Data is the new god of education. The state of Colorado has made it law that all educational practices need to be based on student data. This is all well and good in theory, but the reality of such laws is more testing. The joke in education now is that no child is left untested (rather than behind) because there is so much pressure to achieve good test scores. It’s funny to me that it isn’t important to know something, but rather how to do something. I recently finished a class through my school district that covered the use of Google Docs in the classroom (really cool ideas by the way–ecollege and blackboard need to build apps that interact with Google Docs…the writers workshop can be forever changed in a good way!!). One of the instructors who is actually a part of Google Educators told me that in the real world, it doesn’t matter what you know. In fact, Google says that they want people who can collaborate instead  of just having people who know everything. Really? I’m pretty sure that if you want to program for Google, you’d better have your act together in terms of programming and computer science. I thought about asking for a sip of his kool-aid, but I needed a good grade. So in a time when education is growing more and more inadequate here in the states, the educational bureaucracy continues to play pinata.

(Side note: And homeschooling isn’t the answer either. Sure, those parents who choose to do so guarantee themselves full control over their children’s curriculum, what they have access to and what they don’t, but it’s still a thought vacuum where you have limited input from people who think/interpret things differently than you do. And one person trying to teach subjects of multiple grade levels is just as stretched as a teacher with 30 kids in a classroom. There are plenty of cracks to slip through in both situations.)

I’ve never been satisfied with the CSAP test, Colarodo’s implemenation for No Child Left Untested. Colorado Department of Education recently released some portions of the test. As writing is one of the most difficult skills to master (you have to read, think, and act simultaneously–pretty tricky for many students!!), I took interest in looking at the various prompts. (Full Disclosure: Of course I see the prompts every year when I proctor the test, but the district makes us sign a contract saying we won’t talk about it. So I won’t talk about what I see on tests, just what I see on the CDE website). Here is a list of the high school (grades 9 and 10) extended writing prompts available online and the years they were in the test:

• (2001) Some people believe that students should not hold jobs while they are in school because jobs take time and energy away from studying. Others contend that although there should be a limit on the number of hours worked, having jobs is a good way for students to learn responsibility and gain experience in the real world. What do you think? Write an essay that presents your opinion on this issue. You want to persuade the reader to favor your opinion, so you should offer a clear and forceful argument.
• (2002) Think of something important you have that you did not buy. It could be an object, a person, a place, a personality trait, or anything else. Write an explanation to tell its importance to you.
• (2002) What is your favorite type of music? Write a paragraph to explain why it is your favorite music. Be sure to provide reasons to support your choice.

(As a side note, it’s a big deal in state standards for students to write for a variety of purposes, but these prompts are all opinion-based. Sure one of them is persuasive, but I don’t think any of them demand any higher level thinking skills. If thinking skills are not required, how can one ever be proficient?)

We as teachers are now expected to look at data, make decisions, think creatively, and form a plan. Yet the system is simply saying, “What do you think? How do you feel?” Writing is an endangered species in itself, especially with people like Goldsmith who are not even requiring students to create their own thoughts about anything (link).

One of the powers of literature is providing the reader with an experience in which he/she might never personally engage. I think it’s valuable to draw connections between what we read and what we live, what someone else thinks and what I think. The ability to do this depends on ones ability to think critically. How can you ever expect students to show their full potential if you don’t require them to reach/think beyond themselves?

But I suppose there is enough data and information out there that it isn’t necessary to think for ourselves because somebody else is willing to do it for us, or they already have. Does this concern anybody else besides me?

“The Brightest Hour”

Barnes & Noble at Denver West, Golden CO

Monday, October 19 at 5:30

I will be reading from my chapbook and discussing the imaginal attributes of light as part of a fundraiser for the D’Evelyn Jr/Sr High Library. The poetry section of our library is extremely limited, especially in terms of contemporary poets. Please come and enjoy this reading, and consider buying some books–D’Evelyn can earn up to 25% of all sales!!

About a month ago, I finished reading The Pastor as Minor Poet by M. Craig Barnes. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but haven’t been sure what exactly I should write about.

