IF THIS ROOM COULD TALK/YOU'D KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU

I think I've finally figured out my great reluctance about "the body" as an abstraction in modern poetry. (As a side note: see, this is one good thing about topic sentences: those of you who are utterly bored by my opinions on modern poetry can stop reading right now and wait for me to post something more interesting about Tyra Banks or how I have this dream where I go around telling everyone that I'm Angelica Houston.) I was reading Doris, the anthology of the eponymous zine--one of my favorites, and perfect for a day spent laid up due to a twisted ankle with nothing for company except public radio and sudoku puzzles. And early on, there's something in there about being so angry that women are always defined by the body rather than the mind, or anything else for that matter. We're bodies before we're anything else, if we can ever truly be anything else.

So I'm not saying that this has some kind of over-arching significance for American poetry, but it has some significance to me. I'm so damn tired of being just a body. Being judged by my body, being invisible because of my body. Maybe that's why I'm impatient with poems that drone on about THE BODY THE BODY THE BODY in the abstract, when it's really the specific that gets the major meaning-making done.

Would I underscore this statement too much by mentioning that, because of my wacked out ankle, I've been bed-ridden all day? And I'm going kind of stir crazy and lonely? Probably, but it's the truth.

& PARTY & BULLSHIT & PARTY & BULLSHIT

So you can see how successful my attempt at room cleaning has been, since I'm here talking to you instead of sneezing in my room. I think I'm freezing up in my relocation plans because it's just so overwhelming. Really, what happened to me was I found some old mixtapes and started to think about all of the people I should make mixes for before I leave, so it immediatly seemed more important that I work on THAT instead of tackling the closet. So much better than contemplating the reason I have so damn many tacky polyester dresses.

I've been thinking lately about this blog, and the weird blurring between personal and private that is, as they say, the coin of the realm. When I started this four years ago, I had very little sense of audience (or privacy) for myself, but increasingly I maintain a balance between sounding personal but leaving out a lot of the actual factual details. In any case, I would like to know who you are. So I've added a comment function--if you read this blog regularly, do me a favor and say what up to me. You may find that a little demanding, but oh come on, accept it as your payment for the four years of fun this blog has been so far.

A CUBE OF ICE INTO A GLASS OF OUZO

An off-day: some sadness and confusion about friends and friendships, a few long undeliverable letters written, an ankle injury from some over-exuberant exercise, a walk back and forth through the neighborhood, and of course many solitary and unenviable thoughts. Also, I read a few fantastic Sven Birkerts essays on contemporary poetry, which brought up some uncomfortable points even though they were fantastic.

For example, from "The Rage of Caliban," his essay on the deadening effects of media on language (and ultimately, poetry):

"What does the poet, especially the young, media-infected poet, have to draw upon apart from this new lingua franca? What is he to do if every attempt at departure from the homogenized norm sounds arch, mannered, or pretentious? Add to this the fact that the poet needs to believe that he is writing for his culture, his peers and compatriots. How can he address his time and get a hearing without resorting to the familiar blanched sounds and leveled cadences? Only the subject matter is variable--but even here the possibilities are limited, for not everything will 'play.'"

What a pitch-perfect capitulation of the problem! In some ways I think this problem is the most often- and naturally-occurring voiced by the poet company I keep. We want to be recognized as part of culture rather than away from culture, but in order to be "part" in any real way, we have to entertain. (I'm thinking specifically of slam poetry, spoken word, and other genres of poetry that, at their worst, are easily absorbed into commercial culture and television.) Entertainment feels cheap and limited, but the second we try to engage in any other kind of voice, we're socked away for being snooty and elitist.

Reading "The Rage of Caliban" is even more dizzying because it was published in 1989, a point at which our current media saturation was largely theoretical. It is a pre-internet essay. And even without the internet's intensely mediating presence to discuss, Birkerts hits the mark: I, for one, am sufficiently frightened by the way our relationships with media have altered our relationships with language. I am a product of that shift-- "media-infected." It's clear from the incisive paragraph above that Birkerts doesn't have a great deal of hope for me, but he does understand the frustrations perfectly well.

I'm further frustrated with him for presenting such a clear understanding of the problem without suggesting any redemptive measures. Maybe this is because his understanding of the social factors at work outran his ability to offer a cure instead of a diagnosis. Maybe the cure is only visible to the media-infected generation. Maybe (and most likely of all) a cure is the most facile way to cast the shift from attaching language to reality to attaching language to mediated images of reality.

Even though he does not explicitly intend to defend difficulty, Birkerts ends up offering an implicit case for the anti-entertainment poem. I find this encouraging. I spent a lot of time this year trying to teach poetry to middle school kids (who are even more "media-infected that I am!), trying to theorize around my students' resistance or inability to deal with abstract or out-of-the-ordinary language. In some ways this work had a negative effect on my own writing because I wished (as I hunted through books for a poem they might be able to hang onto) that I were writing the exact poems I tried to find. My guilt increases when I think about how many people close to me (parents, family, friends outside of literaria) would find little to grasp in what I write. It's a profoundly alienating feeling, one that doesn't necessarily help me do my job as a teacher or a writer.

So, with Sven's nearly invisible support of difficulty and difference, I am going to forge on. That's the only thing I can imagine at the moment anyway, but a small push can do a lot of good.