulates many of these same concerns, and I’d like to talk about that book in a moment. I wonder, though, doesn’t poetry seem marginalized by “the culture” and doesn’t that make its comments on these “arguments” somewhat inconsequential? CK: I think it’s “the culture” that’s insignificant, illusory, not the claims of poetry. Language is evolving all the time. It would be shortsighted of me to put too much emphasis on my contributions to it. At the same time, I’m always gratified by the legacies of history. What is important and lasting makes its way across time. I realize this is a traditional view of the role of art. I’m comfortable with this view because I know there are always those in the present who hear and confirm what to others remains incomprehensible. I could imagine a culture more sympathetic to the proposals of poetry, but I don’t have access to one. So I’m trying to live and affirm my renegade agenda! TM: Tell me about Utopic. What made you want to write that book? There are many voices lingering behind the text—presences in the text—and they are important; tell me how those voices coalesced with your voice. Emerson, King, Weil—they’re a disparate troop. How do you understand all of their presences? How can you briefly describe the “utopic” vision that the book articulates?

CK: Keats, King, and Weil are the angels of that book, mostly, for me. Emerson is there as a transparency—I’m sure he’d approve. King, Keats, and Weil were all utopian idealists. Their ideas are keyed to the reciprocity between self and other, to the erasure of the distance between self and other. King’s urge toward the “beloved community” is a civil model of Keats’s concept of negative capability. Likewise, Weil’s conversion to Christianity pushes her from philosopher to mystic saint—one who is dedicated to via negativa, the negative way. Traditionally, the Bodhisattva embarked on such a spiritual journey and refused entry to Nirvana, knowing that Arrival made Nirvana moot. Same with King’s concept of community. The community, the movement toward community, must never end. Diaspora must be ensured so community is living, evolving. Keats’s take was in personal opposition to the “egotistical Page 142 →sublime” he saw within Wordsworth’s poetics. He knew that self must be lost to see objectively; he understood that being a poet, and a dying one at that, was to accept the passing, the versional, nature of both self and time. TM: Do you think that his poems articulate that vision? “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in some ways seems to argue the opposite. CK: It depends on how you read the statement the urn makes. “Ode to a Nightingale” certainly is in conversation with the passing; in fact, the whole structure of the odes themselves seems predicated on the same kind of dialectic I’m talking about. TM: But what of the quotation itself? CK: I think it’s interesting because the statement is inside quotes. The rest of the “story” the urn tells is through the images on it. It sounds like an echo to me, one that Keats may be tempted by, but one that his poetry ultimately, and his letters explicitly, refute. TM: You’re a teacher. Describe how the profession, from teaching in Boston to teaching in the South to teaching at UNLV to teaching at Iowa, has affected your poetry. CK: My life has always been nomadic. In fact, I’ve now lived in Las Vegas, of all places, for, technically six years, though this year I’m teaching in Iowa. I suppose that my sense of place and people is very influenced by that fact. There is always the next place; there are always others. This makes me happy and when I’m happiest I experience my life and project as a classless one and the citizens of my city and the students in my classroom as the Demos who I love and am of. TM: A few more questions. Tell me about living in Las Vegas. I’d love to hear your take on that city. CK: The longer I live in Las Vegas, the less I understand it. My husband Donald Revell lives and teaches part of the week in Salt Lake City, part of the week here, so our family has spent a fair amount of time shuttling between Sodom and Zion. Salt Lake does a very good job of keeping out all the “freedoms” available 24 hours in Vegas: gambling, sex, all-night gun ranges, and for the kids, roller coaster rides through the New York City skyline. So all that is at the edge of our lives all the time, and when we’re in Salt Lake City, the angel Moroni over every temple lets us know he’s watching, which somehow fails to comfort me every time. Las Vegas is continually in the process of remaking itself, which makes, on the one hand, a city Page 143 →where a blackjack dealer can afford a house with a swimming pool, and on the other, a hundred-year-old city with no solid infrastructure. The schools don’t open on time, though they build many each year; the dust from construction is so thick that everyone is developing respiratory problems. The U.S. government in in the process of sending the entire country’s nuclear waste to be buried at Yucca Mountain, a military base 40 miles west of Las Vegas. Out my window, the desert is still there, barely, and a few herds of wild horses still roam nearby. I don’t know. Perhaps one really does write one’s life. Utopia means “no place” and ecstasy means “to be placed outside.” There’s a

lot to be done here and there are no rules of order already in place. I like the present in such wilderness. TM: What role do you envision for the poet given our government’s recent action in response to terrorist attacks on the United States—what looks to be a period of fear and violence? CK: Obviously, everyone is off balance at the moment. Gertrude Stein was right, as usual, in “Composition as Explanation,” that war demands attention to the present and so instructs an immediacy usually relegated to the margins of our free time. I’m teaching a Gender and Literature course right now based on Whitman’s concept of the body electric. We’d just read “Song of Myself” when the first plane hit the Trade Center and the message of inclusiveness there, the insistence of self being other—it was the only word for the moment and continues to be, I believe, no matter what polarity you describe: man-woman, citizen-nation, nation-world. Any definition that does not take the Whole into consideration is an incomplete one. Radical freedom is the only whole measure—that’s what I hope to teach, to reach.

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Interview for Barrow Street, conducted by Derek Pollard (Utopic and The Devotion Field) Derek Pollard: In all of its richness and variety, American poetry has always contained a certain measure of the wanderer’s urge to celebrate the uniqueness and spirit of new and different places. To what extent does your poetry share in this impulse? Claudia Keelan: Certainly parts of the American tradition have developed through the notion of wandering, at least that part that descends from Whitman, though I often think there is a large part of our tradition that is rooted in provincialism and region. This is MY room, MY woods, MY country, MY heritage, the tradition of the possessive noun, you know what I mean? The tradition of the twoyear-old! I go with Whitman, first from temperament, and then, probably as a result of temperament, I have lived everywhere, and so have developed a nomad’s ethic, I suppose. DP: How has your professional life facilitated your exposure to such new and different landscapes? Has relocating been a burden or a blessing in regard to the development of your poetry? CK: Well, look at the vita! Boston, Kentucky, Denver, Iowa, Utah, Las Vegas. I’ve now lived in Las Vegas, God help me, longer than anywhere in my life. I’ve tried to celebrate my transience quite a bit in my work. Lately, it feels lonely. I sometimes feel like the foreign diplomat—what’s that movie? Pascale’s Island—who my government forgot about. DP: I don’t think that it would be wrong to describe you as a politicized poet. Poems such as “’Tis of Thee” and “Southern Anthology” in The Devotion Field, for instance, demonstrate your continued attentiveness to and concern over social and political injustices. In fact, these two poems hint at a tonal shift in your Page 145 →more recent poems that tends more toward unbridled outrage and an almost obligatory defiance of the status quo than was the case with your earlier poems. Do you think that it’s possible for a poet to separate politics and poetics? How do you view the relationship between politics and aesthetics, polemical political poetry notwithstanding? CK: Do you mean that readers or my audience have politicized my work? I can’t speak to that, but I don’t see myself as a political poet, per se. If I were a political poet, I’d have influence, and I’d be an activist, like Ginsberg was, when he testified to a congressional committee on the effects of LSD, along with Timothy Leary and others, or when he managed to calm the demonstrators in Chicago, so that nobody would get hurt. Or, maybe I’d have read at somebody’s inauguration, as Maya Angelou did for President Clinton, or Robert Frost did for John Kennedy. Perhaps, on a narrower level, I’d lobby to judge contests for a national poetry organization! I’d be very interested in joining the dialogue about Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal here in Nevada, but though I’ve written letters to congressmen, no one has asked me to participate, though they have asked me to apply for poet laureate of Nevada. When I was a graduate student in Iowa, I protested against apartheid, but when the police gave us a choice either to leave or to get arrested, I went home. I had friends who didn’t. Beautifully brave people. I’ll never forget my friend Kristen falling gracefully into the policemen’s arms. I can imagine issues heinous enough that I’d let myself be arrested, such as impingement of academic freedom in my classroom by the university administration, or by the suppression of my books. Those are my venues, where I’m the one in authority, and who is ultimately responsible, so there I’d be willing to fight. Since my writing and teaching negotiate various passive resistances, I’d like to think I’m doing my part. I was on a panel a few years ago at the Poet’s House, the topic was political poetry, and none of us—Fanny Howe, Myung Mi Kim, others—got very far in defining the political inside of poetics, though everyone was quite sincere in believing there was a politics operating in their own

work. I’m simply an outraged citizen, and I don’t separate between my life as a citizen and my life as a poet. I don’t feel obligation to anything but my family, friends, my students, and my feelings. I am also open to other loyalties, one at a time. I signed a loyalty oath Page 146 →to “defend the state of Nevada” when I took the job at UNLV, but I’m comfortable with ambiguity. It’d be interesting to stage a defense of the state of Nevada, but I know mine wouldn’t involve guns, and I know it wouldn’t involve any party. My outrage—really, my terrible sorrow—over the death of the civil rights movement is mine by history. I was born into that conversation, into the hope of that conversation and I absorbed it. All of the “statistics” in “’Tis of Thee” and “Southern Anthology” are lifted right off public radio news. I hear, I write. I don’t believe either, in polemic. But then, I guess many people hear lyric as polemic. DP: You make no apologies for being a spiritual poet in a culture that privileges the secular. Because we’ve just been talking about politics, I find myself turning to images of those historical religious figures—Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, etc.—who have acted as divinely inspired rebels, as levelers in some way—perhaps some remote way—similar to Whitman as leveler. Do you think that it’s fair to say that the poet is engaged in some similar type of “leveling” or revivifying project, even if on a lesser scale—leveling of language, of political landscapes, of consciousness, of modes of understanding? CK: I think Christ was a secularist, for instance. He was tired of the religious men using public space to stage their coups. HmmВ .В .В . sounds kind of familiar right now.В .В .В . He was looking for equity for people, by asking them to pray aloneВ .В .В . as he does in the Sermon on the Mount. So the anity in Christanity doesn’t work for me, to my mother’s perpetual sadness. Christ’s life was a revolution of one that inspired others to their own revolutions, albeit on behalf of justice, the poor, the sick, and despised, and against a status quo which largely judged everything, as quo tends to, in regard to his big brother, status. That’s how Jesus was, as you suggest, a leveler. He was a critic of the society he saw, where authority, as now, was either inherited via family and or money (and very rarely by sheer talent and good work), as opposed to the kind of individual, singular power he was asking the faithful to summon from themselves. I’d rather be a lily than a lawmaker! I think it’s fair to say that I’ve tried to do that kind of leveling in my work. I found a method for doing it in Utopic, by taking away the authority given to different parts of speech, and placing the authority on other parts of speech, especially the verbs, as well as letting absence play a very dominant role on Page 147 →the page. Then, in The Devotion Field, I let the leveling take on a broader stroke, so that I could speak specifically about political and social issues that make me enraged; the end of an active civil rights movement, for example, and the destruction of the earth’s atmosphere by a destructive, transparently self-serving energy policy. Journalists, however, are the ones who are doing the leveling, in writing, of political landscapes, not poets. I’ve been moved and heartened by the dedication of journalists to exposing the lie at the center of the Iraq War, and by their commitment to “the story,” which has led to more than one of their deaths. I see the role of the poet as much more invested in revivifying activism in language, and in consciousness, as you say. Certainly, many American poetries being written presently are themselves modes of understanding. DP: Many poems in your two most recent books, Utopic and The Devotion Field, approach language from a more visual and spatial perspective than in your previous books. How has your relationship to language changed since you were working on the poems in Utopic? How does this revaluation relate to your continued participation in politics and your involvement in spiritual practice? CK: It’s not until recently that I’ve had any interest at all in the visual—as in the seen, the descriptive function in language. My desire in Utopic was to create a musical phrase, determined, as Creeley spoke about, by a constant and a variable. The constant was largely silence, the variable, the

