Goodbye Pork Pie Year / Meta-Discussion about Genitalia

2012, I don't want to say you were completely awful.

Here is Charles Mingus and his band playing the title-song. Background music for this post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfe_8RAaJ0

Names

So I'm experimenting with names now.

Some I've found that I enjoy:

MFA / PhD Applications...DONE! Also, Three Lists

*giant exhale, not a sigh*

Woke up super early to mail packets before the holiday cut off for overnight shipping, glad I asked about it on Saturday. Mailed rec letter sent to me for me to send to program. Called around to places to make sure they had everything assembled. Checked up on rec letter submissions, everything is as expected. Called clearinghouse about transcripts. Checked bank account to see if the GRE folks (ETS) had taken out their money yet, samesies for transcript folk. Crossed off last items on last lists.

Everything made it in on time! The statements of purposes; the transcripts unofficial, the transcripts official; the single goals statement; the rec letters; the GRE scores; the poetry work samples; the nonfiction work samples; the combined-but-not-interspersed poetry-and-nonfiction work samples; the writing samples critical, expository, and analytical; the teaching assistant applications; the teaching philosophies; the teaching statements; the statements of interest; the CVs; the cover sheets and cover letters; the pdfs; the pdfs that couldn't be filled out electronically and thus were printed, filled out by hand, scanned, and emailed; the documents uploaded, the documents mailed; the documents literally cut and pasted on top of one another  and scanned (thanks Ben!);  the online graduate college applications; the paper department applications; the payments!

Speaking of the payments...

A list for those who may want to do this sometime: Total Expenses

December 18th Update

So I haven't blogged since the semester kicked into gear. What a time, what a time.

Here is an experiment in how to summarize four months' worth of life-altering events in a single post. First thing: you condense time. Second: elements must recur for a secret narrative to tremble below the surface. Third: be honest and choose your details wisely.

Against "Faith"

I have been trying to put my thoughts about the irredeemably bad nature of religious thought into words for so long, and I just saw a post on Facebook that beat me to it. These first three paragraphs mirror my thoughts exactly. Post starts "In another thread, we are discussing atheism and anti-theism..." on December 18th (today).

http://www.facebook.com/TABCP
Yes I am atheist. Yes I am anti theist also. I will not censor my beliefs to comfort those who feel threatened by my ideas.

Though I only have personal experience with how Catholicism can ravage lives, the same idea holds true for all faiths: they deny reality in order to preserve beliefs. I feel fine making that generalization about all religions. And that is the problem: a distance from reality is sought, and it never makes things better. That distance allows religion, via faith, to interfere with the mind's sense-making apparatus, so that people will act in the best interest of the religion instead of in the best interests of themselves and other people. It took me years to intellectually become an atheist, and I still find myself trying to rid myself of the destructive emotional effects that exposure to religion at a young age enacted upon my mind (guilt issues, self-esteem issues, paranoia, fear of self-assertion, etc.).

What I love about this post so much is that it pinpoints faith as the primary problem, and religion as simply symptomatic of the faith pathogen.

I hope I'm not preaching exclusively to the choir here. I have had many conversations recently about the evils of religion, and always backed down when people say "Oh, well, it works for some people," and I can't deny that some people think religion does them good (besides not wishing to engage in the absurdity of refuting the hypothetically beneficial experiences of hypothetical people). But keeping faith-as-distancer-from-reality in mind, it becomes apparent that even if the short-term emotional gains of feeling secure and feeling comforted and feeling moral that arise from faith are what "work for some people," even if faith creates a belief in a better reality than the present one, in the long term the effect of faith (and religious practice as its proxy) is a slowly increasing loss of the ability to engage with reality in a rational manner.

If faith is needed for the world to be good, or for a person to feel their existence is validated, then for the believer there exists a much larger perceptual problem: why is the world or the self in need of validation in the first place? Why must people wait for death in order for good things to start happening? Faith asks people to become non-actors and wait for someone / something else to change things.

Religion (faith's proxy) plays on insecurities and gaps in understanding. Becoming comfortable with the imperfect nature of reality allows for both more reasonable expectations of behavior in people and a higher frequency of experiencing wonder. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean there is no way we can. Just because there is wickedness in the world does not mean the whole of existence is flawed and in need of redemption.