The main premise of the book is that pastors should approach people the same way that poets approach poetry. Barnes relies heavily on the writings of Eliot and Pound as he draws connections between poetry, the Christian faith (including the character of God and the hear of poets found in the Bible), and relationships. A large chunk of this book is directed towards pastors as they prepare their sermons, and while interesting, doesn’t necessarily relate to my life. However, Barnes keys on two ideas that can be thought provoking for everyone, regardless of their faith.

Barnes presents Keats’ idea of Negative Capability, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Simply put, Negative Capability refers to the inherent mystery surround poetry–the idea that one doesn’t have to have all of the answers to a poem in order to enjoy it. In defining his own poetics, Joseph Hutchison writes,

Puzzlement is a puzzling quality. . . I especially enjoy being puzzled by my own work, but I detest the impulse I sometimes feel to “hide the treasure” somehow, as some kind of test for the reader. Mystery is the essence of life on our planet. . . The works of Emily Dickinson and Rae Armantrout seem to me full of mystery. . . .

Poets seem to have this knack for finding joy in the mysterious (or should anyways).  Barnes takes this idea of Negative Capability and it’s resulting joy and suggests that humans, in our post-Enlightenment/Age of Reason nature, can’t deal with not having the answers. My students get really frustrated when they can’t solve a poem–regardless of the musicality or images. American citizens get all hot-to-trot when we don’t know what our President is thinking/doing/deciding. We want and demand answers. Barnes believes that this demand for answers and clarity pervades the church as well. People seem discontent with the mystery of God–and many have decided God doesn’t even exist because of so many questions/mysteries/unknowns (What kind of God chooses some people and not others? What kind of God justifies eliminating an entire race/civilization? What kind of God would send somebody to hell for eternal damnation/suffering?).

I’ve realized over the past couple of years that I do not really truly understand the character of God. He is a mystery to me. How much of that mystery am I okay with? How much mystery do I despise, resulting in demands to have the answers? How much does my view/opinion/understanding of God depend on the relationships/influences of the people around me and my past?

This leads to the second point Barnes makes in his book. He thinks that relationships between people should be nurtured the same way a poet and a poem relate. As I have conversations with those around me, I hear time and again stories about people (pastors, Christian friends, Christian family) that have completely alienated those around them. Adam Fieled  posted a blog last spring with the following quote:

My two basic problems with Christianity: 1) that I have never seen or heard Jesus 2) that I have seen and heard a lot of Christians. They are, I think, mostly a lousy advertisement.

And again, more recently:

If anyone wants a good scare (quite as good as Carrie), go to Netflix and watch Jesus Camp. I had no idea that out of 320 million Americans, 80 million are Evangelical Christians. One in four. I’d say that there are probably 1 million Americans seriously involved in art. So there are 80 times more Evangelicals in America than there are artists. The center of much of the film’s action is Rev. Ted Haggard, who appears an hour into it. Haggard was later charged with picking up and having anal sex with a male prostitute. Now that’s leadership.

I don’t think the only way to experience God is through other people, but it seems that people are a major prism through which others will determine their point of view. Is it any wonder why people don’t see mystery in the character of God when those that follow Him don’t seem to live anything but hypocritical lives?

The poetry that seems most criticized in the poetry world is that which is too easy, too obvious, too old-school (some would say too quiet, but I won’t go there). But what if Christians got over their safe, homeschooling counter-culture and took the risk of accepting the mystery of people, and saw others as objects of love instead of something that needed to be fixed–actually being a part of the world instead of hiding from and criticizing it?

Joseph Hutchison recently blogged about not blogging because there was simply nothing to write about (he also includes a great quote about reading). I haven’t written in a while because nothing noteworthy has struck my fancy. I could keep posting about political garbage but there’s more to the world so I’m retiring from that.  Since completing my masters in August, I’ve been spending lots of brain-neuron bonfires on the idea of creativity and Kenneth Goldsmith’s dousing of it.

