Are "meaning" and "meaningful" always already subjective? What value does "meaningful" have, ethical or otherwise? Do you need a subjectivity in order to recognize "meaningful" patterns and articulate them as such? How does "meaningful" become a shared category across subjectivities? How does anything become shared, except through a seeping or seeming, seaming.

Coeval, meaningful and non-meaningful. We need a fully complex model.

A belated constellation:: Chad Bennett / Gabriel Gudding / Buffalo / GEB con't / representation


This past Saturday I had the pleasure of listening in on the latest installment in the SOON poetry reading series here in Ithaca, this time featuring friend and fellow PhD candidate Chad Bennett and Gabriel Gudding, Cornell alum and assistant professor at Illinois State University. Particularly interesting for me to hear Chad read his own work. I'm quite spoiled by now—having him around in classes and in the hallway, I'm accustomed to hearing his unassuming gems of literary wisdom. No surprise, then, that the poems are in the same vein. Smart, witty, just plain funny, and quite a delicate eye for form. My especial favorites, apart from a series of poems with titles taken from the captions of an illustrated version of Sherlock Holmes, was "Gerhard Richter," a 'closed-vocabulary' poem taking its cue from a New York Times Magazine article, and "To a Landscape," from a series of what Chad calls 'hermetic odes." Listening to the former is an almost giddy experience—sheer delight in the repetitions, with ever so slight differences making all the, well, difference. The poem opens "Dresden was still in ruins [...]"; from there, watch some of the permutations:

[...] We discovered
the cellars of churches and a system
of tunnels under the city. Fantastic.
It all seemed perfectly normal. We were
very happy. We made jokes. [...]

[...] Still: obliged to
work in the cellars and tunnels under
the perfectly normal, we discovered
we were clearing away fantastic jokes,

Fantastic, indeed. A non-committal, ironic, dismissive fantastic, as in, "oh, great." Or an emphatic fantastic, as in, "it is fantastic. You will think it fantastic." By poem's end, a nostalgic fantastic or a fantastic of lack, loss... what was cleared away after. And normal's drifting from adjective to noun, as though the descriptive is no longer sufficient. The language is no longer about, the language is. Normal's no longer mere descriptor—it's as concrete (not to mention as eerie) as the alien cellars and tunnels running beneath it.

What do we do in the wake of trauma? What do we make. What do we lose:

and in, around and under the jokes
we discovered—we made—the city under
the city, so still it seemed (at first) the first.

Props to Chad also for picking up and running with Vera Nabokov's "Let's rent an airplane and crash." I'm glad I was there to hear it.

Gabe followed Chad's reading—the two complemented each other well, I thought, given their senses of humor—most memorably, for me, with an anti-ode for that central orb of patriarchal order and enlightenment in the universe, the sun. The poem oscillates between smirky addresses (e.g. "You are big. / I like you. / I feel personal towards you."), riotously disrespectful epithets (e.g. "buttocks of the air / you shag the trees"), and half-assed thank-yous ("What for, sun? What for you do this? I like your clouds. Thanks" and "Thank you for gophers, sun") on the one hand, and on the other, less ironic moments of thanks for certain other things under the sun, like the familial and the beautiful. Gabe has a book forthcoming in 2008, Rhode Island: Notebook; look for it.

For Aaron's dish on the reading and photos, read on.

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So I have been meaning to get down some of my notes from the Robert Creeley conference in Buffalo this October, On Words.

I got into town as the first gusts of what would become more than two feet of snow began to make everything white. It was cold, but poetry in Buffalo was alive and well. The first night, a Thursday, things got into gear with readings by Rosmarie Waldrop and Robin Blaser. I was exhausted and couldn't hear Robin's reading very well, but immensely enjoyed hearing Rosmarie. I hadn't yet heard her read in person, and whatever I may say about fetishization of the artist, sometimes you just want to see them anyway. She read from The Reproduction of Profiles; I happened to have my copy with me and so followed along, pages 1-7, 14-17, 23-26, 28-, and so on. She moved on to a new series of work called A Little Useless Geometry. For three of these poems, see Chicago Review's 51.4/52.1. By the end of evening snow was falling heavily, and we each of us scuttled away in the night, to wake to a white, new city in the morning.

I managed to miss the early morning and afternoon events on Friday, thinking them cancelled, and despaired as I walked over to Trinity Church late that evening. Lo, there were Susan Howe and John Ashbery. Susan read a little from Frame Structures and afterward, from The Midnight. Afterward in conversation I mentioned how important I thought The Midnight was (my basic argument being, in a paper I delivered last spring, that among other things, it teaches non-linear and experimental reading/writing practices, demands that we reconsider conventional models of reading and relation to textual and visual material). Susan said she was glad, that she had been disappointed that The Midnight had just seemed "to disappear," which she supposed was due to its generic mélange between prose and verse. If she's right, it's quite a loss and it is quite disappointing. It's precisely in the tension between the prosaic and the poetic that we find meaningful relation. As an aside and as a way of leaving off transcribing my hopelessly scrawled notes from the academic talks and readings on Saturday, I was thinking about the prosaic/poetic and public/private divide/continuum again a couple of weeks back at a wind ensemble concert. It struck me, though it must already be obvious to most everyone else, what a strange configuration a wind ensemble—or any musical ensemble—is. There are the polyphonic voicings of the ensemble, in which each individual member tacitly agrees to be subsumed within the mass. But the whole organism acts under the direction of a conductor and under the aegis of an absent master composer’s musical score. At one point there was a solo pianist accompanying the ensemble.

* * * * *

Of note in GEB so far::
15, sliding infinities
21, strange loops, or in Susan Howe's terminology in The Midnight, dialethism. Meaning/non-meaning?
37, a book which asks you to step outside it

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A continuum:: non-representational art / the politically unrepresented. Thanks for picking up New American Paintings, spark.

from Stevens, "Evening Without Angels"

Air is air.
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

[...]

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest of nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.