Brian Ang’s manifesto, “Poetry and Militancy” begins with the following epigraph by Rod Smith. “We work too hard. / We’re too tired/ to fall in love. / Therefore we must / Overthrow the government” but it becomes clear within a few sentences of reading the manifesto that the epigraph is too soft (for lack of a better word) to do what epigraphs tend to do–provide entrance or capture the spirit of a piece of writing–for Ang’s particular arguments.

Of all of the essays in Lana Turner #4, Ang’s manifesto, in my mind, is the most provocative and irritating (I’m thinking of irritating as a quality here) to ignore. You should definitely read this short piece.

I get the sense in reading Ang’s piece that his desire is two-fold. He not only desires the poet become a militant activist “breaking with acceptable behavior” but also that her poems themselves give rise to this break which is of mind, body, and spirit. We must break, Ang argues, not only the “acceptable” or “mannered” period-piece poems we (try not to?) read regularly but also the conventional politics that  prevent us from writing anything worth writing and this double-break, or total transformation, is both precursor and conduit to a communized transformation of the world or what Badiou calls the “emancipation of humanity.”  It’s worth quoting  a few lines from Joshua Clover’s poem called “Gilded Age” at this point “There are not two kinds of poetry there is only one: Jacobin and unyielding /The first principles must be beyond dispute /The best poetry will have contempt for its era but so will the worst.” If there is one kind of poetry, (and I think he’s right, though there might be a lot of ways to write it), we certainly need to place our bets somewhere.

Ang begins his manifesto by discussing what he calls “poetry networks” interested in radical politics that occasionally create militant radical activists who move outside of those networks. This is to say that these networks of poets produce and foster both political poetry and political lives. If you feel a bit taken aback by his propositions, well, that’s your bourgeois interior monologue talking you out of what’s right: “the mass media can be expected to slander militancy.”

In defining “militancy,” Ang says that he means “activism that thinks toward the furthest limits in challenging the social text for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety, and executes actions as necessary toward this goal, often requiring strikes, occupations and riots.” He continues, “if elements of poetry posture to be concerned with politics at all, they need to contribute to thinking and acting toward the furthest limits or they are useless at best and reactionary at worst.” It may be unclear what these “furthest limits” are, but if one doesn’t venture from acceptable forms (of political action, poetic action and aesthetic choices ), he argues one will never know. Certainly, these “further limits” are worth theorizing.

Being eight months pregnant, I’m now more interested in this piece than I was a few months ago since I associate “direct action” with the body (my experience has mostly been with unionizing student labor) and I’m in no shape physically at present to be on the front lines of social action and yet I’m, curiously,  desiring to be. And I do wonder what it means when one’s body is not in the “ideal form” to handle the much-needed aggressiveness. Pregnancy is transient, but what about the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the children? Didn’t we see a four-year old get pepper-sprayed at Santa Monica College just a few weeks ago? The state spares no one. I wonder where these groups can find their place in these ideas? For now, my involvement has to be more intellectual but, in the back of my mind, I do wonder if this is an excuse or way to circumvent responsibility. The future is now, right? When the reality is that poets that I love and admire are getting arrested and beat up by the police, Ang’s piece becomes more relevant than ever and it becomes clear that old, banal saying that “all poetry is political” is one that can only now be reserved for fools.

Lastly, what I admire about the piece is the seriousness and urgency that Ang believes about the potential of poetry and its possibilities and this stance  is especially remarkable and brave in someone so young.  I guess you could alternately argue that only the young have such lofty ideas about poetry; nonetheless, when I read what other young writers read, things like this , —moronic, popular, cynical to the core,  it gives me hope for Ang and his ilk.

Bottom line? If you think you’re writing political poetry, you probably aren’t. If you think that your poetry is relevant, it probably isn’t. If you think you can get away with “doing nothing” in terms of social action, and expect to write poetry that’s meaningful or relevant, you’re fooling yourself. And if all of this pisses you off, it should.

Additional note: Worth exploring, and I don’t have the time to do this today, would be the connections, overlap and differences (historically, ideologically etc.) between Ang’s rhetoric and Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto from the early 20th century.