It’s nearly impossible to define creativity outside of the general idea in regards to the act of creating. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure, so it’s splitting hairs arguing over what is creative and what isn’t…unless of course someone comes out and says, “this isn’t creative. It’s boring and I like it!” Enter Goldsmith. But not for a little bit longer.

As humans, we have the capacity to do something no other species on Earth is capable of: creating for the sake of satisfaction. I’m sorry, but my dog has fun making an arabesque out of the kitchen trash, but it isn’t because she wants to make art–she wants those few drips of grease and the mac-n-cheese remains. The squirrels outside don’t create a ballet to escape my dog, they are simply running for their lives. We have the capacity to have a thought or idea, ponder on that idea, and then bring it to artistic fruition. I think there a several reasons for this from a Christian Poetics point of view:

1. Man (hu not he) was created in God’s image. If God can take nothing (the Earth was void and without form) and make something out of it, then we hold that same capacity.
2. God looked at his creation and it brought him pleasure–it was good (the original hippie? it’s all good, Man.)
3. God was intentional about creating things. Whether he was bored or not, doesn’t matter. What matters is he set out to make a universe, solar systems, planets, trees, flowers, oceans, mountains, fish, cheetahs, elephants, etc. Therefore, we should be equally intentional about being creative.

It’s no secret that I have some issues with language/conceptual poetry, the base of which is the philosophy of language.  There is indeed a power to language, especially when considering the Genesis story where God created many things with his words, and mankind with his hands. The langpo theorists assert that meaning comes only from language, not the self or the experience, thus poetry should be focused on language. A while back I posted my thoughts about language and my doubts about the sustainability of language without experience. Responses I received were telling me that language isn’t dead, that Goldsmith uses dead words. That’s not the case at all, as I hoped to suggest that taking the experience out of language kills it slowly, thus resulting in a dead language years down the road. I missed the boat on explaining that one. So I should clarify some things here.

I have been adamant in the past that poetry can indeed include the self and experience, and I still believe that to be the case. I also think that meaning can come from language, especially when looking at the Genesis story above. But even then, language did not come from nothing, it came from the mouth of God and was used to make nothing into something.  There seems to be an undeniable connection between the self, experience, and language in the creative process.

Which is why Goldsmith’s ideas of boredom and uncreativity bother me so much. If you don’t want to read these two links, I’ll summarize for you:

1. Goldsmith wants to be intentionally boring and uninteresting.
2. He hopes to rid himself of creativity all together, his poems coming from retyping weather reports and articles word for word from newspapers and magazines.

There are two ways (in my mind) to interpret these assertions: Goldsmith is being sarcastic and trying to make a point, or he’s being serious.

If it’s an artistic rant to make a point I can accept that. He states that by purposefully being uncreative, he was astounded by the experience of looking at day-to-day things in such slow detail. This is not a new realization–poets across time have been saying to slow down, look at the details, look at the small things. It turning off his creativity, Goldsmith was (is?) able to see what is out there beyond his own self, his own shell. If this is just one big “let me show you a lesson,” Goldsmith has taken it to the extreme. He’s published books of his uncreativity, tells people to not buy them, and is absolutely thrilled exploring how boring work can be. It could be that his entire movement is a game, challenging readers, students, and writers to find importance in the unimportant. I get this. Good for you.

But what is there to say if Goldsmith is being serious? Then I’d say he’s right in step with American laziness and entitlement. I’d say he’s taking the easy way out. Goldsmith claims it’s difficult to shut off all creative faculties, but he’s going to try anyway. Just like it’s hard to sit around and watch television for 8 hours, or to buy fast food rather than produce your own menu for a meal, or to only looking for friends on Facebook rather than in real life, or to let somebody else fix the world’s problems because your busy doing nothing.

To rid oneself of creativity is to lop off a piece of the human spirit. Like the integration of self, experience and language, creativity is an innate human attribute. How much interaction there is between health and creativity I may never know or understand, but Goldsmith’s idea, I’ve concluded, leads only to decay. It’s a common theme nowadays with the decay of the economy, the decay of democracy, the decay of immune systems (see H1N1 and cancer statistics), and the decay of our ability to treat each other respectfully and honorably.