notes, or words on either side of the silence. Too, I wanted to replace the hegemony of parts of speech with endless variation and mutability. I was joining the part of the tradition I’d come to love whose relationship to poetry is projective, and interested in compositional methods as a means to the true. Since Utopic, the field of play is wider, since, in that book, I guess I was “leaving it all out,” as Ashbery proposes is one way to write, in Three Poems. He also writes there that leaving it out is the “truer way” than “putting it all in.” I think he’s trying to assess his own way of writing in that passage, since he has always tried to include it all, I believe. I’m now trying to put it all in, not to limit my subject matter, or my sense of composition. It’s harder to seem “true” when your scope is so wide, but it’s less dire. I mean, there’s a lot that is funny about the way we categorize in life. I laughed a lot when I wrote The Devotion Field, since I’ve cried enough. I suppose you could say I am now Page 148 →intent on using the whole Self, whatever that is, which must be a politics, and is a spiritual practice. DP: More generally, how do you envision language? Do you see words as objects, as material things, or as signifiers? What stability, if any, do words have for you? Do you believe that words might have spiritual equivalences, as the Qabalists and Russian Futurist poets believed? What do you make of Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles,” for instance? CK: I don’t see words as objects, just as I generally don’t see any of the things we call nouns, as objects: son, husband, daughter, world. I like Fenollosa’s essay “On the Chinese Written Character as a Fitting Medium for Poetry,” as the character still has its noun and verb etymologically together, as opposed to being deprived of one function or the other, as in conventional English. Stable is as stable does. I know what a word means when I find it again. Words most likely have spiritual equivalences, as do all living things, though I don’t like the idea of a direct parallel in that word “equivalent.” My arrow is not Krishna’s, for example, and the doves that live under the large pine outside are mourning doves, and themselves, exactly. “Voyelles” is perfect, sweet Rimbaud, all his passions intact and to the point right until he gave up writing. Of course one wants to break the vowel open, find the language of ecstasy that would make all of the inadequacies of living perfected. It’s a noble aspiration, from the mouth of a poor boy. Nobody goes farther than that.

Page 149 →The Poet on the Poem For My Lost Original: Elegy Is a Seeking in “Everybody’s Autobiography” (Missing Her) Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person. —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents The writing began as a way to spend time with my dead father, so that who was absent could live in real time again, at least for the duration of the poem. The writing also began as an attempt to understand the historical reality of America’s field consumption, which I knew to be a direct reason for the September 11th attacks on New York and the Pentagon. “Everybody’s Autobiography” began as an essay,1 from (f) essayer, which means to try. I was trying to spend time with my father in an essay by researching his life via events that took place in the year of his birth, as well as by finding out more about his career in the oil industry, which he left in disillusion, as he also left California, when a trip of 40 miles reached two hours. In my reading, I was fascinated by the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad and its demise to oil barons via the powerful lobby of Hiram Johnson, California senator for twenty-eight years. The essay became a poem when it collided with my father’s life in oil later in the century, and with my childhood spent largely, as most Californians, in the car. An essay became a poem because my intentions were ignored, and what could be said about my absent father must be said about the condition of being human, must be said about everybody. I am not talking about a theoretical category here; I’m not talking about universality or a race-blind, gender-blind, difference-blind humanism. Page 150 →This is about (a) life and (b) death. This is about (c) love, about loving in the short time span we call human life. Gertrude Stein knew this we she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She knew this when she wrote Everybody’s Autobiography, “Composition as Explanation,” Melanctha, The Making of Americans, and any number of the books she writes, evolving grammatical categories in the “continuous present.” What she didn’t know then, or chose not to mention, is what it would feel like when one of the essential “everybody,” not excluding one’s self, died. This stark reality she faced in my favorite book of hers, The Geographical History of America, where she notes the ultimate limitations of the mind, and is asking fervent questions of her obviously brilliant and learned heart. In this book, she understands that because everything must be born, everything must also die. She says it like this: If nobody had to die how would there be room enough for any of us who now live to have lived. We never could have been if all the others had not died.В .В .В . Human nature cannot know this.В .В .В . But the human mind can. It can know this.2 In this book, she is doing her best to understand why everything must die in order for everything to be born, and though she keeps insisting the mind understands this fact, there is a suffering in her grammar not heard before. My days after my father died were lived in such a book. My essay became an elegy, an elegy for father, California, my child-self, my country, all my others, and I came to know that elegy’s truest purpose was evident in its seeking posture. Who was my father? What is a country? Who are you and how far should I go to reach you? My elegy was not a defining statement. Poem became poem to leave me behind. My essay became a poem when I woke up to know that time, as such, doesn’t pass, but goes on and continues in a manner that links all events to other events, some already finished, some happening now, some yet to happen. I woke up to know the freedom and abandon my parents linked with the automobile was shared by generations, and that that desire for freedom and Page 151 →its vehicle was what assured the planet’s demise. I cut a part of “Everybody’s Autobiography” and now I have to ask why, as it is a published fact that I’ve

