American Poetry Read online

  The canon is an idealistic maze and should ideally prefigure a range of meaningless mood musics, from elevator Muzak to New Age music, to ambient sound construction by Brian Eno, Soundlab and others, to endless TV soap operas and, most of all, to mid- to late-’70s disco with its emphasis on monotonous rhythms, its superficiality, and its blatantly unsubtle sexual innuendoes. The best way to listen to prerecorded voices and background music is to listen carelessly and accidentally, as if one were reading a poem by John Ashbery, T.S. Eliot or Charles Bernstein. Rod McKuen makes you care, unfortunately, and the last thing one wants to do while reading a poem is to care. Reading is too selfish for that. That is why the most boring and long-winded writings encourage a kind of effortless non-understanding, a language in which reading itself seems perfectly (I say this in a positive way) redundant. One needn’t read through great novels anymore like one did in the nineteenth century with Balzac or now with someone like Tom Wolfe whose works are basically dull repetitions (realism) that function like a nineteenth-century version of the Nynex Yellow Pages or Page Six of the New York Post. They work to destroy that thing known as chance and probability and they replace it with that thing known as humor. Humor like that, especially in outmoded forms such as the novel, is always terrifyingly obvious because it tries to include everything. Unlike the over-deterministic novelistic exercises of Wolfe, the truly great works of the twentieth century are works that should remain unread, and Gertrude Stein is the most important writer of the twentieth century who ought to remain completely unread. One need read only a sentence and sometimes only a word to imagine the rest. I have never read more than two sentences of The Making of Americans at a time (they put me to sleep or make me want to eat something like pizza or hot dogs), and in that way I have read the book many, many times. I have, in a sense, never been able to put the book down and I hope that in the future I will continue to never put it down until the day that I die or stop eating. In other long-interlude disco-oriented works there are increasing possibilities for loss of recognition, that patterning of sounds we all speak to each other and upon which a host of social conventions depends. It is not an accident that disco has strong gay undercurrents and that the four-on-the-floor disco beat is totally canned and compared to the blue-jeaned rock n’ roll—unauthentic, mechanical and machine-based. Turntables replace the live voice. The dance floor replaces the stage concert pit. Two discs on two turntables, spinning simultaneously, replace the long-haired rock star. Synthesizers and drum machines replace the realistic. Disposability, superficiality and ephemerality rule. Except for Donna Summer and a few others, most disco performers never became stars. Poetry should be like that. It should not be permanent, it should be very impermanent. It should aspire to the interminably pure moment of an interlude.

  Only by so doing, can poetry stage its own inversion to talk via the larynx of others, and the most interesting larynx today is modelled after television and to late-night talk shows whose primary medium is the canned sound of two voices talking (that person sitting in the room trying to find a cigarette) about what they were saying. On Sunday, for example, after dinner, I take as is my habit a long walk in my flower garden (mainly perennials which recur from year to year depending on the preceding winter). Beneath an azalea, I recognize a buttercup (yellow cup, sprigs of white and green in the surround) but then I realize that my recognition, a form of repeating, of the buttercup in my head was the wrong repetition. I am now repeating what is not a member of the species ranunculus bubosa. The act of classifying a sound is momentarily lost in this particularly noisy act, before I realize I am looking at a weed which has a name I don’t know but which I now recognize. Of course, the picture transmission is “instantaneous.” What is a televised sound I recognized when I saw the weed is the same sort of sound one recognized, i.e., repeated, while reading. It is something which I have heard myself again. Sounds in TV and soap operas and Gertrude Stein are simple and untelevised, but buttercups are not, or rather the sound of a buttercup is not. Or rather a single sound or phoneme is simple but the sound of a buttercup is certainly not when it is broadcast by the eyes into the far reaches of a brain. All talk is nothing but a form of latent imagery and noise dispersion. All speech should be televised for maximum effect. All talk is nothing but a form of latent imagery and noise dispersion. All speech should be televised for maximum effect. All talk should aspire to the impermanent repeatability of a disco beat. Only in such a way does a word flower in the brain. Repetition is like spelling something out sound by sound, a linear process of random meaningful bursts working out its opposite: a pure soundfield in which all signals are mixed, a state that is the opposite of meaning or stability. This state we sometimes call flirtation, and it is closely related to the idea of lying. This field of lies goes by any number of names, the tradition, the making of the making, etc., etc. All lying comes down to sounds, and all sounds ultimately revert to noises and everybody who has ever spoken a word knows that till the day he or she dies. A great poem, like Ronald Reagan, lies without knowing it. Lies are the most mechanical forms of speech known to man and his noises.