Faith short-cuts the critical thinking apparatus, and places false answers designed to satisfy people emotionally erroneously in the places we seek intellectual answers. I think this is why faith is so hard to abandon. It is more emotional than intellectual. And emotional suffering is a brutal thing indeed. If you think of it this way, faith functions much like paranoia, creating a feedback loop of fear and alleviation of that fear (fear of not being good, of not acting good, fear of the unknown in death, fear of loss of faith, fear of loss of the validation religion and faith provide, etc), like a mental illness. The mind becomes a prisoner of faith. The inspiring part is that the mind is also the warden of said prison. You can unlock the door anytime you want.

To my religious friends, please, if you value your mind and its sovereignty, religion can only hurt you. Get out as soon as you can. I can guarantee you will find the better world you seek.

Not sure why I felt inspired to write this now, but I did, and so there's that. Maybe it's because of all the stupid Christmas garbage I'm surrounded with this time of year. Anyway, that's my reaction to this neato post.

-J

BTW, I am experimenting with female names in my personal emails, so I figured where better than this place? New names to come. Fell free to leave comments on them!

-Ylia

Republicans Finally Out of the Closet: GOP Opposes Critical Thinking

Neruda will have to wait. I just saw this infuriating piece of nonsense today.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/

Here's Richard Whitaker of the Austin Chronicle quoting from the Texas GOP's official platform.

Pablo Neruda

I believe my next post will be about Pablo Neruda, and how he makes poetry seem both easy and impossible.

Until then, here is a rather pleasant translation of one of his early poems, by Stephen Mitchell. Found in the anthology, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. I think I would let that fourth stanza do whatever it wanted with me, and then invite the fifth and the sixth over for dinner. Would?

"Walking Around

It so happens that I'm tired of being human.
It so happens that I enter tailor shops and movie theaters
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing on a lake of origin and ashes.

Psychic Telephone Service

My friend Rosemary just suggested I start a psychic telephone service.

Sleep, Kenneth Koch

I'm sick today.

Whipping Girl

Reading a trans manifesto / collection of critical essays on feminism / gender mindfuck in a desperately needed way. Called Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. It's blowing my mind. Dissecting sexism and privilege into 3 major camps. Promoting a bimodal distribution pattern for the relationship between gender expression and biological sex. Identifying and undermining both cultural and personal patterns of cissexual privilege and transphobia. If any of this stuff interests you, reader, by all means, this book is a gem.

Hurm. Stakes, Dean Young, and Unblocking.

Hokay. So, I don't want this space to turn into a gripe-fest. Practically, based on my last two posts, it has. Ultimately, though, the idea is less about whining and more about writing. Let's talk a little about block, stakes, and why I have always been secretly attracted to Dean Young.

Life as of 8-2, Like a Geode

So I haven't done anything writerly for a while. No poems, no essays, no stories. I may be blocked, but block implies I've been trying to write. Sometimes you need a break, even from things you enjoy. Makes me remember why I enjoy them when I come back. Assuming I do come back.

Life as of 6-30-2012

Some people say "Write what you know" is the mantra of all successful writers. Other like to say things about how you won't be producing interesting writing unless you are living an interesting life, getting new experiences all the time. Others say, Fuck it, just write.

I've been living a very interesting life as of late, but it has been keeping me from producing writing at all. I don't think I am the sort of person who writes about what is happening to them. Usually.

Published Essay!

The  editor at the Four Ties Lit Review has been kind enough to publish an essay of mine. Check it out. It's about the how-to and why and of collaborative poetry, one of my favorite passtimes.

"“How Do You Say ‘Pineapple’ in Esperanto? / It Depends on How Many Cowboys are Getting into the Pool” |

The Pleasures of Collaborative Poetry part 1 of 2"

http://fourtieslitreview.com/2012/06/15/273/

Getting there, 

J

Dissociation part 2: The Narrative Strikes Back

continued from part 1

Hoagland asks implicitly, and I wish to ask explicitly, of art that champions "a self-conscious lack of consequence," as much disassociative poetry appears to: What then does it exist to do? If you are trying to write something inconsequential, why even bother to write it? Hoagland asserts that one thing this vein of poetry certainly succeeds at is representing attitude (I think of punk rock here, and DaDa) more than anything else, an act all too common throughout American culture. So by seeking to convey the lack of substance that permeates contemporary culture, perhaps this lack of substance ends up permeating the poetry as well, to its detriment. What, if there is no substance, is the reader to engage with and enjoy?

Attitude and Disassociation, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Intelligibility

So I just read an essay about disassociation in poetry, specifically the urge some poets have to reject narrative, to embrace a disjointed structure that pivots and flails all the way down the page. It was Tony Hoagland's "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." And my poetry world just fell to pieces.

To Know What I'm Doing

I don't know what I'm doing when I write, usually. I think I am trying to find truths. Not The Truth. I don't believe in The Truth anymore. I believe in feelings, in impressions, in perspectives. Obscure ones, little heavy ones, even big guys that hide in strange places. Post-modernism, you complicate, but with your complication you liberate.

I don't usually know what I'm writing about when I write. I like it that way. As writers, we are told to "write what you know!" by so many others who came before us. And this works for a while. But eventually, like a marathon runner or a fish plugging along upstream, I hit a wall. What can I say that has not been said before? That's when I reach.

First thing that comes to mind, jot it down. No pressure in brainstorming, in drafting--there will be time to murder words later. Plunge into that abyss. I find new things. I find strange things. Old dreams, cobwebbed. Something I once said to my sister that I don't believe anymore. Foghat. A lick from a Miles Davis tune. Matisse. Stamps.

I once went to a panel at a conference where the panelists talked about writing at, or writing through, as opposed to writing about. Writing about is lame. How now, to write through? At, in this scenario, seems easier. I can see my subject, and I approach. Via specificity. Via detail. Via a thimble where I allow connotations to sift through.

But Through? How to write as if I were inside a thing, and not separate from it? Surely this asks a certain kind of mind, from the author, a level of awareness that hinges upon imagination and breathes relentless impressions.

When I abandon trying to sound like I know what I'm doing and allow myself to sound like I'm feeling around in the dark, part exhilaration, part nervous laughter, part stubbing each individual toe, maybe this is through.

As the Volcano Goes Dormant, I Think of Whales Returning to the Land

What's in a name?

They're the first thing a reader encounters when meeting a person, meeting a poem, browsing the list of panels at a conference, so in that regard, they're important. Yet there are so many different permutations of Title out there that the creation of a universal rule for a good title seems a task that would fit best in a satirical poem, if anywhere.

I can think of 5 distinct types of titles, and they all do something different than the other, though of course, there is still that universal overlap, the act of naming.
Titles for academic papers / presentations / panels
Titles of works of art: poems, pictures, books, songs
Titles of positions / people
Titles of bands
Euphemisms

Let's get the easy one's out of the way first.

T. S. Eliot and St. Louis, Head versus Heart

I wrote self-righteous, self-centered, self-aggrandizing crap for like 6 years before I was asked to "Fuck the head, J! Go for the juggular through the heart" as marginalia returned from a professor in a workshop. Why was I even writing this stuff? I ask myself now, looking back on it, wanting to burn it or delete it. I guess I  keep it around to remind myself where I came from, or from some attachment to the past.

Now that I have some perspective, I will venture a guess as to why my juvenalia, my proto-writing, my initial stumbling-around-in-the-darks, suck. My audience for most of that stuff was myself, so I wrote it for myself. I didn't even read much poetry, just listened to The Doors and read Morrison's drivel, mostly, bought some of the classics every once in a while out of some knowledge that there was something about writing I didn't quite understand yet, something I wasn't doing quite right. Among many things, I had no idea of image.

I stumbled onto T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" late into my college career. I still can't get past that second stanza. Lines 19 - 30.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

What a whallop! I can still hear Morrison drunkenly almost-whispering these lines. The call to follow the speaker, specifically out into the desert, sure, okay, it's hip, it's a Morrisonism, but then Eliot does something Morrison could only hope to chance upon.