never revised my work. In the part I cut, I wrote about Robert Creeley’s poem “I Know a Man,” and I quoted the whole poem: As I sd to my Friend, because I am Always talking—John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd., for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.3 I cut out my knowledge of “the darkness” in the generation that held my parents and Robert Creeley, which they drove against, hard and fast, a darkness I knew because I saw it sometimes in their eyes, a darkness that was their fear of death. By cutting it, I drove away from it. Then I woke to Robert Creeley, my poetic father’s death, early one morning and I saw the darkness, I saw in the darkness. Talk to me, Daddy. Talk to me, Bob. Then, I found that my parents’ continuous chatter had been the heir to my silence. I woke to my serious nature, my desire for accountability, my tendency for “staying with” thoughts, people, and institutions, even if not pleasurable, as the natural reaction to my parents fleeing from the same. I thought if my choices were permanent, maybe I wouldn’t—what? Die? I woke to my father in my son. I was glad to see him again. Page 152 →

Notes 1. Claudia Keelan, The Poet on the Poem, “For My Lost Original: Elegy Is a Seeking in вЂEverybody’s Autobiography,’” American Poetry Review 36, no. 1 (2007): 3–5. 2. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 45. 3. Robert Creeley, Collected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 32.

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Interview for Omnidawn Press, conducted by Rusty Morrison (Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz) Rusty Morrison: It is such a pleasure to see this book come to fruition! I believe it was in 2009 that you first spoke to Ken and to me about your intentions for this project: to produce a translation of the 12th century women troubadours, the trobairitz—women who were able to manipulate their maleascendant structure to express their own intimate and even subversive concerns, rather than let their voices be manipulated by the form’s dominance. Ken and I were immediately excited—we realized how valuable this work could be to modern readers, since so many of us today are looking for ways to recognize our own agency and empower ourselves within the many hierarchies of overwhelming authority in which we find ourselves constrained. But I can only imagine how daunting the work must have been. I want to ask you so much about the project, your process, and its impact upon you. Let’s begin simply: Can you speak to how the idea came to you and what were the first poems you translated? Claudia Keelan: I was living in Denver rather suddenly, after having met and married Donald Revell. One of his students, Carol Nappholz, was just finishing her dissertation “Anonymous Women: The Female Voice in the Poetry of the Troubadours.” Like most people, even now, I’d read the troubadours, but hadn’t even heard about the trobairitz. Carol’s book focused on poems in the troubadour’s oeuvre that spoke in women’s voices. Scholars were debating—and continue to debate—how many of the anonymously written poems could be unqualifiedly attributed to women writers, as so much of what we know about the trobairitz is found only in the vidas—or biographies—of the troubadours. Meg Bogin’s 1976 translation of the trobairitz was Page 154 →the first book in English that introduced the twenty-something women who are indisputably trobairitz. Carol gave me the manuscript and said “make this into poetry.” Twenty years later, I translated a sirventes, a debate, or protest poem in one voice. Called “I Grew Coarse” in my translation, the poem protests the sumptuary laws controlling women’s clothing. I was a visitor at the University of Alabama at the time, living again in the South, where social relations still seem strictly prescribed by evangelical Christianity, even while date rape is rampant. So it was somehow inevitable that I’d start with the protest poem, even though they are rare in the trobairitz’s corpus—there are two, and both are anonymous. Most of the poems are tensos, a poem in two voices that argues about various things, but mostly love, the fin’amor of the troubadour tradition, the so-called fine or pure love invented by the troubadours, to woo his lady, who is the feudal lord’s wife, and a trobairitz. Some readers have associated me with the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E movement, but it’s an inaccurate association, as my interest has always been in the lyricism, the music that is the materialism, of language. RM: You are a poet with an excellent ear for the music of lyric poetry, a wealth of critical experience in the history of lyric writing, and you are much respected as an innovative writer who is able to use language to attend to its ambiguities, even as you tenaciously examine our human enterprise. Can you speak to the challenges in bringing this work into a more current idiom? I know that you speak with depth and candor about this process in your text’s introduction, but can you give us some sense here of what was most rewarding, exciting, and challenging to you in this work? CK: Thank you, Rusty! The methods I’ve developed as a poet, and the attention I’ve given to what you call “our human enterprise” has been to put the gaze on the one and the many, and their intersections. The longer I listened to the poems of the trobairitz, the more I could hear that same dynamic at play. The trobairitz, the lady of the troubadour’s attention, didn’t particularly enjoy the categorization that fin’amor placed on her own self, and on her life. Marriage in itself is viewed with anger, resignation, sorrow, rarely, if ever, with joy, in their poems. Centuries before the women’s movement called attention to the commodification of women, and the dual co-