I always find Perloff’s work interesting. Just to hit on some main points. In the first part of the essay she basically asks how “original” poetry can be original or interesting when so many people today are writing. (echoing Jed Rasula). Then she goes on to describe the sort of “acceptable, workshop-style” poems that are produced in both the academy and reproduced in poetry magazines across the country. I suppose that this sort of cultural promotion and reproduction is essentially the creation of what one would call a “period-style.” ( in her formulation, I-centered, prose-like poetry, heavy metaphor, and what she calls “expression of a profound thought” or “small epiphany.”) My personal experience in workshop and with publishing is basically in accord with her observations.  The workshops that I took at FSU (I only took a few), were heavily skewed to this formulation of poetry as worthy. It’s not that the professors were mean or unkind about  what they perceived to be “experimental” poetry, but rather I truly think that they did not believe its value or history. In some sense, I might be wrong on this but I think that they thought that “experimental” poetry was an offshoot of “regular or mainstream poetry” which is, one could argue, a misreading of modernism. Instead of thinking that the modernists were themselves the experimenters, they believed that the modernists have always been the center or the “mainstream” of poetry. And obviously that’s true now, but this wasn’t always so. I also think that their general indifference and sometimes skepticism about innovation or what they perceived as “experimental” is pretty much a reflection of a publishing culture that tends to publish the types of poems that Perloff describes. If students go to school to become professors and publication is central to their advancement, the question becomes why should professors actively promote experimentation or innovation? In terms of the practical, these professors have their students’ best interest in mind. And one might even argue that it’s to their students’ advantage to keep quietly publishing poems that quietly display the craft-like qualities that other academics recognize as acceptable poetry.  My experience was also that there was a lot of talk about “acceessibility” in a poem: read, the more accessible a poem is to the audience, the more successful it is. But to try to even formulate what it means to be an “accessible” poet would probably take another blog post but I would argue that accessibility has a lot to do with how much bang you get for your buck after one, cold read. If you can get everything reading it once, you’re good. To give you an idea, one of my professors (someone I should say who I consider a friend and someone, furthermore, I admire) from graduate school says that poetry should be understood by a six-year old and if a six-year old doesn’t get it, then the poet has a problem with a poem he or she has made. Now, I don’t espouse this view, but it certainly sheds light on the behind-the-scenes ideology of some professors writing in this day and age.

It’s worth noting that Perloff recognizes the unmusical nature of this sort of poetry. At the same time though, it’s considered “lyric.” In my mind, this is a contradiction. In fact, a lot of the “sanctioned” poetry that I read in poetry magazines is impersonal, unmusical and almost always apolitical insofar as the political has not touched on that person’s life in some small and silly way (she does note this)—as though this poetry could have been written by a machine (the great machine of the academic poetry workshop). So I think what appears to be the “personal” poem that comes out of the workshop is something like a great con as if the confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s had been taken to its cynical, post-ironic, post-sincere, late-capitalist end. For example, when I was in workshop, I was told that Plath was a good poet but that she’s “melodramatic” and not to write with too many exclamation marks. Someone like Charles Bernstein was either never even worth the time to teach or was simply an unknown. In fact, I don’t think I read one language poet in any of the workshops that I took as a graduate student. Most of the reading that I did in this tradition took place outside of the classroom.

After these initial observations about current poetry trends, Perloff goes on to talk about the impossibility of a hybrid, “third-way” poetry which we’ve all read about before and then hits on the Rita Dove anthology. I think that the best points that she makes about the Dove anthology are that all of the poems can be found on the internet and the anthology was basically created because Dove is so famous in the poetry world and people will buy an anthology if you recruit a famous editor to compile it. Perloff’s belittling of Dove, however,  is a bit uncalled for (calling parts of her introduction “folksy,” there’s a line that’s outright rude: “accuracy is not this editor’s strong suit” and Perloff’s wondering if the anthology was meant for middle school). I haven’t read the anthology since I think most anthologies are pretty useless, but I think we all  can assume that the intended audience is not middle schoolers.  At the same time, Perloff does reflect my own experience of how the history of poetry is misunderstood, misread and reproduced.

Anyway, this is all setup for Perloff to champion the (mostly) conceptual poets who she perceives as working outside of this conservative system (feedback loop?) of both the workshop and publication.  Poets like Susan Howe, Vanessa Place, Goldsmith are creating poems by making in “pivotal choices” rather than acting as Romantic, first-person narrators of “deep” feelings about the world.

It’s a bit slippery here but, Perloff seems to like political poems that are “curiously free of all moralizing and invective,” something that she’s finds in Voyager by Srikanth Reddy. I’m not sure if this is mere observation on her part about that particular book or a statement of judgment/ taste. I would need clarification. (In any case, I’m thankful that she wrote about this book, one which I will definitely buy).

I’ve thought a lot about political poetry in the past few years and I’ve often wondered why both inside and outside of academia moralizing and invective with regard to the political are looked down upon and I’ve definitely had to question my own feelings in this area as I tend to react negatively to what might be called the “overtly political” in poetry especially if it’s attached to the personal or emotional. If anyone has read the exchange between Levertov and Duncan, it’s helpful at this point.  Place and Goldsmith certainly make a commitment to the political, but do not use the lyric-I in the traditional sense. Perloff talks about the new lyric that is formed through technologically-mediated choices. (something that is not a new phenomenon).

