Khalisi, the queen of the barbarians, joins her husband on the funeral pyre. Before walking in she says to her devotees: "I am the daughter of the dragon. If anyone harms you, they will die screaming." The witch who betrayed her is tied to the pyre too. She says: "I won't scream." Khalisi: "Yes you will. But I don't want your screams, just your life." When the branches have been burned and all the agonizing screams have been screamed Khalisi is still kneeling there, unharmed, naked except for some ashes where her clothes have burned off. The dragon eggs thrown into the fire with her have hatched. A baby dragon sits on each shoulder. In the book, one is nursing at her breast.
-- Jerome Sala
If you're around NYC and free, hope to see you there. For more info on the reading and DIA, click here.
I'm reading to close Tamara Gonzales' incredible show at: Norte Maar, 4PM Sunday, April 29th. She's included 4 of my poems in her project. Thanks Tamara!
Norte Maar 83 Wyckoff Avenue #1B, Brooklyn, NY 11237 646-361-8512.
Ever since I watched a documentary on Encore about the career of Jerry Lewis -- Method to the Madness -- I haven't been able to get one of the comedian's iconic bits out of my mind.
Lewis pretends to be typing (on an invisible typewriter) to the sounds of classical music. He performs a sort of hand ballet, looking a bit like a conductor at times. As the bit goes on, he gets goofier as he becomes exhausted by his efforts:
One of the things that fascinates me about this gag is how it mixes the codes of high art with everyday life to such a delightful effect; it's part an elegant display of nimble dexterity -- and part slapstick.
In fact, this little concerto brought to mind a comment the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey made in his classic book on aesthetics, Art as Experience. Dewey cautions against drawing too fine a line between the creative arts and everyday life. As he puts it:
"The intelligent mechanic, engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his tools and materials with genuine affection, is artistically engaged."
Is not part of the humor of Lewis' skit found in the degree of "genuine affection" his typist exhibits for what we conventionally think of as a mundane task?
If Life Can Become Art, So Art Can Become Life
Another reason the Lewis routine grabbed hold of my thoughts is that it exhibits an impulse that I've seen mirrored in interesting ways by the world of high art. If Lewis suggests that there's something about everyday life that's artistic, the history of the avant-garde is replete with examples of poets and visual artists who have sought to make artistic culture part of everyday life.
Lautreamont, the prose poet and predecessor of Surrealism, insisted, for example, that "Poetry must be made by all..." Among the ways this idea found expression in the art movements of the 20th century was in the recipes for cooking up poems that Dadaist and Surrealist poets offered to make it theoretically possible for "anyone to be a poet."
Tristan Tzara's famous instruction for making a Dada poem, for example, was to cut out words from a newspaper, shake them up in a paper bag, splash them onto a table, and record the results.
"Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else...Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to re-read what you've written."
Following this method religiously, Breton states later, should enable you to write entire books on subjects you know nothing about.
Perhaps you could even say that some aspects of the Slam Poetry movement pursued dissolving art into everyday life -- and vice versa. For in that format, as I remember, not only anyone can get up, "be a poet", and compete -- but all can be judges/critics who canonize the list of winners for the night.
In any case, it's no surprise that I associate Lewis' bit with certain modes of avant-garde art. Both offer examples of how conventional thinking and experience can be transformed in pleasurable and even liberating ways.
Of course, once such techniques have been around in the culture awhile, the more traditional aspects of the social order usually move in to mess with them. In our so-called free market society, such experiments are not so much repressed as standardized for money-making purposes.
Tzara's Dada poem is marketed as "Magnetic Poetry." Surrealism becomes a preferred method for drawing charisma to rock videos and ads, and its techniques featured in self-help books to aid in overcoming "writer's block" (and "unleash the voice within"). Slam morphs into movies, TV and Broadway shows and rap records. And "Jerry Lewis" is now a studio, a brand, a corporation -- an entire industry.
But before this process takes place, when low can still be high and vice versa, the joy that comes with the sense of new possiblities can still be felt.
Perhaps part of the appeal of this strain of culture is that it supports the belief that things can still transform in exciting ways. Maybe even that they can change. Thoughts?
Related Interest: More on art dissolving into life in my review of Nick Piombino and Toni Simon's Contradicta, now up at Evergreen Review Online.
There's been so much on the web and TV about the big car ad of the Super Bowl ("Halftime in America"), I thought I'd weigh in about a different one -- a spot that relies more on the bizarre than the authentic to make its point.
I'm thinking about the Chevy spot that invokes both the Mayan and Biblical (it's raining frogs!) apocalypse -- and our dreaded year of 2012. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out:
Of course, this satiric way of claiming that a Chevy lasts longer than a Ford has been accused of exaggeration. As reported by brandchannel, a representative for Ford Trucks lodged this protest:
"They [Chevy] cite R.L. Polk data on longevity -- not durability. If you look at R.L. Polk's data on durability ... there are more Ford trucks on the road with more than 250,000 miles. We've made our point and we'll always defend our products."
You might expect religious folks, at least those who believe in prophecies of the end times, to get upset with this scenario too. For the spot takes an episode of sacred history and uses it cavalierly, for ironic purposes (and, of course, to make a buck).
Though I suppose even fundamentalists -- at least in the West -- are numb to this by now (and probably find it funny themselves), because hey, that's what modernity (not to mention advertising) is all about.
Nevertheless, there is more than a grain of truth in this spot. Chevy, after all, did survive a crash of nearly apocalyptic proportions. What saved the company, though, was not simply the durability of their trucks, but the same thing that saved Chrysler: a little Keynesian economics (in the form of government funds). (Ford refused the bailout offer.)