option of feminine authority imposed by marriage and children, the trobairitz were arguing, lamenting, resisting, these same things. They are very Page 155 →aware of what their actual conditions are, over and beyond the fictionalized lady of the troubadour tradition, and also what they received from this tradition, and from the feudal system by which their marriages are bound. They realized they were not free, much less loved or respected, within a system that nonetheless insures their relative wealth and mobility. In that sense, they are modern. Once I really heard that, all I had to do was transfer it into contemporary language, which wasn’t too hard, since the kind of human unhappiness they experienced is what comprises the unhappiness of the status quo, or what in our country was once called the middle or upper middle class, whose material wealth didn’t translate to personal happiness. RM: I know that you traveled in conjunction with and to augment your research. How did visiting sites in Europe impact this work? What moments were most memorable in their influence upon this translation? Can you narrate for us any instances of surprise, of challenge that seeded work in this text? What experiences were, and/or remain for you, most resonant? Do you feel this translation is more alive to the trobairitz because of that travel, because you invested that time? In what ways? And /or were the changes subtler than can be clearly articulated? CK: Long before I read the trobairitz, I had been fascinated with the heretical Christians called the Albigensians or Cathars, who were slaughtered by command of Pope Innocent III in 1129, an early crusade made largely to gain possession of the land of the large fiefs in Occitania, what is now called the Pays d’oc, or the south of France. After the crusade, Catharism disappeared from France, and the trobairitz and their poems were never heard of again. It is very likely that many of the trobairitz were Cathar, and were either killed or silenced during and after the Albigensian crusade. So, along with the extinction of a liberating Christianity, came also the extinction of the first known instance of sustained women’s writing. I travelled to the Pays d’oc, to Albi, and while there, I wandered into the city hall of the town, where I saw an amazing painting called Femmes des Albigenses. It depicts a group of seminaked women, their hands full of stones, all of whom would be killed that day or the next, confronting the crusaders. This willingness to live and die for a lived belief parallels certainly the clear pinnacle of fin’amor, where lover submits to the higher authority of the lady, and the lady, if she hears the truth of his song, too gives way. Page 156 →RM: I have heard you speak thoughtfully about your own writing process. If I’m recalling correctly, I understand that you may, before writing, find yourself musing, meditating on an energy or idea, but that once you begin to write, you move through the work and then complete it. In other words, you are not a poet who actively or consistently engages in extensive revision as part of your writing practice. Is this still true about you? And, did you use this strategy in your work of translation? Or did you find yourself returning, revising, in ways that might be different from your own creation of poems? Or was translating this work a hybrid of practices? CK: Some of the translations came through in one piece. Others took longer, usually because they were longer. You’ll notice that some of the tensos are several pages long. Ultimately, though, after I heard the translation and wrote it down, very little revision was done. RM: Did your process change from one trobairitz to another, were some of these women closer to your process, and some more different, and thus asked different process strategies from you? Can you speak to their differences and how that impacted your translation process? CK: My process didn’t change, but I was very aware of the differences in personality of each, because they made themselves very clear. Countess of Dia, for example, laughs through her poem, making puns, accusing mockingly, while Castelloza speaks through heartbreak so great, I too cried when I translated her. Each of the trobairitz speaks with a vivid individuality, even as they employ the conventions of courtly love. The trick became how to translate the essence of their individual feeling.

