From a Montevidayo post regarding The Black Swan:
 
"In the comment field to a previous post Adam Strauss suggested that Nina is a lesbian, but I think that’s making her too stable."
 
The above response strikes me as participating--accidentally I suspect--in the well established discourse of lesbian erasure.  For something to be visible there--typically--is a minimal degree of stability required, so to jump (as the comment does in the bit I didactically leave out) to emphasizing an instable sexuality seems to me to be a move in collusion with the prior mentioned erasure; or if not erasure just uninterest.  Now if it was stated that the character in question--Nina--is for sure not clearly a heterosexual, then I'd be less suspicious of this comment.  As may be clear, I find the notion of polysexuality--or sexuality as unstable electron-cloud etc--very problematic: it seems to afford the opportunity to bypass just how terribly rigid sexuality exists in situated circumstances happening off the page or out of the performance or frame or art-space.   That said, I don't think utopical theorizing/rendering the world wonderfully aesthetic and outside conventional political restraints is bad; just very simultaneously problematic, and perhaps a great vehicle for subtle forms of heterosexual hegemony.  If someone wants to go to logoslalafantabulastic land (or more like outre atmosphere)--and I often want to and do--yay--but please clearly cite counter-arguments to that stance! 

I need to finally write up a review of S Simonds Warsaw Bikini!

A Mess Of Fry

Once upon tines.
Tinsel telescopes collapsing a soundscale.
Trips and wires.
Viruses as lookouts.
Viral arias.
Scission teetering at the top of immune to toppling.
Ripcurls rankle rapport.
Curls clue us into outré.
Outsiders snuggle.
Insiders struggle.
Interiors resemble the chambers of expensive seashells.
Lustrous undersides.
Bellies and belies.
Tropes ride meridians like cowboys hold-on to bull-bucks.
Ropes made from tropical fibers.
What does all mean?
All doesn’t.
Eggs and a scrambled game of The Dozens.
Eggs and eggs.
Ducks.
An ideogram for an egg no bird lays.
An extinct bird in a contemporary sentence.
A sentence in the manner of the 17th century writ in bird-blood.
Manners glance at mannerist paintings.
Ants crawl over thick blue strokes.
The blue changes from second to second till it’s a color there’s no English word for.


Becoming Another Species

Fish on their way to flying.
Flight concluding in crushed lungs.
Light no-one can see this surround’s so dark.
No species in the vicinity of here can hear these soundwaves.
Looking at these chipped plates helps make sense of sentience.
Fine lines which don’t matter at a distance or close-up. 
Final breaths before more.
Starts without precedents.
Art with uncanny incidents.
Tar with echoing myths.
Relief and remittance interloping the other.
Flagged down.
Fags getting’ up.
Pansies storm down foregrounding a marlin being gaffed.

More A Less point

Graceless lace.

Caul wrapped around a lollypop for the heaven of it.

Calls for the heave of it.

Heaven of it a pointlessness.

Pointlessness a splendid.

A sentence from Stein sashays out of its pulpy bondage.

Sentences split from their spines.

Excision as very-very-very bloody and the bleeding cerebral.

Brain blood.

Flushed cortex.

Brainy sex.

Bloody sexuality.

Heterosexual versus homosexual S and M.

Turn as chiasmus.


Why have I singlespaced the first two pieces, and not the third one posted?  Why grant greater pauses?  Lace doesn't clearly link to more space! 

Of course "New Criticism" is not the only mode in which thoroughness can take place.  However thoroughness occurs is lovely to me.  Rachel Blau De Plessis is not necessarily a New Critic, and her essays tend towards the splendidly thorough!  Amartya Sen (not a lit-crit for the most part, true), if anything, downplays the importance of language--and he too is soooooo thorough.  I suppose all I'm arguing for is the delight I experience when people take the effort to substantiate their claims, to do the difficult work of explanation/connection, as opposed to relying almost entirely on the "gesture."  I do not, as is likely implicitly clear,  have much enthusiasm for innovative criticism.  Yes, poem is a porous boundary, but I do not want what is more than less a poem to serve as replacement for academic/expository/argumentative prose.  Manifestos (with O'Hara and Warhol as exceptions (and likely others I have not read)), grin, ought to go jumping off the nearest cliff. Funnily, I love impressionism when it comes to paintings.  And I often find non-contemporary belles lettres charming. 

Gorannson has responded again, and it is kind and ungrouchy and I am grateful.

Johannes Goransson, in a Montevidayo blog comment-box, has written a dismissal of my distrust of metaphor; I've responded and hope I don't appear too annoyed (firm, sure; agressive, I hope not) in my trying to articulate why I find his response rather inadequate.  Relating to this: it seems some poets are really into dissing closely reading a text, and instead want to banish that kind of response and replace it with belles lettres; why oh why?  New Criticism does not have to be retrograde; on the contrary, it can communicate a ton, and it can allow a reader to really look at the text(s) in question, whereas belles lettres may end up saying far more about the responder than the work being responded to.  Too, belles lettres I think might be said to be predicated on authority (declarative syntax, minimal support with evidence for why a given claim is made) and I like essays which don't take authority for granted.

Will very soon read Jonah Winters' recent Octopus poems, as they appear to have something to do with Lesbians, who I feel are massively under-covered by contemporary American poetry, and in particular--"experimental" poetry worlds.