Hopefully Goldsmith get’s through this boredom thing and finds the meaning he’s looking for. That’s why it’s poetry of course, whether I like it or not. The funny thing is, any time Goldsmith expresses his thoughts about uncreativity, he’s using creativity to share his vision–the vision itself a creative way to look at the mundane. Therefore, it’s absolutely impossible for Goldsmith, or anybody, to become completely uncreative as long as there is communication, as long as there is language.

This healthcare thing is a mess. A government with too many fingers in the pie ruins the pie. Now the Savior of All Mankind, Lord Obama, is asking that Americans snitch out other Americans if their view don’t fall in line with his. Here’s the link and a quote from that link:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Well Mr. American Pie, where do you go from here? Snitching out people who use free speech? Who have an opinion that’s well thought out? Oh I know, let’s snitch on people who write poetry for the school of quietude. I don’t see what good can come from this. Hello, Mr. American Pie.  Goodbye individual that doesn’t want to depend on the government for everything. I guess this means I’m getting ratted out.

In Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Barfield spends a considerable amount of time discussing meaning. I know, it sounds weird since it’s only in the title, but he keeps his word and actually stays focused on the task at hand. In the chapters on metaphor, Barfield outlines the history of various words that over time, have grown in meaning. For example, the word ruin used to mean only to fall. But poets began using the idea of falling in terms of describing things (they created a metaphor out of it) and the word became a noun. This is a fun way to think about language. While working at the Youth Writers Camp at The Lighthouse last week, there was a conversation and somebody mentioned either banks or bakeries. My ears have still not recovered from that concert at the beginning of July, so I asked for clarification–because there’s a big difference between a bank and a bakery. The response:

Yeah, but both have dough.

Doh! I love a good pun. But it wasn’t just a pun in my mind thanks to Barfield. I started thinking about the connection between bread and money. Somewhere, sometime, somebody drew the connection (is the origin of the metaphor related to the expression of bread winner? Bringing home the dough?) and the word’s meaning expanded.

Barfield asserts that language needs poetry because through poetry language and meaning grow. I agree with Barfield. The point? If we keep theorizing about poetry (langpo, flarf, conecptualism, quietude, blah, blah, blah) we lose sight of meaning. Now, to someone like Goldsmith, meaning doesn’t even mean anymore so why try. But I think it’s a cop out. I wonder if this is why there is such a disconnect between the p-a crowd and everybody else. To say there is no meaning but in words is ludicrous as Barfield points out, because words and meaning depend on experience. So I would say this whole idea of poetry existing only through theories leads to a dead language, where people like Goldsmith dwell. Take the experience out of poetry, and you’re left with flarf and other regurgitations rather than humanity and a growth of language.

I’m sitting in the Arvada Public Library working on my capstone project reflection paper. (It seems the school cares more about how I feel about my work than how strong the actual work actually is. Fortunately, I have a superb adviser that cares more about the poetry.) As I wrote yesterday, bloggin is an escape for me, and here I am when I should be fleshing out a paper due on Monday or Tuesday. That’s tons of time!!

I went to a screamo concert the other night with my brother. I didn’t mosh, but I had the itch. But it wasn’t that bad of an itch because the crowd was pretty lame. Security was letting people do what they want (as long as people weren’t getting trampled and falling over) and only a handful of people were really into it. The bands were lively and rockin and screamin and one guy got on the mic and said, “Denver, you’re pretty weak right now.”  My brother and I laughed about the concerts we went to in high school, where blood was smeared across the floor when the bands were finally done. Bumps and bruises appeared ifrom body surfers and we were usually tired from jumping and slam dancing. Not so poetic, but really fun! What has happened in the past 10 years that a bunch of kids go to a concert and stand around rather than beat each other silly. And then it hit me.

Car seats.