RM: Who are the authors with whom you feel a kinship? Who influenced you in this work of translation? Who are you reading currently? CK: Oh my goodness, so many! Some would include William Blake, John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Brenda Hillman, Claudia Rankine, Sasha Steensen. All of my writer Page 157 →friends. These are just the poets. I love philosophy, though it is slow going. Lately I’ve been working through Levinas again. Last year Whitehead. Pound’s theories of translation helped me to my method, as did Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus, and David Slavitt’s Virgil, as they too were translating a vastly older text, and found the means to carry across—the first meaning of translation—lost languages into a contemporary idiom. After I had translated the poems, I was also interested to find that both Pound and Snodgrass translated troubadour poems via the jazz of their periods. As my translation sometimes involves rap and hip-hop in vocabulary, idiom, and rhyme, I was glad to see that others had found the music of their moment an apt vehicle for the troubadour’s vernacular poetry. I read Derrida and Venutti, among others, also in the process of translating the poems. Right now I am rereading William James’s Pragmatism in conjunction with Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation” and doing a thorough reading of Robin Blaser’s complete work, both for independent studies with students. Also, Native American oratory and mythology. And Alan Watts’s autobiography. RM: Would you tell me a bit about yourself? Anything you are willing to share that might not be in your short bio that is published in the book? CK: I try very hard to believe that life is beautiful, and that things make sense, and am almost constantly heartbroken when the evidence shows otherwise. My poetry and my teaching are rooted in the practice of fair-mindedness and equilibriums. When I’m alone, it’s hard to maintain either. I wish I had more friends I could see on a daily basis, who could either razz me out of my sadness, or sit with me and weep. Or we could just look at the sky. It amazed me how companioned I felt when translating these poems. I felt I’d found lost sisters. It was a happy few years. RM: You were actively involved in the selection of the image that is used in the cover design for this book. Would you describe the search, your hopes for the cover image? How this cover may fulfill your desires, intentions? CK: Well, it is beautiful, yes? It reflects an idealized state, one that doesn’t vie with the history of the period, but does mesh with an idea of harmonious love and music making, which was at Page 158 →the heart of the story the troubadours told themselves about their art and times. Friendship was a very important ideal in the troubadour’s lexicon, and while there is evidence that the male poets did make and keep friendships, there isn’t much record of women’s relations to each other during the period. The cover elicits friendship and ease. I go with that.

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Poetics Statement for Poetry Society of America “In Their Own Words” (O, Heart) O, Heart is a lyric sequence, rooted in the utterance of an omniscient or all-knowing narrator, never named, who speaks on behalf of the woman, the main character in the book. The poems posit and argue the main questions in the piece, specifically what comprises what we call the human heart, how can we know our “heart’s truths,” and how have the answers to those questions informed human history. The question re the “heart’s truth” also explores the difference in kind between the answers women and men provide historically to the question of sincerity. Answers appear in the book from many sources, but the main “drama” is the dialogue—between what we call the humanities and what we call science, and the inconclusive answers provided from both disciplines. The narrative of this struggle takes place in the questions posed by the narrator to the main character, called only “the woman,” as well as in “the woman’s” interrogation of the figure called only “the stranger.” This gender struggle is also enacted via numerous quotes from literature of all genres, from lyric love poetry, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, as well as in passages from early scientific inquiry into the function of the heart, which was ultimately proven and demonstrated by William Harvey’s treatise on the heart De Moto Cordis in 1628. All of this brought into conversation might have just resulted in an interesting exercise, but for the need I had to understand my spiritual malaise, and to write my way through it. My father died of a heart attack at my home, my husband has mysterious Page 160 →heart issues, and my sister suffered a series of heart attacks just as the book was published. About halfway through Spring and All William Carlos Williams remarks “the best workВ .В .В . is always done under stress, and at great personal cost,” which has been true in my experience, and O, Heart is a book written under such stress.1 “The woman,” as John Berryman said of Henry, has suffered (serial) irreversible losses, among them a direct connection to herself.2 When I was younger, I took pride both in my life and poems in following a via negativa, a negative way, which resisted identification with the common demographics of human experience—family origin, geography, politics, even friendship—as this kind of self-identification seemed to me to miss, or skip over, the insight that Otherness, in all its strangeness, might provide. My pride now seems misplaced, as I have found time makes strangers of us all, and it’s the extent to which you can make room to love yourself that might give you the ability to love the others. The poem “Continuous Acts” considers this condition of becoming a stranger from a personal point of view, via meditation on women’s history as art object or the “beloved” subject, as well as through my Catholicism, which likewise places women in a subordinate position in relation to men, to herself, and to God (not unlike the condition of the “foreigner” described byKristeva in Strangers to Ourselves).3 While I have not for many years been a practicing Catholic, I still retain the teaching, good and bad. Writing “Continuous Acts” allowed me to locate the historical and psychic construction of my self-disconnection, which led me to gnostic texts that place Mary, the mother, in equal relation to God the father, and Jesus the son. The poem ends with my own enactment of what Blake called “the human divine,” which in my reading is available through what psychiatrists or the innocent call an “open” heart.4