Also, there's something about the way the main character shrugs off the loss of "Dave" that mirrors the dopey "whatever" attitude of the survivor in all of us -- happy to be one of the lucky ones who made it (as the theme song suggests), but powerless to do much about the daily catastrophe.
What Comes After the End?
But what I think the spot is most accurate in portraying is a contemporary mindset. Astute observers of the apocalyptic imagery running through our pop culture, such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, have remarked about how easy it seems to imagine the end of the world.
What's difficult, perhaps impossible to envision, they argue, is the end of capitalism -- a system responsible, in their eyes, for this continuing sense of dread in the first place.
The spot's closing line captures this idea perfectly: "Chevy Silverado" the (Tim Allen) voice-over intones, "from the beginning of your work day, till the end of the world. Chevy runs deep."
And the images act out this sentiment in a literal fashion: the world around these characters is crumbling, but their trucks keep going and going - like Engergizer bunnies. What survives the end of the world? Products, in this case trucks and twinkies. (Perhaps their preservatives have made them invulnerable?)
But despite the spot's hyper-bullishness about its brand, it nevertheless seems bruised by the times. It's as if the humor is there to help relieve a lurking anxiety.
Because even if a few brands survive the next meltdown, what's the point -- if the rest of the economy is (as in the spot) annihilated? Of course, the commercial's humor assures us this could never happen. But then, you've got to ask yourself, how did the apocalypse end up in a spot to sell a truck in the first place?
Back in 2008 it seemed, at times, the conomic end was near. At the very least a spot like this proves the trauma of the deepest moments of "The Great Recession" hasn't left us just yet.
And that trauma continues to color thoughts about the future. In fact, the jokey quality of the commercial seems flavored by a bit of gallows humor. It even made me think of Robert Creeley's classic poem "I Know a Man":
I Know a Man
As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what
can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going
The authors of this commercial would, of course, make an addition to this poem. In their version, there would be an extra line; the poem would end by saying:
"and make sure you're driving a Chevy."
Also of Interest:
Click here to see my review of poet Nick Piombino and artist Toni Simon's collaborative book, Contradicta, at Evergreen Review Online:
I noticed during the State of the Union the other week, how frequently the theme of economic nationalism was invoked (bringing jobs back home, rewarding companies who base their manufacturing here, etc.).
And judging from the polls afterwards, it worked -- across the political spectrum. This got me thinking about nationalism in general. If ideas about "the Nation" strike such a chord, how might they affect aesthetics?
Even writers who eschew such identification, embracing a sort of cosmopolitanism, are only able to do so because of the confidence their national culture affords them. In other words, if you're a writer from an older literary cuture, one already respected on the world stage, you don't need to worry about your right to write.
But for nations just emerging, the driving aesthetic often has to do with discovering, refining and battling for a national identity. And making the case that one's own culture can stand, aesthetically at least, toe to toe with the giants.
One might imagine, by extension, that an important step in such aesthetic nationalism would involve fighting off the images cast upon your culture by the more powerful.
These ideas came to life for me as I was rereading a poem by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Poland, as a national culture, is certainly in a state of (re)emergence, since it only recently has escaped (yet again) the domination of its aggressive neighbors.
Zagajewski's poem records the aesthetic after-shocks of such a history:
POEMS ON POLAND
I read poems on Poland written by foreign poets. Germans and Russians have not only guns, but also ink, pens, some heart, and a lot of imagination. Poland in their poems reminds me of an audacious unicorn which feeds on the wool of tapestries, it is beautiful, weak and imprudent. I don't know what the mechanism of illusion is based on, but even I, a sober reader, am enraptured by that fairy-tale defenseless land on which feed balck eagles, hungry emperors, the Third Reich, and the Third Rome.
The picture painted of Poland by more powerful nations here reminds me of Donald Lopez's classic book on the cultural history of Tibet, Prisoners of Shangri-La. In it, Lopez examines how that country has been portrayed in books (and skewed translations of Tibetan texts) by Western scholars, New Agers and explorers.
This "mystical kingdom" has been seen as everything from a utopia ("Shangri-La") to a sort of medieval slave state; its people portrayed sometimes as superstitious and even barbaric -- at others, deeply wise (if idealized) magicians. But like Poland, however Tibet is pictured, it generally ends up seeming like a place lost in the past and its own passivity. It's rarely an actor on the modern stage.
The Poetics of U.S. Nation Building
But the nationalist muse doesn't only inspire smaller, less powerful countries. As U.S. literature came into its own, as Casanova points out, it too competed on the stage of international cultural politics.
Throughout the 19th century, U.S. writers, in their own quest for cultural independence, saw themselves in competition with Britain. This nationalist impulse reached a high point in Whitman (who has been hailed as "America's Shakespeare"). As Casanova puts it:
"Walt Whitman's writings contain magnificent pages on the power, novelty and immensity of American verse, while the United States themselves constituted 'the greatest poem' of all."
It's amazing how such poetic nationalism persisted -- especially in view of how dominant the U.S. became by the mid 20th century. As late as the early 60s, for example, poet George Oppen criticized U.S. poets for looking away from their home soil -- and toward "the exotic arms of Zen" -- for inspiration. Oppen remarked that for his generation, developing a more homegrown poetics (Williams being the ground breaker here) was considered the radical position to take.
Why? "We grew up on English writing..." he wrote, and "the more open society [of the U.S.] made possible the literary career of the obviously non aristocratic spokesman who, once he tired of Invocation to Someone Else's Muse, had to make his own poetry."
Nevertheless, I'm not sure how appealing such ideas are for U.S. poetry anymore. A few years back, I remember attending literary events attempting to answer the question of "What's American about American Poetry" (as if few knew anymore).
But I wonder, if the national economic ideology shifts away from the globalism of the last 25 years or so, how might this affect poetry, or our aesthetics in general. Thoughts?