Kids are strapped down and locked in every time we take them somewhere. Once they grow out of the car seat, they get a bigger one. Then a booster seat. It’s safer for the kids and it’s the law. Heck, my wife and I just bought this massive thing (looks straight off of the Mind Eraser at Elitch’s) because we want our son to be safe in case something happens. Let’s take this to the melodramatic nth degree though. We want our kids to be safe. We give them plastic shells with seat belts until they’re 60 pounds or so. They swim in antibacterial hand gel whenever they can get their grubby little hands on the stuff. We give them hundreds of shots to help their bodies fight off disease (ask the autistic kid’s parents about how that works out). So when immunizations become unsafe, parents don’t have their kids shot (that sounds so wrong). I heard a statistic that if less than 90% of the population is immunized, then the immunizations won’t work. We’re headed to something like 80%. So in being safe, we’re jeopardizing safety. Hmm.

This is fun being emotional and dramatic. Let’s keep going. We take care of traffic danger with car seats and air bags (which the scars on my arms say are not safe at all, especially for tall guys). Now there’s school danger. Shootings all over the place. So systems are put into place so kids can be safe in public. This is good–I don’t want to get shot at when at work. I want to talk about literature for Pete’s sake!! Who’s Pete? I dunno, but we’ll press on. So it becomes safe to homeschool (I know many families home school out of necessity–geographic location, family situations, etc) regardless of the consequences (social, self-discipline, etc.). It doesn’t surprise me either that the majority of home school families are conservative Christians. Oooo, Christians love playing it safe. We’ve created our own safe sub-culture with safe music, safe literature, safe life styles, safe toys, and school is just another addition to the gated community. All of this safety is wrapped up neatly and stamped with a “the world can’t touch me, I’m an American” sticker. I think too many people have the mindset that if we leave the world alone they will leave us alone. Yup, the terrorists love that idea. I don’t think we realize that people out there want to kill us and they will sacrifice anything to get to that end.

It’s funny how an easy going crowd at a screamo show got me thinking about all of this. And I know it’s dramatic. But in the literary world, where Kenneth Goldsmith is causing a stir by saying that no poetry is new, nothing is new, only regurgitated and synthesized.  But what if poets are too wrapped up in their car seats, to afraid to unbuckle and look at the possibility of creating, however influenced? What if the vocal established poets are happy in their booster seats, happy that their ideas are limited to a school zone? I would say we are too safe resulting in a mellow, meaningless unconsciousness. As Owen Barfield writes in Poetic Diction, “Great poetry is the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness.” On so many levels, we aren’t writing good poetry.

How the days have passed since I last posted anything about anything. It’s amazing how much writing takes away from writing. Seriously. During the school year, when I may not do as much writing, I love to spend my planning period blogging. This summer, while I work on creating a chapbook for my capstone project, I haven’t had any thoughts left over for the blog. Oh the thoughts are there (Barfield’s metaphor, Kenny G’s absence from meaningful creation and influence, safety and the human spirit of adventure, etc) but they’re jumbled after hours of writing poetry, revising, and thinking thinking thinking so intensely. But there is a light, and there is a tunnel, and I’ve finally found my way into and out of both. (Yeah, think about that one for awhile).

So I will leave you with a link to paperbookswap.com. Here’s how it works: find 10 books (paperback or otherwise) in decent condition that you don’t want anymore…or want others to read. Get an account at paperbookswap.com and post your books. Then browse the 3.7 millions books that have been posted and find one you want. Ask for. Then the owner ships it to you. When someone wants your books, you ship it to them. Yup…a free swap (with only the charge of shipping). Some of the postings are old and stale, but what a great way to get books, read them, and then pass them on. Seriously, check it out!

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey (Cover Image)

This is my last entry in the 4 Modes of Poetry series. I have discussed mainstream, the beats, and langpo, along with Tony Hoagland, Kevin Prufer, and Harryette Mullen. I’m left with elliptical/hybrid poetry and I’ll take a look at Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life.  Many moons ago, (okay, 11 years), Stephen Burt applied the label elliptical to Susan Wheeler’s collection, titled Smokes. He writes:

But most of its virtues and faults are those of a school: let’s call it Ellipticism. Elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-”postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers,” and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively “poetic”) diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning “I am an X, I am a Y.” Ellipticism’s favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden; Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.