Notes 1. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1922), 116. Page 161 →2. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), vi. 3. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 4. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43656 To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.В .В .В . For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.В .В .В . Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

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Interview with Thomas Barkman for Barrow Street (O, Heart) Thomas Barkman: “Mojave Letter,” “Continuous Acts,” and “Agape, the Woman Is Agape” are poems that appear twice, though differently with other poems between them. Are these poems “interrupted” by the ones in between? Are they insteadВ sixВ poems (two separate poems though both titled the same)? What is its relationship to the poems between its two iterations? Claudia Keelan: The poems that appear twice are different poems with the same title that recall the issue of the first poem and bring it forward to a newer iteration. The ones in between them do not interrupt them, in so much as they complement them. The books of poetry I most like are books where the poems speak to each other and teach readers how to read them. The poems in O, Heart told me how to write them, and more than other books I’ve written, the sequencing and structure of the book is very much a flow chart of my experience writing it. Take the poems “Agape, the Woman Is Agape.” Agape is a great word. There’s a gap in it, and an ape, which is an animal and a form of mimicry. In the experience of becoming “agape” there’s the visceral sense of being cut open that happens in heart surgery, as well as in the absolute exposure one feels when what, or who, you love betrays you. You are very clearly agape, mouth open, in surprise, horror, wonder, whatever; you are very clearly blown wide open. Luce Irigaray wrote about how women have more than one mouth, the one she speaks from, and the one where she is entered, through which other life proceeds, so that one of the qualities of the feminine is its porousness, its openness, with all the possibilities of ecstasy or horror available in that state, anatomically from top toВ bottom.1 Page 163 →And of course, agape is the most beautiful concept of love, derived from Christ’s example, the love of the human sister and brotherhood that Christ experienced completely unto his death for them, in order to teach themВ howВ to love, the stakes of love, if you will. You have to move through eros to agape to love anybody. You have to inhabit your body and soul to love anybody or anything well. Whitman teaches this amazingly, especially in section 5 of “Song of Myself” where he personifies the soul and the body making love, which results in an understanding of the connection of all things, including the knowledge of God, which was what the crucifixion of the human man Jesus was meant to give. I can’t say I’ve ever truly inhabited either my body or soul, but I know that’s the state where truth would be. The two poems “Agape, the Woman Is Agape” chart something like this. TB: The Awakening, The Scarlet Letter, and De Motus Cordis all appear in O, Heart. If you track them, can you say what is at work? And with the use of attributed and unattributed quotations through the text—what is at work, even or especially if these quotations are from texts not explicitly identified? CK: I love all those books. I think the way in which the idea of the heart functions in Hawthorne’s novel is pretty clearly as the vehicle through which human understanding arrives. The Scarlet Letter’s intention was to label Hester Prynne an adulteress, but it doesn’t work.2 At the end of the novel, people have forgotten what the A stands for and believe it means angel. In Harvey’s treatise, he outlines for the first time the way the actual heart works, the four chambers, the pump mechanism, etc.3 Those tracks seem pretty overt in the book. The Awakening may be harder to track, but not really. From the beginning of poetry, women took on a pretty heavy burden, as the beloved subject/object of the poet’s attention. In Shakespeare, most of the good women die before the end of the play—Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia. Elsewhere, she gets put in the attic, mad as a hatter. Women served as symbolic functionaries for the dreams of men. Chopin’s Edna “awakes” to herself, but she too dies at the end of the novel, swimming until she loses strength and drowns.4 I wanted to subvert that tragic, suicidal trajectory, which is why all of the characters in the play decide to swim away, together, friends, in spite of all

their disagreement and petty betrayals. They swim into a Page 164 →literary history (if I’m lucky or good enough) where the great books are the books that demonstrate human love and survival as a process of understanding that leads to forgiveness, and thus toВ .В .В . well, eternity. So “swim / swim” good reader! Maybe we’ll get there together.

Notes 1. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). 3. William Harvey, De Motus Cordis: An Anatomical Study on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Harvey Leak, Kindle Edition, 2016. 4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 2nded. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

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