Year in Poetry 2012

Most best-of lists come out in December, I know, but since my birthday happens in January, I’ve always done the requisite reflecting on l'anee passe a few weeks late. Here then is what mattered most in the poetic year, offered for those of you who don’t live near a superlative reading series, or great bookstores.  

Personal

On a personal level, this year was important as I was living in Germany at last birthday  and gave my first European poetry reading in the Zimmer Theater in Tuebingen.  Moreover, I finished at long last a series of poems I’ve been working on for a couple of years called The Elegy Beta, a series of responses to Rilke which I hope you will hear much more about the future and conceived as a collaboration with the Argentine photographer David Wittig.  I also began a partnership with musician Jake Armerding trying out new ways of distributing poetry to the people. You really should check this last link out; big things are happening.

Runners-up

In the broader world though, first: B.K. Fisher’s Mutiny Gallery was published: a book about the poet’s travelling with her daughter which reads more like a novel than a book of poems since their are consistent characters to whom things happen, but which tries several formal devices to convey those happenings, making it an engaging read start to finish which, needless to say, not all poetry books are.

The second runner-up for most important happening in poetry this year is pages 8-11 in the December issue of Poetry Magazine (reprinted in full here). Richard Kenny’s three new poems in that volume are acute pieces of thinking, and beautiful besides, but the interview printed afterward–his attempts to explain those poems–condense a monograph’s worth of poetic theory into a few humble but muscular pages. Required reading.

To this entry I should also append the news, announced only a few days afterward, of Christian Wiman’s leaving the editorship of Poetry Magazine. Wiman took the magazine into the stratosphere, changing the design, the headquarters, and the structure of the magazine, while tripling its readership. Surely, his is one of the most productive editorships that have ever been, and his acumen made itself felt across all quarters of the establishment, such as it is. 

Big News

Matthew Dickman’s new book Mayakovsky’s Revolver came out and he has switched presses: he is now on Norton who produced a beautiful black book for him rather than the paperbacks he had been stuck with for his previous. Dickman also produced a book called 50 American Plays with his brother Michael Dickman which I’ll be teaching from in the spring, and which is terrifically smart.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s new book Our Andromeda also came out this year, which I was looking very forward to as her last two were just exceptional. This new book is too long by half, which is to say that some poems are just outstanding and the other half probably could have used a stronger editorial hand, but is still important because Brenda Shaughnessy is a star, and those poems that do work work marvelously.

But the single most important thing to happen in poetry this year (as it might be measured in 20 years’ time) is the death of Jack Gilbert and the publication of his Collected Poems. This volume is significant because most people don’t know any books from Gilbert apart from Refusing Heaven, and because it’s a gorgeous copy absolutely essential reading of a poet that seems more important every time I return to him.

C. M-H R.I.P.

This week, I resumed my reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, from a new copy I picked up at Elliot Bay Book Company, having left behind the Tübingen Library's copy in Germany, at...the...Tübingen Library.  For a bookmark, I am using a postcard from the Linda Hodges Gallery here in Seattle that was an advert for a painting show by Christopher Martin Hoff.  

View fullsize

Every day this week, when I picked up the book to start reading, I glanced at the reproduction and said to my wife, "we really have to buy this painting; this guy is amazing." Yesterday, I found out that the artist died this year, quite young, but apparently of natural causes.  It was sad to hear not only because he'd been, weirdly, on my mind all week, but because his work was so good, and because he was apparently a thoroughly decent human being. The city was better for his being here. 

Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my tenth year of teaching at the university level, and while I usually have students make some kind of project in addition to writing essays, the projects for the class I've just finished were exceptional, for the clarity of thought that went into them, and the sheer import of the undertakings. 

The class was called Texting: Writing about Digital Humanities, and the idea was to introduce students at an early stage in their academic careers (this was my first time teaching Freshmen in quite a while) to the plethora of tools available to them during this explosion of all things digital, but also to the problems surrounding the humanities generally, and the digital ones specifically. Not least: what are they?

If nothing else, I wanted to gain, over the course of the class, an answer to that question, and so we set out, week by week, confronting the memes and websites, databases, archives, and articles that make up the debates surrounding

• Digital Music
• Digital Scholarship
• Digital Poetics
• The New Aesthetic
• News Aggregators
• Centers, Symposia, Initiatives
• DH Resources particular to UW

One student, in a farewell blog post, summed up our project particularly well:

After taking English classes for more than 7 years, I expected to re-learn about things I have already been taught. How wrong I was. My English 111 class's focus was digital humanities; something I've never even heard of. We learned to navigate our way of information, data, history, poems, research, and so much more through the future of the digital age. We live in this digital age and it only grows from here, so I thought that learning about it now will only allow us to strive for greater success later. It doesn't end here. We would take digital works of course, such as articles, blogs, poems and really learn to dig deep into them and read. Read for context, read for analytical purpose, but we also read for style. Like what apprentices do, we learned from people who were better than us, who had mastered what we desired.

The class explicitly aimed at education's not being theoretical. I didn't just want them to know what I could tell them during our ten weeks together, but how to learn/make/do whatever it is they are individually in to better ever afterward. Again, a student summed it up better than I can:

I remember in our first day of class, our teacher told us something that stuck with me. He said, "You can do, what you can do." He put great emphasis on how much impact one person can make if they really wanted to. Throughout the whole quarter, we learned about many great organizations and devices that became successful just because one person had a crazy idea.  Due to English 111, I have learned "One person is all it takes", is overused for a reason; because it's true.