(Side note: Burt recently published another essay, moving past Ellipticism and onto The New Thing. His style is the same: define a term and then never really deal with the new term in the scope of the essay. It irritates. But maybe I’ll try it and see how it all works out.)

The last few sentences best describe this type of poetry: almost-stories, almost-obscure, sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, and desperate. This doesn’t really encompass Harvey’s entire collection, so it’s important to also understand the idea of hybrid poetry. Don Share wrote about it on the Harriet Blog last October. The gist of the hybrid movement is perfect for the greater modern culture: take what you want from the various schools of thought and mix ‘em up, then discard the rest. I’m going to discuss Modern Life with these two “theories” in mind.

My initial reaction to Harvey’s collection was to associate with Prufer’s National Anthem (discussed in Part 3 of this series). Prufer’s may be a bit more apocolyptic, but the tone and imagery seemed strikingly similar to me. The two section of “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” poems are most like Prufer, with such images as “The regime’s shaved heads felt like sateen / and their salutes shot through us like rum” (Terror of the Future / 2) and “You had to win the sweepstakes / to get a survival kit…All we ever did / together was play “Simon Says” and try to outrun / our shadows. It was a rotten routine and I’m not / going to romanticize it” (Terror of the Future / 4) and”We got most of our gear from / an abandoned general store” (The Future of Terror / 4). These portions of the book could be labeled as elliptical–they are almost stories, but not quite. They are cinematic (again, like Prufer) while not providing any answers, and there seems to be desperation without any clear direction. It turns out these poems are abecedarian (she explains in this essay (pdf)–read it by the way, not only for her humor but for a great explanation of abecedarian) in form, even if modified just a bit (hello, Hybrid). Exploring these poems with the form in mind makes the experience quite fascinating. These poems are the best in the book.

One interesting aspect of this collection is the integration of prose poems. I’m still stuck struggling with this idea of how prose poems are poems. In the case of Modern Life, I don’t see why they aren’t simply short fictions. I intentionally didn’t use the word narrative, as they aren’t complete narratives (even though the reader gets the story of each little section). Am I disappointed in the prose poems? Not necessarily, but why couldn’t she use lines? The language is beautiful, descriptions concrete, commentary cutting. I’m almost convinced the first poem in the collection, “Implications for Modern Life”, connects humans to pigs. The prose is obviously the influence of langpo, but I don’t see what it does for the poem. Does it emphasize the language itself? Not really. Does it strictly adhere to langpo rules? Not really (we’re talking hybrid and elliptics after all).

Either way you cut it, Harvey is a marvelous writer–I think she and Prufer paint the most cinematic pictures of any poet I’ve read. While meaning may be hidden, confused, or altogether missing, the path is at least paved with unforgettable scenery. Not intending to pun, but the previous sentence ties in perfectly with the last poem in the book, “Setting the Table”:

To cut through night you’ll need your sharpest scissors. Cut around the birch, the bump of the bird nest on its lowest limb. Then with your nail scissors, trim around the baby beaks waiting for worms to fall from the sky. Snip around the lip of the mailbox, and the pervert’s shoe peeking out from behind the Chevy. Before dawn, rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside. Frame the long black stripe and hang it in the dining room. Sleep. WHen you wake, redo the scene as day in doily. Now you have a lacy fence, a huge cherry blossom of a holly bush, a birch sugared with snow. Frame the white version and hang it opposite the black. Get your dinner and eat it between the two scenes. Your food will taste just right.

This poem seems to not only summarize hybrid poetry, but it may also lean towards Burt’s New Thing. The poem instructs cutting out and taking what’s beautiful, then find a comfortable place amongst the cutouts to live peacefully. Is this possible, in our modern lives? Is this possible in the current state of poetry? Harvey seems to think so–on the poetry side of things anyways.  I wonder what the night stands for in this poem–confusion, questioning, uncertainty, misconception, meaning, or…?