  In a perfect world all sentences, even the ones we write to our loved ones, the mailman or our interoffice memos, would have that overall sameness, that sense of an average background, a fluid structure in spite of the surface disturbances and the immediate incomprehension. The best sentences should lose information at a relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition. The writing should take a long time to complete and induce a mode of slow (because repeated, hence nontemporal) transmission and (simultaneously) a high rate of error. It is no longer important to connect one thing to another with language or meaning but merely to create more errors so that in the transmission it is unclear if errors are controlling the speed or vice versa.

  Writing is inanimate. For this reason there should always be photographs to accompany it, whether or not they belong to the text or not, whether they make it true or just reinforce the lies inherent in any work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

  Writing produces a dead letter in the eardrum or the buttercup, whereas speech is living and breathing within a present that is refused, thus not seen. It is dead to all who refuse. Speech is not written language that is spoken. Speech is a flood which pours through strict rules of syntax and contains no words. It is frequently aleatoric. Written language on the other hand is usually highly structured, premeditated and processed formally by a reader in the absence of the writer.

  What is love an excuse for? Like writing, it usually is an excuse for saying something that didn’t need or mean to be said. Today I was reading a story about Greta Garbo, and especially those mysterious thirty-two cards and telegrams that were finally unsealed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia this past weekend. What is writing a love letter but an excuse for NOT loving someone? That is why Greta Garbo is so beautiful in these letters where she never professes love for her interlocutor (it could be anyone) and why anyone who reads the letters enhances the piquant privacy of its container and creates that feeling known as error. Love is the greatest mistake that can be directed at someone else beside oneself. It is also the greatest kind of error that may take place in nonwritten form. That is why one falls in love so easily, and why one loves Greta Garbo so much as one reads these nonlove letters. Because one does. Everyone loves a mistake. It is not surprising that very few love letters are written today (there are too many cell phones) and why almost anything today can be mistaken for love: a rock star, a restaurant, someone else’s one bedroom apartment with a fireplace and a couch, a Prada suit, a novel by Philip Roth. One should never know what one falls in love with. The minute one recognizes a lover it is already over. That is why so many marriages end in divorce and why so many photographs resemble unmade sitcoms and why so many novels are so readable. Tom Wolfe knows this. As T.S. Eliot remarked, minor novels are so pleasing because they are so minor. It is too bad they got transformed into something they c
ould not be.

  Anyway, most of the unsealed letters were sent by Garbo in the ’30s to Mercedes de Acosta, a playwright, screen writer, suffragist and poet whom Garbo met one evening in Constantinople in the late ’20s. Garbo admired the bracelet Acosta was wearing and Acosta promptly gave it to her. They met again and this time Garbo gave Acosta a flower. The two traveled to Silver Lake in Wyoming or Wisconsin where they spent “six enchanted weeks in the sun” which was probably closer to three and a half weeks. And so it went until the late ’30s when they met, apparently after a long hiatus, in Sweden. Garbo wrote, after their parting, “I was a wreck after she went, and I told her she must not write me. We had a sad farewell.” In the ’40s Garbo showed up at Acosta’s door saying, “I have no one to look after me.” But Garbo refused to give Acosta her phone number and Mercedes was unable to make anything more than a brief visit.