You can read more of the students' weekly responses here.

Projects

This is the really exciting part.  The students completed two large projects for the class in groups; one of them, called "The New Aesthetic Project," I'll have to tell you about later; the other was a Free Project of their own choice and devise. The prompt said simply find something that could be better and make it that way using the tools we've discussed. Here's a sample of what they outlined and built:

• A Facebook page--The Husky Food Project--featuring photos and reviews of every restaurant, eatery, or coffee stand on campus
• A book (pdf preview here), yes, that you can buy in hardback, softcover, or pdf from here, which is a guide to all the public art on University of Washington's campus, featuring pictures, history, and a short description of each.
• A Comprehensive Digital Map of UW building interiors (for finding your class on the first day of school, bathrooms, etc) whose pitch is just a model of professionalism and urgency.
• An e-book about 100 Changes Due to Tech.
• A website listing all the free products available to students at UW

The point is, I was impressed. These students, for many of whom this was their first college class ever, conceived of, argued for the importance of, and executed significant projects they designed, while writing papers, doing readings, and keeping up with the other, rather large project we were working on as a class.  Hats off!

PAMLA: Coleridge and the Prison Bower of Meaning

This year's Annual Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association was hosted by Seattle University and held October 19-21 - 110th.  I contributed a paper on Coleridge to the session "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream."

Abstract: 

 In Coleridge’s Dream Theory and the Dual Imagination, Kathryn Kimball puts forward the poet’s outline of sense impressions that “arrive constantly,” “whether asleep or awake,” which “the night-working imagination transmutes into dream images,” arguing that, while the poet can be said to have a purposeful theory of dreams, the main reason he was so concerned was that “dreams are an escape from a difficult life.”  

Using Kimball’s assemblage, and a section of the Biographia Literaria called "Nihil Negativuum Irrepresentabile," I argue that the arrest of such “transmutations” becomes for Coleridge an aesthetic technique wherein the Imagination is staged as a mediator who is intentionally exhausted by the difficult (or impossible) task it is set.  He explains the difficulty of his project: to produce “a body at one and the same time in motion and not in motion,” and his method: to erect “...a motory force of a body in one direction and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction,” which he argues “is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable.” The interjection of the man from Porlock, for example, during the composition of Kubla Kahn,  like the overvaluation of albatross-hunting, is that second “motory force” which demands that the imagination mediate between the two opposites in an effort to achieve a place of retirement. 

This paper reads Coleridge’s failures of thought and willful obfuscations in the Biographia Literaria as Deluzean attempts to construct a kind of black hole in which meaning is itself imprisoned, with the intention of defining the imagination’s mediative role between states:real and unreal, sleep and waking. 

It was a lively conference in which to participate, and much larger than the usula discipline-specific conferences I attend.  The best part was connecting with people outside my particular area of specialization and hearing the fine papers by my co-panelists (see full program here):

• Patrick Randolph: "

  Who Are You?" Queerly Destabilizing Identity in Wonderland

• Rebecca McCann: 

  “The Scientific Possibilities of Mesmerism”: Dreaming of Utopia in The Diothas

• Kristine Miller: 

  The 'Fever Dream' of the Post-9/11 Cop: Trauma, Personal Testimony, and Jess Walter's The Zero

Special thanks to our panel chair, Lauren Bond (La Sierra University), to the conference organizers from Seattle University, and to the Renaissance Hotel for having us.  

Punk Prayer →

Pussy Riot are unbelievably articulate and intentional about their work.  This defense should be posted in lieu of an Artist Statement in any galleries that can’t better explain their raison d’être. Churches too.

"The Breaking Towers" at Monarch Review

My new essay--"The Breaking Towers: on Hart Crane's Crumbling Muses"--is up now at Monarch Review.  Essentially, it's a meditation on the way critics treat artists, especially as seen in the new film Broken Tower (dir. James Franco) and in Paul Mariani's biography of the poet, by the same name.  

Monarch is the new kid on the block in the (tough neighborhood?) of literary magazines, and it's based in Seattle, which is why I wanted to publish there.  That, and the fact that they've got an epithet from Richard Kenney on their masthead, whose book One-Strand River is, apart from Shelley, the poetry I've re-read more than any other.  I'm seriously in the middle of my 16th or so straight read-through and it still chokes me up.  

Anyhow, the folks at Monarch are generous and give this content away for free.  You can read the whole essay here. 

Behind-the-Curtain Reading

photo by David Wittig Photography

I'm giving a reading next week at the historic Zimmer Theater in Tuebingen, Germany (named for the Zimmer family, the poet Holderlin's caretakers during his madness).  I'll be reading with Marcus Hammerschmidt, a local poet with whom I've been working to translate some of my poems into German (we'll debut some translations at the reading).  

The Behind-the-Curtain is a fun structure for a Reading Series.  The audience doesn't get to meet or see the writers, who read from onstage with the curtain drawn.  It focuses the attention more on the verse than on the poor nervous poet; in the second half though, the curtain is pulled back and there are more readings and discussion. 

If you're in Southern Germany, come check it out; for those of you who will miss it, I'll post some images to this space and check back in after the fact. 

Tuesday, 5 June 8:00 pm

Charles Bukowski "The Laughing Heart"

Essay on Caravaggio

The Quietest Painting in the Room is an essay I wrote on this painting by Caravaggio and its relationship with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and published over at Comment Magazine.  You can read the whole article by clicking this link.