I don’t know if it relates, but a quote from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town comes to mind. The dead young woman has just returned from reliving her birthday, and is crushed by how humans don’t slow down and see things for what they are–they don’t look at people, they don’t enjoy the moment, they’re missing out (I should be saying we instead of they). She asks the stage manager if anyone can see life for what it is, and the manager replies, “Saints and poets maybe.”

But does too much theorizing affect our ability to see? To mean?

And now we come to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the third of four styles of contemporary poetry. I think this from/style/theory is the most difficult to learn because of its complexity and non-traditionalism. For those familiar with language poetry, the previous statement is one of the dumbest things I could ever say. But coming from a high school English teacher who works in a very successful, academically rigid school, language poetry is a completely foreign concept. I am going to try and define language poetry–at least by providing some general guidelines and suggestions–and then apply those concepts to Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings (from the collection Recyclopedia).

Before I dive into figuring out language poetry, here is an example from Mullen:

Starving to muffler moans, boa scarfs her up. Feathers tickle her nose. Kerchief, fichu. Gesundheit.

In order to understand language poetry, one must understand Ron Silliman’s theory of the existence of the new sentence. In this article, George Hartley reviews the theory, but also explains what Silliman is getting at. Here’s a summary:

• The sentence is the main mode of composition (instead of lines)
• The paragraph organizes thoughts instead of stanzas. It is a unit of quantity rather than logic, while sentence length is the unit of measure
• Sentence structure is altered for ambiguity
• Syllogistic movement is (a) limited and (b) controlled and moves towards the paragraph or the whole
• Language cannot move towards outside things–each sentence must refer to another within the poem itself.
• Limited syllogistic movement keeps reader’s attention at the level of language: the sentence or below

Silliman’s premise with language poetry is that language should only be used to recognize itself rather than an outside idea. In terms of thought, nothing is higher than the sentence. Or in other words, language generates meaning rather than meaning generating language. Let’s analyze the above poem looking at some of these ideas.

In terms of sentence structure, there is a combination of complete sentences and fragments. The first sentence is the longest, with each shrinking in length until the one word finale. The ambiguity in this poem doesn’t necessarily come from the sentence structure, but rather from the words themselves. And to understand the wordplay, one must understand the context of the poem. Trimmings is a collection that is a response to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, where each poem is a different article of clothing or accessory (for the most part). So with this poem, we have muffler, boa, scarfs, kerchief, and fichu. True to the imagists, there are no ideas but ideas in things here. Muffler could be “muffle her”, and boa could be a snake turning the noun to a verb. The feathers tickle, suggesting not a handkerchief but a sneeze. Bless you. So is the poem about a woman wrapped too tightly in materialism, thus sick and sneezy? Is the poem about a snake that ate a bird? Is the woman getting dressed allergic or sick? (In talking to my students about this poem, one came up with the snake suggestion that I had never thought of. My initial reaction was that it was a bit of a stretch in terms of the context of the poem amidst a larger work, but it’s still an interesting possibility.) There is no concrete meaning except in the existence of scarf-like clothing items.

Here’s another poem from Mullen’s collection:

Menswear, the britches. Rosie flies off the handle. Jeans so tight, she pants. Wants to cool out, slacks off.

Obviously, the object being described is pants: Menswear, britches, jeans, pants, and slacks. This fits the context of the clothes found throughout the collection. Pants and slacks, being nouns, are used as verbs, and britches reminds me of Robert Frost’s birches (did a really just mention Frost in the same thought as language poetry? I’m not suggesting anything by that). Again, there’s ambiguity on several levels:

• If men wear the britches in the relationship, some women get mad by such a tight grip and can revolt by being slackers.
• Men swear, the bitches. This makes Rosie mad, concluding the same way as the previous interpretation.
• Rosie is a feminist, causing men to swear and call names. The she pants are too tight for him, and he just needs to chill and not try to wear the pants in the first place.