  I believe that reading about moments like these, not writing about them, especially years afterward, is what creates that thing known as love. That is why there is so little love in Proust where everything is happening in the present tense of memory and why reading old love letters (sealed from memory and history) as opposed to writing new ones is the best way to fall in love. Like great television re-runs, a love letter will render you utterly passive and silent, especially if it is written to someone you hardly know. Language is a mistake and that is why more mistakes happen with total strangers than with acquaintances. No one ever really falls in love with anyone they know. To fall in love with someone that one knows is to fall in love with someone that one already fell in love with a long time ago. The truly great lovers, like Greta Garbo, were capable of falling in love while saying nothing at all. Of course, Garbo liked to confuse people. She called herself a boy in public and she was fond of wearing trousers. “I have been smoking since I was a small boy,” she used to say, or “I am a lonely man circling the earth.” No one knows if Acosta and Garbo ever had an affair or if they were lovers, though Acosta with her jet-black hair and aristocratic Spanish Catholic parents, and tendency to wear black trousers, claimed to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne and Isadora Duncan. Poetry, like love, is filled with obvious mistakes.

  It is always impossible but highly desirable to imagine something twice. Let’s say, like Alice falling through the looking glass, that you find yourself in a world reversed perfectly. Pavlov found it almost impossible to get a dog to salivate when touched on the left side as opposed to the right side, and similar experiments with rats, goldfish, turtles, monkeys and children have borne this out. Children learning to write, as opposed to read, have considerably more difficulty discerning b from d and p from q than they do in discriminating b from p and d and q. Like an animal or a child learning to write, you would not be able to tell the world was reversed—unless there were humanly made objects and symbols, and in particular signage and alphabetic systems. But unlike the humanly made world, the natural world, especially an unfamiliar landscape, can easily be reversed without your knowing it.

  This is a lie

  It is Tuesday in the Mirror World and in the World of this Writing it is also Tuesday and if you live in the mirror world, taking a shower, finding the cold tap, operating a screw gun, driving a car and writing a note are difficult right now. Now you say now you use your right hand to shoo away a fly on your left elbow without even thinking. And now, pictures when remembered, are frequently remembered with the wrong left-right orientation, suggesting that memory traces are themselves duplicated in the brain in mirror-image form. After watching the movie Rushmore, such perfect symmetry, which leads to imperfections in the real-life world, is not at all uncommon in literature, which as we all know is made up of a series of elaborately coded lies that are not being told to anyone in particular, but exist as ciphers within a written text. It would be nice if after all we no longer thought, essentially, about objects, or felt a need to have thoughts about something, and thus were finally able to abandon the idea of thought itself as a language that was comprehensible in relation to its objects. Then it might be possible to give up the idea of speaking while thinking or talking about something. It would be much more pleasing to talk about the reverse of what we were talking about and to feel the opposite of what we were feeling. To think about nothing and say nothing at the same time. Anyone can feel love (or pain), especially when the person (overhears someone) in love feels nothing at all. Only in overhearing could one ever be said to feel anything like love at all. Yesterday I went to the movies to see Rushmore by myself. I had a very good time.

  Pure repetition involves recognition of previous sounds in the shortest of attention spans: the span between two words. Unfortunately, the voice occasionally flutters or expresses random ambient sound-bursts (nonrepetitive patterns). Even now as I speak, the human voice is strangely inhuman and mechanical, plagued by poor transmission, errors and mechanical repetition. The interest in the aural pleasures of nonsense and repetition coincide with the deeply unsettling manipulations of voice and identity when transmitted “at a distance,” through a field. The most interesting things written aspire to the condition not of music—which has recognizable harmonic and melodic threads—but of the code, the meaning embedded in a language field as undistinguishable sounds, the lost beat of disco which obliterates the singer’s voice. Language is forever temporal, subject to change, cancellation, decay, a failure to specify anything in the here and now. Repetition is a good way to remember something very fast. That is why it is much nicer to lie to others than to oneself. Lying is a highly regulated, i.e., a highly rehearsed form of being in uncertainty vis-a-vis what one was not remembering or not forgetting. It might be said to resemble the human system of breathing, which is also a kind of sonic rehearsal for death. A lie is always located in the death of the message. Yes, I am lying to you. No I am not lying to you.

  Poetry should not be written to be written, it should be written to be listened to it should not be written to be remembered or absorbed it should be written to be forgotten.

  You are repeating yourself (interview)

  In any system, I repeat myself, I believe it is possible to turn the repetition inherent in oral forms (speech) on its head. Let me tell you a story that might not be true. I went to hear the rock band Chicago last night at the Greek Theater in Hollywood, which is an outdoor theater set against a backdrop of hills and aging palm trees. The audience was mainly fortysomething hipsters and studio execs with big hair, lots of gold chains and Porsches. People were singing and standing up a lot, telling those around them to get up and sing. As I stood up, it suddenly occurred to me that these were once hippies but now they were hippies preserved in some form of twilight, evergreen light that had descended the L.A. air over the outdoor amphitheater. People were standing up and looking back at the people behind them as if they were the audience. No one was smoking pot or anything else. The air was clear as a television screen. Everyone in the audience was white, even the Asians and the blacks. The only people who weren’t white were the ticket takers and the bouncers and one kid from some high school in L.A. who was asked to come onto the stage and play with the band for one number. And that is how my memory of going to high school in Athens, Ohio in the mid-seventies came back to me, and remembering stories about deer blinds, or harvesting pot planted at the local public golf course, and what I was called in gym class, Ho Chi LIN.

  Those who study information flow know that repetition in real life situations and in spoken language is generally used to secure meaning, to make sure one is not misunderstood. Repetition lessens the possibilities for error. Hearing Chicago again, it was impossible not to remember the massive inertia of “Saturday in the park, thought it was the Fourth of July,” and it was impossible not to remember being back in those long, carpeted corridors of my high school, and the cafeteria tables where everyone was shouting next to their food and the plastic trays. I believe that repetition is more thoroughly embedded in speech than in writing, which is too bad really, for
the memories that are inside me feel like they are about to be formed but would rather not. Of course, as my high school teacher Mr. Lalich, who later went on to become a city council member, reminded us in American History and Economics, the trade-off lies in the realm of the temporal. The more repetition there is, the greater delay in the rate of message transmission. But rehearsal is also key to absorption, i.e., in short- and long-term memory, and oral forms thus work to do two things: reduce ambiguity in the message and promote retention. Certain kinds of psychotropic drugs (LSD), novels and poems, and Mr. Lalich’s lectures on inverted forms of economic efficiency rarely transpired in the long term, they re-enacted the processes of memory at the short-term and synaptic level, which is to say, before memory has attached itself to the sound field. Repetition, especially in the things one reads, is opposed to the class of words known as antonyms, which is to say language’s repeating tendencies, its tendencies to be synonymous and simultaneous rather than different. And this violates the idea of meaning which is grounded in differentiation. But, of course, if everything is or appears the same, then language takes on the qualities of a cipher or code where differences are perceived to exist but are disguised. Disco music, the phone book, Gertrude Stein’s books, and TV talk shows function like this. To read is to forget the meaning of reading. For this reason, the best literature is often written in times of war where puns themselves suggest the origins of language in a consciousness that cannot use language to make any distinctions between language and thought, speaker and world, signal and noise, sound and word. I left the Chicago concert filled with memories and very depressed. I never knew about Vietnam or the war protest movement except secondhand and so all my memories of those events were memories of things I had already seen on TV. The best TV and the best works of literature do not engender memories, they get rid of them. The best cure for memory is a really good poem or maybe a novel.