Poems

In my experience, poetry more than any other art form offers a plethora of aesthetics, a multitudinous array of ways to react to it, many that are at direct odds with each other as far as criteria for what makes a poem within that aesthetic "successful" or not.

Poetry as a whole is very inclusive, and takes moves from both visual art (image, composition, use of white space) and music (rhythm, permutations of rhyme, assonance and alliteration, collaboration, diction, etc). There are many ways to read a poem. There are as many if not more ways to write them.

Personally, I think a reader should not have to think very hard to determine if a piece of art is moving or not. Art should grab us by the throat at the very beginning and pummel us with meaningful surprises all the way through.

But this is not always the case, not for art in general, nor for many poetic aesthetics out there (I'm looking at you, language poetry, New York school, etc). I get really annoyed when the artist has to explain zir art, or they hide some secret knowledge that the reader cannot glean from the piece that is the key to its interpretation. Art should not champion inaccessibility--this is a route to a swift death, perhaps of the whole medium, and some say poetry is already there--a dead art. Of course, poetry is not dead. As long as people speak, there will be poetry.

But people still fear poetry. It has a scary rep in American culture, probably because so many people are exposed to it at such an age (adolescence) where they have not yet been challenged to think outside of black versus white, good versus bad, all those binaries and fallacies and clever aphorisms they've internalized from a culture that seeks to dumb things down and oversimplify. I'm not trying to say that poetry is complicated--rather, I'm arguing that poetry allows for a truth that is tied to the observer and the moment of observation. In successful poetry, there is no right answer, there is only an impression, communicated with urgency, via intentional language that grinds against the rest of the world. In this way do people think they do not "get" poetry. The challenge is not in figuring out what the poem means, or what happens in the poem. For me, the challenge arises from allowing the poem to let you feel like the poem does, and readers can achieve this by paying attention to the language in the poem.

"Paying attention to the language" sounds vague, and it is. Language = every idea that could ever be constructed; therefore paying attention to language asks for a greater level of attention paid than, say, paying attention to traffic, or to a parental lecture, or to a job training video, to a cooking timer. I find it productive to look for strangenesses, places where a thing is described or phrased in an un-usual manner, or in a way that calls attention to itself. It's usually being described that way for a reason.

For me, the best poetry asks you to do none of this. It is a romp from the first word to the last, and the poem is fun and exciting to inhabit, pulls you through with a type of anticipation magnet and finishes with a muted bang. Authors like Dean Young and Marc McKee work like this for me especially. Reading them is very different from reading someone like Louise Gluck or Robert Hass, or Larry Levis even. Some authors speed up the world, others tend to slow it down (not as exciting, but sometimes we aren't looking to be excited), while others try to represent it accurately (journalists).

Poetry can do a ton of work in a very small space, charge words that would usually never see a spark, find meaning where we never thought it could exist (my favorite). Granted, there is a lot of bad poetry out there. A LOT. I blame this on high school. I also blame this on rock n roll, rap, pop music, the consumer culture sort of environments where language exists primarily (though not always!) to make clever rhymes and sell a cheap idea of sex to the broadest audience possible and nothing more.

Poetry may start from an experience (but it does't have to!), but it has to go beyond the experience. If you want to tell me about your experience, please write me an essay. If you want to show me how your experience has implications for people besides you, we're on the right track. If your experience throws into question something that has been commonly accepted to be true, then great. If your experience was such a trip that normal language, grammar, syntax, or vocabulary cannot accurately convey it, that's the stuff.

I don't want to turn people off to the writing of poetry by giving these proscriptions and limitations. We all have to stumble around for a long time before we learn how to walk. Give yourself license to fail, and eventually, with effort and a little guidance, you'll have given yourself more opportunities to succeed than most people ever have.

Continued in next post!

-J

Introduction, Foundation

I like to be inundated with and overcome by feeling. Suddenly the perfect word in the perfect place, and the top of my head feels like it's been unscrewed a little bit, and somehow this is overwhelmingly pleasant. It's instances like these, where things really work, that get me going, that motivate me to look closer, and to try to create my own. I try to make little universes whose contents bash against each other and cause emergencies with consequences for everything else in that space.

Thing is, art asks you to pay attention.