Not being raised in the language poetry family, approaching poetry in this manner intrigues me. The wordplay fascinates me. But as I synthesize more of theory behind language poetry, I grow skeptical of the theory’s ability to withstand itself. Here’s what Lyn Hejinian says about language poetry in her introduction to The Language of Inquiry:

[P]oetry [is] the dynamic process through which poetics, itself a dynamic process, is carried out. The two practices are mutually constitutive and they are reciprocally transformative. it is at least in part for this reason that poetry has its capacity for poetics, for self-reflexivity, for speaking about itself; it is by virtue of this that poetry can turn language upon itself and thus exceed its own limits.

I think this position closes off poetry to those who desire to theorize. Poetics being the theory of poetry, it makes sense that poetry would be the expression of said theory, but I don’t think poetry is limited to merely expressing theory. (As a side note, I’ve read over and over this quote and I can’t figure out if Hejinian is saying poetry is only the expression of theory, or can be the expression of theory. For the sake of discussion, I’m assuming she’s limiting poetry to poetics). I’m also unsure of the last phrase regarding poetry turning language upon itself. What is exceeding its own limits: poetry or language? Can a poetry limited by theory in turn extend beyond itself? If language exceeds its own limits, it must be admitted that it has limits, and thus is unable to fully exist as the language poets say that it does. This same kind of logic drives the theory of evolution–that something can naturally grow and evolve beyond itself, disregarding inherent limitations.

Hejinian also states that “Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.” Let’s draw circles in the ground and call it logic. Hejinian suggests that if language is taken apart, there is meaning. And if meanings are taken apart there are contexts. So the root here is contexts, but then contexts can never grow into images or terms. I think terms are connected to language. So if I have this right, language is nothing but contexts and contexts can never grow into language.  So is language poetry simply an exploration of futility?

Later in the same introduction, we come across this gem: “Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.” I’m glad it is “a” medium instead of “the” medium.  Is there even a difference between experiencing and experiencing an experience? If one doesn’t experience an experience, it fails to be an experience (unless the failure was an experience in itself. An infinite loop I say…). However, it is interesting to connect language to experience. Children don’t remember early childhood; could it be because their language has yet to develop?

Finally, I’m having difficulty connecting language to experience because there’s a third unmentioned party involved: an entity. I am the synthesis of language and experience, but the “I” is often absent from language poetry due the self’s nature of incompletness.  Regardless of language, how can “I” experience without the presence of “I”?

My final beef with language poetry is the lack of the line. I’m at a point where I think the line is an integral part of the poem. I understand that language poets see the sentence as the mode of measurement, but getting rid of the line seems to be tossing out the baby. From what I’ve read of the language poets, the writing really is wonderful and thought provoking. But a poet can create ambiguity, infuse tone, and include emphasis (among other things) through line endings. It seems as if the language poets have already limited themselves to their theory, and then built an additional panic room void of certain poetic possibilities. Choosing to end a line infuses the self into the poem–but doesn’t choosing to screw up grammar do the same? Doesn’t choosing to ignore the line do the same?

Despite my qualms with the theory behind language poetry, Trimmings by Harryette Mullen is an engaging read. I was determined to find the connections between the sentences and the poems, and it was intellectually (in a good way) entertaining to figure out the meanings and contexts. The poems seem to identify costumes with which people try to define themselves, others, and relationships. Near the end of the collection though, the focus shifts beyond clothing objects and moves towards larger things, like language. The final poem reads:

Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space.

Because the entire collection refers to various types of clothing, language in this poem works well representing clothes. It could also be a theoretical breakdown as language is not a specific object here. The ambiguity of a body clothed in language being veiled by silence is astounding. Or is Mullen suggesting that the whole language theory in essence is stifling? I’d like to suggest a re-spelling of the last line sentence.:

• Availed, unavailable body makes unavailable space
• Availed, an available body makes an available space

Throughout this entire collection, Mullen creates connections between clothes/accessories and life. Meaning comes from objects and is expressed via objective language. But even at the most critical point of Trimmings, the ability of language to stay completely and truly autonomous is called into question, which–in my mind–suggests that the foundation of langpo may have some structural deficiencies. So is it possible to integrate some ideas around language poetry with those of other forms/schools? That’s what the hybrids set out to do, and I’ll save that for my next post!