Certainly, this movement away from moralizing and invective has something to do with our times. Outrage about say, pepper-spray cop, can take place on a thousand blogs and in a million Facebook updates, but it has no place in “craft-like” poetry or the person-less poem of the new avant-garde. Outrage, invective, moralizing or whatever you want to call it is reserved for the “amateurs” (the unschooled), the slam-poets, or the simply the poets with no taste. All sides seem to want to control the lyric into something manageable and safe: in the conservative view, this is a kind of mechanical, workshop poem that really has not much to do with the lyric after all. In the avant-garde, it’s a demand for a new, “unoriginal” lyric. But can’t there be something else? It seems like both sides are ultimately unwilling to cross the police lines of their own taste-making.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts this morning regarding this essay. I’m thankful that the Boston Review published this piece. It definitely made for some good reading this morning.

Last week and this week, we have not had daycare, so I’ve been finishing up the semester and taking care of Ezekiel full time which is fun and time-consuming. I’m looking forward to next week when I actually have some time off. I’ll be working on Wildlife next week as well as some of my own poetry, I think. Pregnancy is going well–only about eight weeks to go. My goal for Weeks 30-34 is to go swimming every day which feels great. It’s getting really hot and humid in Florida and even though I’m used to it after having lived here for over six years, being very pregnant with this heat isn’t the most fun thing in the world: like I almost passed out at graduation last week! So, swimming is very nice and relaxing–makes me feel light and cool. Ezekiel and I have been baking a lot: cookies, bread etc which is not helping with my weight gain. With Eze, I gained 56 pounds which wasn’t ideal. I lost the weight really quickly, but still–I had to work out twice a day for a few months. With Charlotte, it’s been a little bit better (I think), but I think I’m already up about 30 pounds so I’m probably headed for a 40 pound weight gain. I don’t want to stress about it too much though.

The cow at the zoo died a while back and recently we found out the pig died and yesterday we heard that one of the river otters died! And they’re building some stupid obstacle course in the trees which is destroying the natural beauty and contours of the canopy.

So, I’ve talked it over with Craig and I’m definitely going to go to the Vermont Studio Center from the 8th of December to the 20th. I’m super excited about it. Mostly because I get to have two weeks where I get to write without any interruptions. I’m going to try to make the most of it. I am a little nervous about leaving Craig with the kids for two weeks but he seems perfectly fine with it. (Not that I think he wouldn’t take care of them, of course. Just feel a little guilty and selfish about burdening him like that.) Also, the secondary concern is that Charlotte is going to only be 6 months old and I’m not sure how I’m going to work that out since I’ll more than likely still be breastfeeding. But all of that aside, I do need to be able to write and have some time to myself and not the 1 hour here and 30 minutes there kind of time.

My students just finished the second year of the Night Hawk Review, TU’s creative arts journal and we had our big celebration at the university library. It was so much fun. The student contributors read their work and I got my friend Josephine Yu to read her poems. Also, we had the TU jazz ensemble accompany  the poets WHILE they read which was excellent. So, I’m happy we put together another issue. My students worked so hard on it and I think that the quality of the work is excellent.

Oh and I almost forgot this amazing food blog that tells us what our favorite writers ate. I think I might try Plath’s pudding lemon cake tonight. The recipe looks pretty simple and I think I can make it pretty quickly.

So, I applied for a fellowship to go to the Vermont Studio Center and although I didn’t get the fellowship, I got funding to cover about half of the cost of the residency and I have a few weeks to decide if I’m going to go. I really do want to go and I’m sort of leaning towards yes at this point. It would be for 2 weeks before Christmas. The main issue is that Charlotte will only be six months old, so that’s going to be hard. They have fellowships at Vermont that last a month, but I couldn’t apply for one since that length of time away from home is out of the question. It’s funny, I’ve known writers who do these sorts of residencies but they are almost always writers who don’t have kids and it’s funny how having kids makes the residency seem that much more of a dream. I don’t know. I guess I will need to decide soon. I wrote some more lake poems. I think what I’m going to do at the end of the month is just turn all the lake poems into one long poem so that I can say I’ve written a long poem. Which I’ve never done before.

Last week some of my sonnets got rejected from an internet magazine but knowing that Bernadette Mayer likes my sonnets is truthfully enough validation for a long time.

My friend Becky is also doing the poem-a-day thing but along with each poem she talks about her process for writing the poems. I have not thought too much about my poetic process. Mostly, words just pop into my head or phrases or ideas. I try to pull things from everyday life I guess. I don’t really keep a notebook and I just assume that if something is good when I’m thinking about it later on it will come back to me when I am writing. I mean if it’s really good then I doubt that it could get lost. Oh one other thing, I can’t write with noise or music or anything. I really need complete silence. Music and other noises are a horrible distraction for me. So silence is my #1 priority when writing. A clean house helps too.

Drunken Memories Of Anne Sexton
Alan Dugan

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
“I don’t care what you think,
you know,” as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
“Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green”
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others’ beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine